Gaming boys

This weekend it became apparent that the sweet little baby in the picture below, dozing in his father's lap, can now whup his father at pretty much any computer game he chooses.

Gaming boys - November 1999

The baby is also incredulous that his father had so much hair and games consoles required wires in 1999.  That's, like, so weird.

Weekday market walk #1

The weekday walks are back - and this autumn we are planning our walks around markets.

Walthamstow Market - the longest in Europe

Today, at the end of what felt like a long week settling our nearly-twelve year olds into their new secondary schools, we walked to our most local market for a potter around.   It is just about half an hour walk from my house to the end of Walthamstow Market and we set off at a brisk pace, chatting away about everything and nothing - setting the world to rights with every step.

Walthamstow Market runs down the middle of a long street of shops, so as well as all the market stalls there are shops to explore too.  The whole market is gloriously eclectic - if you have a mind to, you can buy: 

• fruit and veg
• toys
• phones
• prayer mats
• matches and lighters
• goat meat
• saucepans
• carpets
• herbs
• CDs
• knicker elastic
• jellied eels
• chocolate
• books
• cake tins

I love it.  I have been visiting some stalls and shops for years, and others come and go with each season.

The last of the summer's strawberries

Stall selling knicker elastic

Market caff

Gill buys fruit

Headscarf mannequins

After a good prowl around, and having acquired bags full of fabric, ribbon and fruit without really meaning to, we needed a nice sit down and a cup of tea.  One of Walthamstow Market's best-loved destinations is L. Manze - a proper, old-fashioned, East End pie and mash shop selling jellied eels, pie, mash and liquor, and good strong cups of tea.  You can find out more about East End pie and mash shops here.

Walking into Manze's is like stepping back in time - the tiles, lighting, benches and sawdust-strewn floor are all from another era - and very calming to an addled, modern mind.

L Manze - an East London institution

Beautiful lights and tiles in the pie shop

Coat stand and an aspidistra in a brass pot

Booths at Manze's

Beautiful, old tiles at Manze's

But the best thing?  Piling your bags up next to you on one of their benches and settling down to a little china plate with one of their pies, and a cup of good, strong tea on the side.  Just what a tired shopper needs.
 

Pie and tea at Manze's

Good habits

August-September, rather than December-January, always seems to me like the end of one year and the start of the next.  The summer has finished but the new academic year is beginning.  One year's triathlon training and competing has ended for G, but there are now next year's races to enter, and a new training schedule to plan.  Tired, dusty sandals are put away and leather boots are taken out and polished to a conker-brown shine.  The summer glut of berries is stacked up on the shelf as jam, and I am dreaming of dishes made with lentils and rabbit and root vegetables.

I love this time of year.  That new pencil case feeling leaves me full of energy and plans for the year ahead - and this month I am adopting another feature usually associated with the end of the calendar; that of new habits and firm resolutions to Do Better. 

The NHS website tells me that I should be aiming to drink at least 1.2 litres of fluid daily, but despite starting the day well with a cup of tea, and then a cup or two of coffee an hour later, I often stop there and fall well short of this target on most days.  When I was in France I bought three glass water bottles, for just two euros each, to remedy this.  They now live on the bottom shelf of the fridge, chilling tap water for us all to drink. 

My Mum and Dad had several of these glass bottles in their fridge in France, and they were responsible for me drinking much more water than I usually would at home.  Properly chilled water is much more appealing than tap water, and more 'gluggable' somehow.  The bottles look nice on the kitchen table at supper time too.

And I am hoping that my starting this new habit at a non-traditional time of year will means that it doesn't fall into the 78% of resolutions that are 'doomed to failure'.  It's only the 7th September, but I'm doing pretty well so far.

10 things

• I have now been married for six days and I find I like being married very much.
• We stopped off on our journey home from France at a small village called Camiers, in the Baie de Somme.  We visited St Cécile Plage for some fresh air and exercise after spending all day in the car, and the family was divided along boy-girl lines about whether the sideways wind, whipping in from the Atlantic, was bracing and energising, or just plain miserable and cold.

• It is knitting season again for me - I have picked up all those half-finished projects from earlier in the year and am looking forward to some quality autumn television to keep me company in the evenings while I knit.
• C has been learning all about Spam from his favourite podcast, Stuff You Should Know.  He has been listening to this podcast for a couple of years and has the most incredible and eclectic general knowledge as a result.  The Spam episode really intruigued him and he has been begging me for weeks to buy him a tin and let him experiment.  He made us Spam burgers for lunch on Tuesday and has declared he wants to work his way through the whole recipe section of the website.  Despite this alarming development, I'd still really recommend the podcast for any curious young people you know.

• To compensate for the arrival of Spam in the house, I have been roasting vegetables.  Last night we had this roasted butternut squash on top of a cottage pie instead of the usual mashed potato.  Very good.

• I brought some lovely French notebooks and coloured pencils home with me.  I really love this post from Joanne about how to pluck up the courage to use a pristine new notebook.
• This is my new handcream of choice.  My hands need annointing with a great deal of handcream in order not to become scaly, itchy paws.  This one has a beatiful tube, smells lovely and does the job very well.
• C starts secondary school next week.  He is very excited and has learnt how to tie his tie.  I am charging my camera ready to take loads of First Day Photos.  I still love the ones I took of his first day at primary school so many years ago.
• I have a great many baking plans for the next couple of weeks, to ease the transition back to school for C and O.  My parents gave me these silicone madeleine moulds for my birthday so madeleines will be first on my list; I love their little shell shapes.  Nigella Lawson has a recipe for rosewater scented madeleines in Domestic Goddess which sound wonderful.

• Moss Stitch and I are itching to get back to our weekday walks.  We are meeting up this week to Make Plans.

Le mariage

It was a perfect day - and just what we wanted.  Small, simple and French. 

G and O, ready to go to the Mairie

Ready to leave for the Mairie - eyes very blue and very brown

My parents and C - taking photos before the wedding

The Mairie

I got a big hug from M Massat the Maire (photo courtesy of my Ma)

Self portrait of my dress - after the wedding

At lunch - surrounded by wine glasses, and with my and O's flowers

Thank you to everyone who left blog comments and tweets with good wishes - Graham and I were so very touched to read  them, particularly because many of you feel like friends even though we have never met.

Outside the Mairie, after the wedding

We are headed back to the UK very soon, and once we are home I will be embarking on a wedding quilt.  Just as soon as I stop twiddling with my ring which I am now wearing on my left hand, after nearly nine years of wearing it on my right hand - it feels very odd.

Just the two of us

These last two weeks we have been surrounded by family.  Some have been here in person and others have been spoken to on the phone or have sent emails, cards and incredibly thoughtful presents.  But amongst all this love and kindness we've also wanted to be by ourselves sometimes - just the two of us.  I suspect that all people getting married feel like this occasionally.

A couple of days ago G and I set our alarms for just before dawn and got up to go for a walk.  That time of day is the only time it is cool enough to hike at the moment.

It was a stunning walk - one of the best we've done down here.  And it was just what we needed to remind ourselves why we want to get married to each other, in this magical place.

Wedding preparations

Although it is only one week and one day until our wedding, we are not thinking about it or preparing for it yet.  There are far too many other important things going on.

There are cousins to play with.

There are fancy hairstyles to practise.

There are my brother and my sister and their families to laugh with and spend long, lazy evenings with.

There are French breakfasts to think of - what sort of jam should we have with our baguettes each morning?  Which patisserie does the best, butteriest croissants?

There is swimming in the river to be done too.

But we are getting closer.  My sister and her husband are on their way back home now, and my brother and his family leave for home this weekend.  Next week, my parents-in-law arrive in France, and THEN we can start thinking about the wedding.

Pointless but pretty

Washi tape is very pretty patterned Japanese sellotape, which comes on tiny rolls and sells for shocking amounts at all good stationery shops.  Every time I see some, I want some, but can in no way justify frittering away family grocery money on something so pretty but essentially pointless.

So, inspired by this Pinterest pin of Ali's, I decided to make some instead.  I had a Cath Kidston catalogue, and I had some double-sided sellotape, and I had a pair of scissors (paper scissors NOT fabric scissors - I get very twitchy about appropriate scissor use).

It could not be easier.  Stick the tape onto the catalogue and trim. Then stack the lengths of tape into an old syrup tin and photograph.  When you are ready to use your washi tape, just peel off the backing and stick on to whatever you like.

What are school holidays for if not for wasting time fiddling about with paper and sellotape?  Coming soon...washi tape strips made from newspaper, or takeaway menus - I think that could look really cool.

A view with flowers

Yesterday I was walking with a dear friend in a huge meadow full of wildflowers in Walthamstow, East London. 

She pointed out the incredible view across to the City, and we squinted in the bright sunshine, laughing at the children who were only interested in lunch, not views of the city that they completely take for granted.

It has been nice today, amidst so much sadness on the news, to reflect on this moment, and be reminded of one of the many reasons why I still think East London is a great place to live.

Milk

Yesterday, pottering around the garden, I was listening to my large back catalogue of podcasts.  One of them was an episode of Radio 4's Food Programme, all about milk.

Now I really, really love milk and I'll always happily drink a glass of it - especially ice cold, on a hot day.  I am of the generation that was given milk in little third-pint bottles every day at breaktime at school.  It was disgusting - freezing enough in winter to give you a sinus headache after just one sip, and warm, creamy and sickly in the summer.  The best bit about school milk was the satisfaction that came from stabbing the tight foil lid with a sharp straw.

School milk didn’t give me a life-long dislike for milk though.  I always liked a glass of it at home, or a good glug of it on my cereal.  I grew up in a small village and we had milk delivered from one of the farms in the village.  The milk occasionally had little bits of straw floating in it, and I think it was largely responsible for giving me a very robust immune system.

I still have my milk delivered now I live in London.  We get 3 pints of organic, semi-skimmed milk, four times a week.  Though happily, it does not have little bits of straw floating in it. However, just like the milk of my childhood, the organic milk is still non-homogenised, which I love.  This means we still have the cream on the top of the milk after a few days of it sitting in the fridge.  I never have to think about whether we have enough milk in the house - it is always there.  I love that convenience.

Very occasionally, if I can't sleep, I hear the electric purr of the milk float coming down our street at about 4am, and the milkman dashing up our path, swapping the empties for full bottles with barely a chink of glass, and dashing back to the van.  In the twelve years we've lived here I've never seen our milkman.  He is nocturnal and we communicate by notes left wedged between the bottles and the wall.

I craved milk so badly when I was pregnant for the first time.  I would drink a pint at lunch and another when I got in from work.  That baby, now my tall almost-twelve-year-old, will hopefully have strong healthy bones and teeth for life as a result!

Milk on its own is a foodstuff that divides people.  G and C are milk lovers, like me (perhaps, for C, as a result of me drinking it constantly through his pregnancy?) but O is not a fan (now I think of it, I craved peanuts when I was pregnant with her - and she really loves peanuts, so perhaps there is a link there somewhere?).   O does not like milk on her cereal or butter on her toast, but gets her dairy goodness in other ways.  These are all the ways we use our 12 pints of milk each week:

• porridge - both the children, and G, make their porridge with milk rather than water.  It is more comforting this way, somehow.  Porridge is eaten all year round here, even in the heat of the summer, and must be liberally sprinkled with chopped fruit and golden syrup.
• yogurt - I make about 2 litres of natural yogurt each week (which accounts for roughly 4 of our 12 pints) using the fantastic electric yogurt maker from Lakeland.  We love our yogurt - I stir it into curries, we have it with fruit for breakfast or with a sprinkle of brown sugar on top for pudding.  There is always yogurt in the fridge.  I use the last few spoonfuls of the previous batch to start the next one, and occasionally get a new starter in the form of a little pot of Yeo Valley.
• in tea and coffee - it would probably scare me to learn how much we consume in this way.
• as an ingredient in so many things I cook - bread, cake, pancakes, muffins, bolognese sauce, fish pie, macaroni cheese.  I'm always reaching into the fridge for one of those cold, white bottles.

I also cook with a great deal of creme fraiche (I like the Yeo Valley half fat version), but I have never tried to make it.  I didn't know you could until I read this post by Harmony and Rosie yesterday.  Her creme fraiche looks amazing - I really want to have a go at making some myself.

How about you?  Do you love milk?  Could you happily live without it?  What do you make with it?