The pleasure of lemon and cardamom

I had a restless night.  I was too hot, and flung my quilt onto the floor.  I heard the milkman leave our three bottles at the door at 4:05am, when it was dark and still outside.  Just before 6am, I heard a taxi drop off someone for the house over the road - they were very quiet but struggled to get their key into their door the right way up.  I listened to a few podcasts and tried to doze, but couldn't. 

And then just before 7am, when it was beginning to get light, I realised what had been keeping me awake.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

Very faint, but persistant.  I could definitely hear dripping.  I went to the bathroom, and it got louder.  I hoped it was next door's problem, but when I looked out of the window, I realised it was ours.  We were on the phone to the plumber before breakfast, and he said he could come by in the afternoon.

I couldn't settle to anything all day.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

Then the plumber came.  He dismantled the toilet, he muttered about valves and asked us where the hot water tank was.  He put in new washers, replaced worn pipes, mopped up the mess and checked everything was dry and fixed.  I smiled and was relieved.  We laughed and chatted about his toddlers and our neighbours, and then he went home.

Just as earlier in the week, I was revelling in the beauty of cherry blossom once I knew that a car emergency was resolved, now that there was no more dripping to worry about I could settle down to something peaceful and absorbing.

I made some lemon and cardamom biscuits.  These biscuits are delicious, and I was delighted to be able to use the edelweiss biscuit stamp I bought when I was in Brienz in Switzerland two years ago.  I mixed, rolled, stamped and baked with great satisfaction.  I wished the plumber had still been around because I would have offered him one with a cup of tea.

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The recipe is from the new Hairy Bikers series - Bakeation.  C and I have loved the first three episodes, which have taken in Norway, Benelux and Germany, and with the accompanying book on sale at Amazon for an insanely cheap £8.86 I bought it without hesitation.  It is fabulous.

Race weekend

The race weekend begins on Saturday when we drive up to the National Water Sports Centre in Nottingham with a car full of kit.  The children are staying with their grandparents for the weekend, which means that the race bike doesn't have to suffer the indignity of travelling on a bike rack, it can sit on its very own blanket in the back of the car.

The gleamingly clean bike (in bits) on its special yellow blanket in the back of the car

The day before race day

There are three important things G has to do on the day before race day: registration, racking and race briefing.

Registration takes place in the main building at the National Water Sports Centre.  Most people, including G, are wearing club sweatshirts.  The lady at the registration desk knows G's swimming coach and makes a special fuss of him because he is the only competitor from his club, East London Triathletes.

At Registration

The nice registration lady gives G his race number, which he will wear on a belt around his waist all through the race.  He is also given his timing chip which he will wear on a strap around his ankle all through the race.  The timing chip records his finish time as well as his times for each separate discipline and at various other points around the course.

His race number, which he wears all through the race.  It has his name too, so people can cheer him on!

Once registration is done, we go back to the car and G gets everything ready for racking.  Racking means leaving the bike in the bike racks ready for the race the next day, and also leaving the bike kit (helmet, bike jacket, socks and special clippy bike shoes) in the Bike Transition. 

Transition is where you switch from one discipline to the next.  In Bike Transition you peel off your wetsuit (you will be wearing a tri-suit underneath), and swimming hat, put on your bike kit and load your pockets and your bike with snickers bars and water bottles.  In Run Transition you take off your bike kit and put on your running kit (a new pair of socks and your running shoes - still wearing your tri-suit).

Getting ready for racking, G has to be very organised and concentrate to make sure he is leaving everything he needs in the correct place.  Triathlons are complicated!  Luckily G is a very organised person, so this bit is trouble free.

The back of our car, full of kit being prepared for racking.

We take the bike to the bike racks and G is pleased that the slot for his bike is easy to remember - at one end of the second row.  He won't be dithering in Bike Transition looking for it amongst the hundreds of others.

Hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of bicycle in the bike racks. Early in the afternoon - the racks filled up much more as the day went on.

He leaves a labelled bag with his bike kit in at the Bike Transition, and another labelled bag with his running kit in at the Run Transition.

Then G heads back into the main building for an hour long race briefing.  He finds out important things like what time he has to be in the water ready to start the swim (5:50am) and what will be available at the feeding stations on the run course (bananas and water).

I stand on the balcony of the main building, admiring the view of the lake (usually used for rowing races) and wondering how far the swim actually is.  When G comes out of his race briefing I ask him.

We leave the Water Sports Centre and drive into Nottingham to check in at our hotel and get everything ready for a very early start the next day.

Everything he needs for race day, laid out on the hotel floor the night before

Race day

We set our alarms for 3:30 am.  G gets up and makes himself breakfast: muesli, wholemeal bagels with peanut butter, and fruit smoothies.  I make a pot of coffee and put it in a flask for later.  At 4:15 we leave the hotel and set off for the Water Sports Centre.  We are there in plenty of time, and G goes to the bike racks to check that everything he needs is in the right places at Transition, and to pump up the tyres on his bike.

The sky was dark and the moon still up when we got to the Water Sports Centre at 4:45am

We go into the main building and while I sip my flask of coffee he inches his way into his wetsuit.  Swimming wetsuits are made quite differently to surfing or diving wetsuits.  They are eye-wateringly tight, and take a good ten minutes to put on.  I watch everyone else wriggling into theirs, and rubbing vaseline around their wrists and ankles to stop any chafing.  Seeing hundreds of men peel themselves into skin-tight wetsuits is a bit much at this time in the morning, actually.  I sip some more coffee and avert my gaze.  Wives are applying suncream to husbands' ears and necks, and I put some on G too.

We head down to the lake and I say goodbye to G before he heads into the competitors' area and lines up at the edge of the lake.  I am suddenly utterly overwhelmed by the enormity of what he has to do, and burst into tears, but he is grinning his very widest grin and looks ready to take on the world.

And he's gone. Spectators outside the competitors' area at 5:40am, just after I said goodbye to G

The start of the race

The race is a 2.4 mile swim, followed by a 112 mile bike ride, followed by a 26.2 mile (marathon distance) run.  He is hoping to do the whole race in twelve and a half hours.

I next see him early in the afternoon, about a quarter of the way into his run.  I stand on the grassy bank with loads of other supporters and shriek madly when I see him running towards me.  He is pleased to see me, is still beaming, and high fives me as he runs past.  The next time I see him, about an hour and twenty minutes later he is still looking good, although the grin has faded a little.  He has one more lap to go.  I move closer to the finish line and start to get very excited and nervous.  He is nearly home, and it looks like he is going to be much faster than he expected.

I finally see him coming into the home straight at 12 hours and 3 minutes - a full half hour faster than he expected.  The grin is back and I shriek with excitement again and shout to the world how wonderful he is.

He did it!

I push my way through the crowds and press myself against the railings separating the spectators from the finished competitors.  We have lots of sweaty kisses and he disappears into a marquee to collect his medal and eat some pasta.

Later still, he retrieves his bike, wetsuit and other kit and comes through to the spectators side wearing his new t-shirt, his medal...and that big grin!

His brother and sister were also there to support him and we all tell him how amazing he is and how very, very proud of him we are.  Tears are shed (mostly by me) and dozens of photos are taken.  It has been an amazing weekend, which we will all remember for the rest of our lives.

G, with his incredibly proud brother and sister

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The race, though, is just one day. 

The training for this race has been a full year of complete dedication and focus on G's part (on top of seven previous years of competing in the usual shorter-distance triathlons), as well as sacrifice, compromise, thoughtfulness and determination.  It is for these qualities that he gets my admiration and pride.  He has truly been an inspiration to me.  Nothing with value comes without hard work, and the race day is a celebration and illustration of all that hard work.

The rhythm of the week ~ Sunday

Sundays begin on Saturday evenings these days. 

The race bike comes down from its bed of blankets in the loft and is loaded with snickers bars and sports gels ready for a 6am start on Sunday morning.

With just four weeks until his ironman race, G is at absolute peak fitness and spends his Sundays out on a 6 or 7 hour bike ride followed immediately by an hour's run.  I am in awe that anyone can do this amount of exercise and still vaguely function at the end of it.

He comes back with odd tan marks (from cycling gloves paired with a sleeveless tri-suit), and sits contentedly in the garden, soaking up the evening sunshine and telling me how fast he cycled (very fast). 

We're missing him while he's doing all this training, but so proud of him for all his hard work and dedication.  Only four weeks left.

A citation

This week I renewed my subscription to Ancestry, to help me with part of the work I need to do this autumn for my Open University course on family history.

When I logged on last night I saw that since I was last there, Ancestry have made available the British Army service records from World War I. I started rummaging and searching and without really noticing I lost a whole evening reading the records of my ancestors who had fought in the war.

By far the best document I found was this citation for a DCM, or Distinguished Conduct Medal, awarded to my Great Grandfather in 1920.

My Great Grandfather was awarded the medal:

"For gallantry and devotion to duty. He served at Ypres from June to December 1915, on the Somme from July to September 1916, at Nieuport in August and September 1917, during the operations at Passchendaele from September to December 1917, during the enemy offensive and our subsequent advance in 1918."

That reads like my old school history textbooks. He fought in every major offensive of World War I. And amazingly, despite two separate injuries (one of which was a 'gunshot wound to the head') he returned to the front again and again, survived the war, and lived on to be an old man, dying in the mid 1970s just a year or two after I was born. The things he must have seen and experienced don't bear thinking about.

I looked up from my computer screen at nearly half past midnight and saw that the date was November 11th. I told C and O about my finds when we got up this morning, and as we walked to school we tried to imagine how Ray Renwick felt this time ninety one years ago. Very, very thankful I think.

As are we all.

The nurse

I nearly becamse a nurse instead of an accountant. When I finished university I applied for training posts in both careers and the only reason I became an accountant is that I was offered a job by an accountancy firm first. Funny how close we come to taking wildly different paths in life.

I worked out last week why I had always wanted to be a nurse. It is this book from the 1960s, which is being republished as part of a box set by Ladybird.

I used to pore over this book for hours, gazing at the pictures. I think I wanted to be a nurse mainly because of the magnificent cloaks they wore in this picture.

The nurses who looked after O on Wednesday were wonderful. Well, they looked after all of us really - G and I as well as O. And they even made hospital bracelets for O's twin bears that she has had since she was a newborn.

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O calls them Charlotte and Harriet and until now she was the only one who could tell them apart....

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But we are confused no longer!

Welcome home

This afternoon my brother-in-law, N, left Iraq for the UK at the end of his tour of duty there with his tank regiment. My sister was with me when she got the call from him earlier today to say that he was ready to board the plane and leave, and we have been celebrating ever since.

When N left for Iraq I knew it would affect my sister, but I didn't expect it to affect me as much as it did. Suddenly every time I woke in the morning to hear on Radio 4 the words "A British soldier has been killed in Iraq..." my stomach lurched and my heart thumped until I heard the name of the regiment.

We had to explain to C & O the realities of what their uncle serving in Iraq meant. They listened quietly to my explanation and at the end O calmly said what none of the rest of us had dared speak out loud, "Well I'll keep my fingers crossed that Uncle N doesn't get deaded then".

Over the past six months I have learnt many new things about the British Army, and the life of its soldiers and their families, that I didn't know before.

• soldiers in Iraq sleep with walls of breeze blocks around their beds to protect them in case of mortar attacks during the night
• a parcel of haribo sweets boosts morale
• you can upload photos to your Facebook profile from the Iraqi desert
• wives and girlfriends of soldiers serving in warzones have their mobile phones with them all the time - even in the shower
• letters from home mean more than you could ever imagine - even a glitter covered drawing of a pony from your niece is a good thing to receive
• soldiers are still equipped with bayonets
• when your soldier tells you he is stuck behind a desk at base doing boring admin, he is doing anything but
• you don't pay any postage when you send a parcel to a soldier in Iraq or Afghanistan
• soldiers in Iraq still get to watch rugby world cup games
  

N, we are all so proud of you and delighted to have you home. When O heard you were coming back she grinned and said "Good! He didn't get deaded then!"

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A list heroine of mine

This post is in honour of another great list maker - and a heroine of mine - Nigella Lawson. I have all her recipe books and love her honest, slightly scatty, writing voice and the ridiculously large sized portions her recipes give you.

But as well as being a great cook and writer, she is also a list maker. In her most recent book, Feast, she lists on p.264 her entire cookie cutter collection (and it is a very large collection). Here is what she says about her collection and the publication of her list:

"I have built up something of a collection of cookie-cutters; when anyone I know, however vaguely, goes away I ask them to bring me back a cutter and I'm always on the look out myself. I recently did an inventory of the cutters which I present - pathetically really - as after-dinner entertainment if I've drunk too much. I haven't drunk anything now, but I love my list too much not to present it to you."

I take issue with the word "pathetically" - what is pathetic about proudly showing off your lists? - but I can only applaud her obviously deeply held love of cataloguing and listing.

On her website you can buy or covet a whole range of gorgeous things for your kitchen, including this very pretty shopping list. She says about it: "Only those who get through life by writing lists will know how crucial these pads and pencils are."



Nigella I salute you.


I'm off to start my own shopping list now.