View From The High Peak

The Big Adventure - Christchurch Earthquake

2011-12-25T02:56:00.003Z

24th December 2011

Three weeks ago the skies were blue as we flew into Christchurch and, as we descended for our landing, I was struck by how you could see the flat green Canterbury plains stretching out to the south of the city until they hit the high mountain ridge of the Southern Alps to the west, beyond which you could then glimpse the wide blue ocean again.

New Zealand's south island is effectively long but relatively narrow which makes crossing from one side to the other reasonably easy and offers up some spectacular mountain passes. All looked so beautiful and tranquil in that afternoon sunshine, but as we have travelled around New Zealand in these recent weeks, we have come to understand so much better what a volatile piece of land this country is. From its formation in ancient times when it broke from the supercontinent of Gondwanaland and drifted west across the ocean, was then almost submerged before rising again with the deep forces within this mighty planet of ours, New Zealand is a land under constant physical tension from the tectonic plates which grind and shift far far below it.

As we came to the end of our campervan adventure yesterday in Auckland, we learned of the earthquake which had again rocked the city of Christchurch in the south island, already damaged beyond repair in the massive earthquake of February this year. The doorman who greeted us at our hotel comes from Christchurch and had just confirmed with a telephone conversation that his family were all ok. He still owns a property down there and was just about to get his insurance hand-out from the February quake, but the new quake means it will have to be re-assessed and he will have to wait nearly another year before he may get some compensation.

The residents of Christchurch are tiring of the quakes - the fault line which no-one realised Christchurch had been built on until relatively recently. Many are moving south towards Dunedin, others are choosing to emigrate to Australia where wages are significantly higher for the blue collar worker.

Watching the news coverage this morning, there is something rather unGodly about the fact that this has happened so close to Christmas. Having suffered up to 15 aftershocks all through the night and now dealing with the liquefaction which happens after a quake (when liquid silt bubbles up from underground and floods the streets and houses), it surely must be testing their faith. Not such a Happy Christmas for those poor folk who, as they waded through the grey sludgy mess around the base of their Christmas trees, announced quite simply, in world-weary voices, how they are sick of it.

The financial and economic implications of the situation are of course obvious. It is a city truly in crisis.

The Big Adventure - Bangkok, Thailand

2011-12-14T22:50:00.001Z

'One night in Bangkok' as the song goes. Well, actually it was two...

Bangkok: big, busy, brash and boisterous. Less polluted than many Asian cities, despite the motorised three-wheel tuk-tuks, but also a little less exotic than we were expecting. The 'haves' and the 'have nots' juxtaposed as they so often are the further you travel east: smart high-rise next to low-rise shabby chaos; pockets of sophistication side by side with basic existence. A city, inevitably of contrasts; changing its identity, losing its identity? Who knows what the future holds for Bangkok with its population of 11 million (although many of whom are now moving out to the northern provinces to avoid the increasing risk of flooding). A city where tall neon towers light up with 'Long live the King and Queen' and where shrines bedecked with yellow flowers where incense gently burns sit side by side with temples of materialism such as shopping malls and fast food chains. A city in flux as globalisation sweeps the world.

We had just one full day to see the sights but were keen not to try and cram in too much. The humid heat was intense and exhausting and, of course, you need to wear appropriately modest clothing for the temples - especially the Grand Palace, the main tourist attraction in the city. All of this is not conducive to staying cool. After a hearty breakfast at the hotel - a feast of Asian, European, Indian, Japanese and Arabian choices - we squeezed into a pink metered taxi and headed to the older part of town, stopping at a temple (Wat Trimitri) on the way where a man took our photos without us knowing and slapped them onto badges which he then tried to flog us. They made me laugh, so I persuaded The Accountant to get his wallet out. Then another taxi, hailed easily on the street, to take us to the Grand Palace where we experienced our first ripp-off by an official-looking bloke who told us it was shut until 3.30pm and 'helpfully' suggested we take a tuk-tuk (which materialised miraculously by his side) to take us to the river to do a private trip on a long boat along the river and canals. This was all good fun until we arrived down some grotty back street and were met by some mate of his who was pleased to be asking an exhorbitant price (twice what we had been advised at the hotel), for the boat ride. Much negotiation from The Accountant ensued (you can imagine...). Got the price to something more like we were expecting and off we set.

We spotted an intriguing temple (Wat Arun) looking like a tiered wedding cake on the other side of the river and asked if we could pop off to see it. We were told we had five minutes, which was just enough to go and have a closer look. Back on the boat, the heavens duly opened and inadequate umbrellas were brought over to us as we sat getting soaked. The choppy brown river was a good metre higher than normal and, as we went down one of the back canals, we could see house after waterside house sadly ruined by the recent floods: abandoned terraces, once bedecked with flowers and chairs; confused cats climbing on roofs; pumps still pumping out gallons of water. As riverside home owners across the globe know, this is always the risk with waterfront locations, especially with our increasingly unpredictable climate. You take your chances.

The river was awash with broken greenery, sometimes with a flock of birds sitting smugly amongst it as they were swept effortlessly downstream. Colourful, golden temples sprung up from time to time amongst the riverside rhododendrons and the ramshackle abodes. Friends of the longboat owner came over in another boat to sell things - unspeakable tourist trash, of course, and cold beers. I was tempted by some colourful little elephants, but we went for the beers and it was suggested we get one for the 'driver' which we duly did. There gets to a certain point where resistance is hopeless...

At the end of our hour on the river, the longboat driver manoevred us swiftly and skilfully onto a wooden quayside where, in the surrounding alleyways, the floods had barely receded. We made our way through the quayside cafes onto a street packed on both sides of a wooden walkboard with stalls offering street food in all shapes and sizes - fried fish and other unrecognisable bits; thai curries; noodles; soup; sweet delicacies, freshly squeezed pomegranate juice...the choice was endless and enticing. We stopped at one with yellow table cloths over metal tables with faded pink plastic stools serving up the most delicious beef and noodle soup for about a quid as we watched the world go by. An elderly lady with a walnut-brown wrinkled face lay next to us on a delapidated old sunbed beside the pots and pans and the washing tubs having a nap in the heat of the day. Behind her a guard in smart grey uniform stood erect and stern in front of the gates to the naval academy.

Replete, we then walked the short distance back to the Palace only to be told by a more official looking gentleman than the previous one we'd dealt with that, at 3.30pm, it was now closed for the afternoon. We'd been truly had. So, resolving to get there the next morning instead (and to be honest, I was glad as I was suffering mightily with a bad cold I'd begun as we left the UK), we headed back to the river and waited for the next river boat to take us down to the overhead metro stop that we needed to take us back to within shouting distance of the hotel. The train was modern and efficient, packed with tourists, English language teachers, locals and the occasional serene-looking monk swathed in orange cloak. It was fascinating seeing Bangkok from on high, such as the green, elegant racecourse and golfcourse, which was otherwise hidden behind high walls from street level. We got off at Siam, the happening young shopping district of central Bangkok where a live band was pumping out music at an impossible volume and there were huge shopping malls boasting Vera Wang, Gucci, and so many other designer labels. From here we grabbed a tuk-tuk and as we settled down for the white-knuckle ride, I did think that we should have checked the price first. Sure enough he wanted 400 baht for having driven like a lunatic and done a U-turn in a hugely busy four-lane highway which had G turning pale and seeing her life flash before her eyes. (To put this in context, the air-conditioned taxi which took us to the Grand Palace that morning, about five times the distance, had cost just 70 baht.) More embarrassing arguments ensued with The Accountant, so in the end the girls and I just slipped quietly into the hotel and left them to it. It was going to run and run and the pool beckoned!

I had a fancy that evening for finding somewhere local to eat. We walked the long street outside the hotel in search of something typical until we gave up and took a taxi to somewhere the taxi driver recommended offering fresh fish specialities. Ten minutes or so later we stepped out into a minor horror show of strip lighting, fake flowers, fresh fish and over-attentive staff. A pretty good meal followed, however, of freshly fried calamares, prawn cakes, spring rolls and a couple of noodle and meat dishes. Too much food, of course, but all good, if a bit pricey (despite the decor). As we left, the French couple next to us were busily disputing the bill (having ill-adviseably chosen lobster) and declaring it the most expensive meal they'd ever had in Bangkok and that they weren't going to pay...(would love to have seen the outcome of that one - probably ended up in one of the tanks with the lobsters in question...).

And so we finally made it to the Grand Palace the next day as the sun shone out of a blue sky, sweltering in head to toe trousers and shirts, but in awe of the buildings we encountered. Gleaming gold rooves, sparkling mirrored and coloured glass mosaics, exquisite wall paintings, shaded collonades, green expanses of lawn - a pristine, eye-opening spectacle of Thai history, authority and opulence. Not to be missed.

On the way back, we dropped into the flower market - a wonderfully heady mixture of flowers and vegetables, Bangkok at its teeming, honest best. Thence a quick cool off and lunch beside the pool at the hotel before taking our taxi to the modern splendour of Bangkok airport - an airy, light-filled glass and metal construction putting Heathrow and Gatwick to shame - and as the golden sun set on Bangkok our plane wings reached up into the wide blue yonder and bore us off into the night and the next destination on our Big Adventure.

Bangkok Highlights:-

Street food
Grand Palace
Low life, High Life, River Life, Street life
Dunkin' Donuts and Starbucks side by side with bright yellow flower-bedecked street shrines
Neon signs saying 'Long live the King and Queen'
Poverty, wealth
Materialism, buddhism
A city changing its identity, or losing its identity?

The Big Adventure

2011-12-03T05:58:00.001Z

Years ago N and I talked of how one day, were we to get married and have children, we would love to bob around the Mediterranean on a boat with the children for a year. The idea was inspired by a family we came across one evening on a beach in Rhodes over two decades ago. There was a yacht moored out in the bay on a milky evening as the beach was emptying. A small dinghy was launched from the boat and as it came towards shore we saw three little blond heads rowing their way towards the sand. They were sun-tanned and sun-kissed on that golden evening and we learnt that their father was retired from the RAF and they were taking a year out just sailing around the Med. I held that idea in my head for all these years, urging N to take some time out so we could do something similar with our three girls before it was too late.

I persuaded him to pencil some extended time out in his diary just over a year ago, he having decided that December and Christmas was the best time for him to be absent from the office. And then I held my breath. I kept waiting for the excuses to start, for this special time to be eroded by the pressures of work. Sure enough he came back from our summer holiday (having worked almost every day of it) and declared that it would be much better for him to take the time out next year rather than this. I said no. It was now or never. Next year wouldn't work for the girls, because of educational commitments, and that it was going to get even more difficult the year after that. I was quite forceful and said a whole lot of other stuff too about perspectives and priorities, health and happiness. I didn't think it would make any difference. Yet he went to work the following day and came back with provisional flights booked with Trailfinders. So something I said must have hit home.

The next few weeks was spent finalising hotel accommodation and other bits and pieces - and now here we are: bags packed, taxi to the airport on its way. Our plans may have morphed over time from a year out, to six months, to three months to six weeks - but we're finally off to the other side of the world on our Big Adventure. We're heading to New Zealand, via Bangkok and Sydney, for some fabulous new experiences and, perhaps most importantly, precious time together as a family.

Can't wait!

Sunday 27th November 2011

We Need To Talk About Dad

2011-11-23T00:25:00.001Z

We Need to Talk About Dad, Channel 4, 21 November 2011

This film left many questions unanswered about what had happened to cause a loving father in a 'perfect' family to smash the wife he had always adored over the head with the blunt end of an axe. Most unfortunately the eldest son, Henry, who was 16 at the time, witnessed the immediate aftermath of this atrocious act and has been trying to live with the impact of it ever since, including protecting his little brother who was then just ten.

The whole of the film really boiled down to one conversation which Henry had with his estranged father, now living in Germany (he came back into the family after his release from prison, but in the end his wife asked him to leave). Henry finally confronted him, seven years later, in an effort to talk about the incident which had changed his young life forever, but which everyone seemed reluctant to confront head on. His father's explanation, as far as he could explain it at all, was that he was under such pressure to live up to the image of the 'Sunday Supplement Family', as his own wife dubbed them, where all in their world was perfect and secure, that he wanted to burst the very bubble which he had helped to construct. The psychotic episode which resulted in this assault on a person who he had loved and held so dear was potentially brought on, he felt, by the death of his own father - a father who had never given him anything meaningful (emotionally I presume) and who he clearly blamed for the suicide of his sister at the age of 18. And yet in the months before his death, he had felt the need to still appear to be the loving devoted son. He summed things up as feeling as if the world was just taking from him all the time and giving nothing back.

While feeling deeply for Henry who had borne his own pent up feelings for the last seven years with no-one in a position to share them with (including his own desire to burst a similar bubble that had been built around his younger brother to carry on and pretend that all was all right with their world, despite their father not living with them), it was this last admission by the father which really struck a chord with me. Furthermore, this new knowledge encouraged his son to reflect on the fact that, if nothing else, he had learned that life is rarely genuinely perfect and even the people you most trust and who most try and protect you - your parents (when they are good, loving parents) - are as vulnerable as any other human being on this planet.

I will never forget, in the depths of my depression, the same feelings of the world and everyone just seeming to take from me without apparently giving anything back. I felt I was just giving, giving, giving in every area of my life and that I was having the lifeblood sucked out of me. Everyone hits rock bottom in different ways and we all have different levels of tolerance and fortitude. And it is a sad truth that if you are one of life's givers, someone who just 'copes' and stoically gets on with things, then people just continue to take. Until finally you collapse under the strain. Mercifully I never took an axe to anyone's head, but I have come close to some alarmingly fierce moments of anger and potential loss of control.I also remember thinking about my girls and their tender years and innocence - that they had no idea what a terrible state their mother was actually in, barely able to get up in the morning to feed them breakfast. If there was anything which drove me to get better, to learn how to mend and what steps to take to make sure I never end up in that bad, bad place again, it was the desire to be a good mother to my girls. I didn't want them to remember me as a basket case, yet I wanted them to know me as a real human being - with weaknesses and imperfections - and to understand that life is not always easy or indeed does not always turn out as you might expect. Most of all I wanted to be there for them - totally present in mind and emotion, not just physically.

It was interesting to note that both the parents in the film tonight had suffered at the hands of their parents - parents who had let them down. It was this that drove them so relentlessly - and ultimately unrealistically - to be the perfect parents, living the perfect family life, for their boys. And it was ironically this which led to the collapse of the castle in the clouds which they had built for themselves.There was much to reflect on in this sad, sad tale where a young man was still struggling to come to terms with the isolation he feels as a result of that one horrific day when his world and all his preconceptions of family life and relationships, of love, trust and respect, crashed around his feet.

New 'Fridge Food' Post

2011-11-15T10:46:00.001Z

Where's the Town Crier when you need him? Oh yey! Oh yey! I have just written my first new Fridge Food in 8 months!

This appalling neglect is not through lack of interest - merely, as ever, lack of time. I am so often cooking at the end of the day when the girls are around and wanting help with things and questions answered and forms filling in that by the time the next day comes I have already forgotten what, exactly, I put in the meal. I often take a photo if I think it's turned out ok - my cameras and phone are littered with shots of tempting little meals thrown together from the fridge - but that's no good if I can't pass on how I put them together!

Anyway, last night I was determined to remember and today you have the result.

Cottage Pie is hardly a new creation - in fact it's as old a the hills - and it is certainly an old favourite of mine. However, normally I start it from scratch, but this time I was true to its origins and made it using up some leftovers. Jolly satisfying, jolly tasty and much quicker than cooking it all from a zero.

Click here and all will be revealed...

Lest We Forget

2011-11-12T12:23:00.001Z

At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in the eleventh year of the 21st century, I was watching two veterans share in silence the experiences and memories of war. As Doug dabbed with an age-warn hand at the tears dribbling down his cheeks with his perky checked hanky you could not help but weep with him. Mike stood stoically alongside him, both so smart and proud in dark suits, white shirts and red ties. They had been helped up from the squashy sofas of the This Morning studio just before the chimes of Big Ben rang out eleven times; but now they were standing tall. When Doug was asked what the eleventh of the eleventh meant to him, he replied, quite simply 'Freedom'. When Mike was asked what got him through it he replied, equally simply, 'Willpower'. As they quietly shook eachother's hand you could feel the shared weight of memory between them.

These marvellous men deserve our greatest respect. They will never forget the horrors they saw, the hardship they endured and the friends and comrades they lost in the fight for freedom. And neither should we.

Sadly war continues even into this new century. It seems that Fallen Man will never learn to live together amicably, despite the ultimate sacrifice that men and women are making across this globe on an almost daily basis. Will the Age of Enlightenment ever really bear fruit? I fear not.

-------------------------

Related links:-

The Royal British Legion:11-11-11-11
Henry Allingham
D-Day 65 years on
Afghanistan

Golden Days

2011-11-03T12:04:00.001Z

Only 10 days ago, as we started some tree work in our garden and as I drove around the highways and byways of Cheshire and Derbyshire going about my business, did I think to myself 'Gosh, how the autumn colours haven't really appeared yet'. And then, suddenly, last week I became aware that there was much that was golden around me. The deep reddish gold of the beeches and the cherries, the startling reds and oranges of the acers, the yellowing of the horse chestnuts and silver birches, the red berries in the rowans were all suddenly warming the world around me even as the cooler winds came and the nights were growing longer.

And so, this week, I now feel that summer has truly said goodbye and those memories of beaches and long evenings have slipped to another part of our world - even though, just two weeks ago, I was still basking on golden sands in southern Spain and bathing in clear Atlantic waters.

Yesterday was Hallowe'en where the Autumn colours glow orange with pumpkin lanterns and the fruits of apple bobbing bounce red and russet in the bowl. I am reminded of our wedding day, on 31st October 1992, where the reception was dressed and adorned with all things Harvest and Hallowe'en. Food was served in hollowed out pumpkins and spread on broad autumn leaves. The air outside was sharp and chill, the sun soft in a sky of intense autumnal blue - a precursor for so many good things to come in the approaching festive season and in all the years to come. I can hardly believe it was 19 years ago.

Last night I had planned a lovely meal at home. We were going to eat and finally sit down to relax and watch one of the many programmes that are recorded and unwatched on our television. A quiet night in, of which we have so few. N promised he would be home in good time after a very early start that morning. The girls were going to carve pumpkins and do apple bobbing. As ususal, though, things did not go according to plan: L came home from school, burst into tears, got into bed and was later sick. So at 9 o'clock when I'd hoped to be eating with N, having shared the bottle of prosecco I had chilling in the fridge, I was actually running up and downstairs with buckets. N was still in Leeds and the beautiful, romantic table setting that E and G had so lovingly prepared - full of nightlights and confetti and wedding souvenirs - was haunting me in the kitchen. I did not know whether to go ahead and cook the meal I had planned or just settle for warmed up leftovers from yesterday. N was in a crisis meeting and I couldn't get hold of him. The tears welled and all the disappointment of so many times like this which have peppered our lives in his dedication to his work came flooding over me once again. E picked up on my vibe and she sobbed as she said 'I just wish I was little again when Hallowe'en was fun and we bobbed apples and ate red spaghetti and went trick or treating'. It broke my heart that she has got to that age where she sees and understands so much more of the world around her. She is no longer oblivious to the things that go wrong in adult lives, or the things in the world around her which are less desireable. It is called growing up. I hugged her hard and wiped away her tears and told her that I promised we would do another Hallowe'en when L was feeling better and that we would do some apple bobbing too. She chuckled and smiled through her tears and I was just glad that I was still able to reach the child in her and that she could draw comfort from some motherly reassurance that 'all would be well'.

In the end I decided to press on with cooking the meal - and I'm so glad I did. I sent E up to get ready for bed and had just said goodnight to her when N came bursting through the door. I said she could come back downstairs with us and share in our little celebration for a few minutes as she and her sister had so wanted to do earlier in the evening before it all went wrong. So despite the late hour, she watched us drink our prosecco (with all the memories it brings of our fantastically happy times in the Italian Veneto at the beginning of the 90s and, indeed, her birth in Milan in 1999) and her father opening the present her mother had bought for him: a large black and white framed photograph of the Grand Canal in Venice, taken by a photographer local to us here in the High Peak. It was a photo which I thought evoked the misty wistfulness that is Venice - until N peered at the people in the gondolas in the middle distance and saw that they were crammed with Japanese tourists. Suddenly the magic dissipated but best of all, N had made us laugh. We giggled till E was wiping away tears. It was lovely that she was there to share the moment with us. Our eldest daughter, on the cusp of her teenage years, witnessing a special moment in her parents' lives. Two people who have stuck together through thick and thin, who have tried to stay true to their wedding vows of 'for better for worse' and who, despite life's continued adversities, still find togetherness through laughter which was where it all began nearly 29 years ago. Golden days indeed.

Indian Summer

2011-09-30T08:31:00.000Z

Monday 26th September

I read in the newspaper this morning that we can expect an Indian summer this week with temperatures reaching the low 80s farenheit. This would certainly be very welcome at two levels: one, because it has been almost relentlessly grim since we returned from France; and, two, because G has a camping party in the garden this weekend as a belated birthday treat. When I was out paddling around in soggy grass and cool, dank, drizzly autumnal air last week I did wonder as to the wisdom of the project; but if it is going to be warm and feel like a last taste of summer, then all should be well. With any luck the campfire will glow and the marshmallows will melt - and they may even stay outside under canvas the whole night. But I'm not holding my breath.

Meanwhile I can hardly believe that it has now been four weeks since our return. Frankly, it feels more like four months. We had a rushed few days getting sorted for school as they were back on 1st September, and then I went into a sort of zoned-out mode for a week when I really couldn't get geared up for normal life again - a sign, at least, that I had had a more restful summer break than perhaps I had realised.

Looking back over my diary there have been a smattering of events: I have caught up with a friend in the village over coffee, another over lunch, and another over tea; I have had a dental appointment, done the car M.O.T. , been to a charity afternoon to help a friend raise money for a walk along part of the Great Wall of China, been to a work dinner in Manchester, run a fell race, been to a barn dance and a drinks party; I have planted new plants in our garden, re-started the Infant School gardening club and re-enroled for the second year of my gardening course; I have counselled four friends all suffering in life right now; I have had my brother-in-law and his dog to stay, been to see Alan Carr at the Manchester Evening News arena and gone to a Brian Wilson (ex Beach Boys) concert at the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester; I have been to a country show and climbed a climbing wall; I have taken one daughter to the dentist, supported another in a cross country running race, been to a Beer Festival and done all the usual running around after children, household chores and broken lawn-mowers.

On a broader scale, I have organised for someone from John Lewis to come and help me re-do the curtains in almost every room in the house; we have planned and largely booked a sabbatical in New Zealand for six weeks at the end of November and....we have got a dog.

I suppose, when you look at it like that, I have done quite a lot. It is not surprising that the summer holidays seem a supremely distant memory - a sunny blink of the eye in the tidal flow of life.

How are you doing?

Memories of 9/11

2011-09-11T23:22:00.001Z

I will never forget where I was for 9/11. We were with friends on a beach in the Western Algarve, a favourite place. E was two and a half and G was crawling around on the sand as a13-month old. L had not yet made it into the world and our friends had a new baby.

We wandered over to the restaurant for some lunch and were vaguely aware that something was going on inside. There was much talking, but there was no television. We could never have imagined the news that was clearly filtering through somehow to this remote restaurant perched under the rich red cliffs of this idyllic curve of sand.

Eventually my curiosity got the better of me and I asked one of the waiters what was going on. He told us what he knew of the horrors which were unfolding in New York, that cloudless blue September morning across the very sea which we was lapping at our feet. From the western tip of the Algarve, the next stop is America. Suddenly our happy family session on the beach was turned on its head and instantly transformed into a world where, in the matter of a few moments, all had become utterly surreal. It was almost impossible to believe that we could be fortunate enough to be on a beach holiday with loved ones and friends while thousands of other people were being submitted to unthinkable trauma across the water. There was an extraordinary sense of bewilderment, grief and guilt. Walking back to our little camp, we tried to get a handle on what on earth was unfolding across the water, but we had no television or radio to help us understand. Instead we just had a picture of our three little children sitting chubbily on the sand with big smiles and shiny eyes, innocently oblivious to the hatred and horrors which exist in the world in which they had recently arrived.

We have often returned to that villa and that beach, but I will never forget that September lunchtime.

Where were you? I would love to hear your stories of the moment you witnessed one of the most extraordinary, heartrendingly awful events of modern times.

I will leave you with a story I heard on the Jeremy Vine show on Radio 2 on Friday. It was the story of a firefighter who, before leaving home to start his shift the day before 9/11, left a note for his wife saying:

Dear Stace
I can't believe that I still love you so much even now. Can't wait to come home and see you again.

He never came back.

Golden Girl

2011-08-24T15:39:00.023Z

What better present could you give a child about to have their 11th birthday than have their best friend join them for a beach holiday?

G has known M since infant school. They moved to a new school for Juniors, made other friends together and now they are about to start Seniors. It is sometimes hard to believe how quickly the time has passed from sitting chubbily cross-legged learning their A,B,Cs to becoming long-limbed beauties with golden hair and sparkling eyes striding confidently towards their teenage years.

G, though, is still a child despite her quiet confidence and her insouciance. She still loves playing imaginary games with her younger sister and building in the sand. It may be her younger sister who still physically skips, but G is still skipping in her mind.

I look sometimes at her long jaw, her full mouth, her wide smile, her flaxen hair and her large soft blue eyes framed by dark giraffe lashes and think of the day she was born - the day I nearly lost her before her life had barely begun. This bundle of positive life-force who brings sunshine and strength to all she does - the smile only collapsing when the batteries finally run out - could so easily have been lost to us. It is impossible to imagine her not in the heart of our family, yet sometimes life hangs on a thread, doesn't it? Or an umbilical cord.

I will never forget that hot August day in London: bright blue skies, a morning appointment at the hospital, a new home (moved into just days before her due date), a new garden by the river, a 19 month old toddler to think of too. I nearly went to do some shopping in Habitat (ah yes, when they were still in their heyday), but decided that, actually, since it was such a beautiful day and I now had a lovely garden, that I would do better to go home and rest on a lounger by the willow tree.

I could not have made a better decision.

It must have been about 4pm and I had been resting on my lounger for half an hour or so, with E tucked up in her cot having her afternoon nap, when the first pains came. I thought they might go away for a while, but half an hour later they suddenly hit hard and fast. I just about managed to bring a freshly woken E down from upstairs, and change her wet nappy, but that was where the attention to others stopped. Suddenly I could barely speak, nor certainly walk, the contractions were so intense. With great difficulty I tried to phone N, who was pleased to tell me he was in an important meeting and could I ring him back in half an hour? I meekly obliged until five minutes later I called him again and just about managed to get out the words that, no, it could not wait. The baby was on its way and could he please come home QUICKLY!

E had, with perfect timing, pooped in her nappy, but there was no way I could go back upstairs to change it, so the poor little mite had to live with it. I was alone with my toddler, in a new part of town, miles from my appointed hospital with a baby about to drop. I phoned the midwife who had been newly assigned to me just that morning (the other having gone on holiday) who I didn't even know: again, I could barely speak, yet she suggested I get in a taxi (with my toddler) and travel to the hospital (that whole process would have taken a good hour in rush hour traffic on a Friday from Isleworth to Ravenscourt Park). I dismissed this as an option and then, through E's crying and my own agony, decided to try and call the local doctors' surgery where, mercifully, I had signed up just a few days before.

By now every breath was an effort but I just managed to get out the words that I was alone with a toddler, I was having a baby any minute and that I was scared. They told me they would send an ambulance immediately to take me to the hospital around the corner. Meanwhile the phone was going every five minutes with my midwife from Ravenscourt Park asking me for directions of how to get to me which I was physically incapable of articulating even if I had understood where the hell she was (somewhere on the A40). Didn't she have an A-Z for crying out loud?

And so the doorbell goes at about 5.30pm and a nice ambulance man is there saying he's come to take me to hospital. I reach down for my (previously prepared) overnight bag and, with that, my waters break. I could feel the baby coming. He says he'll get a wheelchair but I know I can't possibly sit down, so I lie down right where I am, on the sitting room floor, my head pretty much under the grand piano, and get on with the job. He realises there is no going back, and brings me gas and air instead of the wheelchair. E is still crying. N is on his motorbike hurtling from central London, not knowing whether I am in Ravenscourt Park or home or somewhere else completely. My right arm goes numb from the gas and air. A kindly faced young doctor arrives from the local surgery, concerned by my phonecall. The two ambulancemen have contacted the local hospital and told them they need a midwife here urgently (they are clearly phased by childbirth in action). There are two ambulancemen, a doctor and a toddler now in the room. N arrives with a throaty roar at 5.55pm having decided to try home first before trawling hospitals for me. He scoops up the smelly, distressed toddler, and comforts her, instantly removing a huge area of distress for me too.

A white-coated midwife from the local hospital and a male student nurse burst through the door at 6pm. There are now seven people watching me perform but I have other things to worry about. All dignity lost, it is simply about giving life to this baby. The room is silent apart from the midwife who gives a running commentary of what she is doing for the sake of the student nurse. I hear that the baby has the cord around its neck. It has meconium in its respiratory passages. It is not breathing. They have to act quickly and decisively. The baby is delivered, but all is silent. An interminable amount of time seems to pass - a baby cannot surely not breathe for all this time and still be ok? Thoughts flit through my head that, after nine long months and all this effort, the baby is dead or brain damaged. It is an unemotional thought. I am simply hit by the irony. And then, suddenly, there is a cry. The blissful screeches of a newborn baby hitting the outside air from its warm, liquid cocoon. The relief is indescribeable. I lie there with her on my chest (thrown completely that it is a girl when I was convinced it was a boy) and thank God. She is alive.

With that the 'Somewhere on the A40' Midwife bursts through the door, triumphant that she has found me at last, albeit rather after the horse has bolted. She tries to make amends by running me a hot bath. I am pathetically grateful.

But my gratitude lies wholly with the local midwife who, thanks to her skill and experience, gave life to a little lifeless bundle. Had I been in a taxi on the way to Ravenscourt Park, or footling around in Habitat, it could all have been very different....

And so, at 6.05pm on 11th August 2000, my beautiful, feisty, huge-hearted, strong-willed G arrived in this world in a bit of a hurry. She hasn't changed. She does everything at full speed. It took a while to come up with a name, since a boy was expected, but in the end she was christened Georgina Jane Allegra Boden. All the girls have a third name which reflects something about their birth: Allegra represents the 'quick and lively' way in which she popped out under the piano (the stain on the carpet bore testimony) but which, in her haste, nearly went so horribly wrong. And, with true harmony, this lively, light-hearted, positive spirit is what she carries deep within her soul.

Her joyful, sandy, surfy, sun-filled 11th Birthday ended perfectly in colourful Biarritz on the terrace of a favourite restaurant overlooking the sea, her best friend at her side, the setting sun suffusing their soft features with golden light.

My flaxen-haired girl with the wide smile and the big heart, I couldn't imagine life without you.

Detour

2011-08-08T22:33:00.014Z

Sadly the only skies under which we have ever arrived at St Malo have been resolutely grey and usually raining or with a thick fog. This year was no different. I had planned to make the journey down south more interesting by incorporating a little detour through Brittany - one of the few parts of France that I don't really know - but the weather dictated otherwise. We did a quick meander off the motorway to take in some D roads which I had a fancy for, but everything seemed against us. Gone are the days, it seems, when you can potter endlessly through emptiness and quaint sleepy villages - even these now seem victim of the new 'progressive' French thinking on road sytems and town planning: you find yourselves either negotiating myriad chi-chi little roundabouts 'decorated' with scenes which are supposed to evoke the essence of where you are driving through (thus you find yourself suddenly distracted as you watch for any fools still believing in priorite a droit by cunning little montages of rocks and shipwrecks or, down here in the Landes, sand, deckchairs and surfboards). And if not that, then you have to watch your wheels on the enormously high curbs, sleeping policemen and indented trottoir of 'traffic calming' schemes on which it is all too easy to burst tyres or scrape your alloys if you happen to be trying to navigate at the same time (believe me, we've done it - at 1 o'clock in the morning, moreover, with three exhausted small children in the car, let alone the parents).

Your eye will also be caught by the extraordinary banks of street lights, often painted in bright colours in the mistaken belief that this makes them attractive. Au contraire, it merely draws attention to a functional item which should be encouraged to recede into the landscape rather than dominate it. And if you are spared all this, then you are probably being directed on the by-pass road (which even small towns seem to have these days) which are pleased to take you through the ubiquitous zone industriel or zone artisanal which basically means they have ruined the approaches to any nice rural town or village with the most hideous collection of enormous industrial sheds crammed with sofas or lamps or DIY or cars or agricultural equipment or food or any of the endless stuff which modern-day society seems to demand (even if no-one can actually afford to pay for any of it).

And so our little excursions off the tedious autoroute engendered anger and frustration more than pleasure, to such an extent that we nearly turned round on our way to La Rochelle which we thought would be a nice detour for lunch. By the time we finally got there I was pretty much ready to slit my wrists having been forced through the arse end of nowhere on endless ring-roads cutting ugly swathes through what might, once, have been reasonably attractive arable land. An equally frustrating time was had trying to reach the old port and a vista of sea and boats as the town planners had seen fit to create such a set of absurd one-way systems that if you took just one wrong turn you'd be trailing through endless suburbia before being spewed out onto the ring road again. Thus, by the time we finally found the wretched port (let alone a parking space), we were fairly ready for a drink.

Tables and chairs spilled from hotels and hosteleries along the quayside, presenting a tempting array of options. We chose one on the simple basis that they had a table free on the front row in a momentary burst of sunshine. We ordered drinks and food and sat back, finally, to relax and enjoy the passing scene.

And a very busy passing scene it was. Within moments of our arrival, one of those people who think it's a good idea to spray themselves in silver and stand motionless for hours decided to set up shop in front of us. This of course attracted a crowd which then blocked our view of the boats. He was swiftly joined by his rival 'The Clown' who was, indeed, most foolish, yet attracted another enormous crowd who clearly had nothing better to do on a Sunday in La Rochelle.

As people wearied of Mr Statue, we regained a slight vista of boat masts until it was just as swiftly blocked by a large black people-carrier vehicle which decided to come and park on the road (where you weren't meant to park), right in front of our table. There's nothing like a waft of diesel with your moules marinieres. Beats seasalt and seaweed any time. Much more evocative.

Meanwhile a group of three English blokes in their thirties and clearly rather pleased with themselves (and I suspect slightly hung-over) came and sat down on the table next to us and provided me with a good half hour of amusing eavesdropping.

Slightly smug one with tan and short dark hair and sunglasses to slightly twitchy shaggy haired blond one with sunglasses:
'So do you like cooking?'
[Much awkward shifting in chair as Shaggy had to admit to not really having a clue with a short run-down of some uninspiring dishes which he sometimes forced on his long-suffering girlfriend - which basically amounted to steak, chips and salad on the basis that it was easy and quick to do when you come home late from work. Fair point. Oh, and he liked dauphinoise potatoes - M&S ready-prepared, I imagine]

Clearly feeling un-threatened, Smug then enlightened us with a full run-down of his foolproof dinner party turn of, funnily enough, moules marinieres (with a twist, I think it's fair to say). It went like this:

Finely chop an onion and some garlic and fry them in a pan with some olive oil and butter. Add cream and a glass of white wine. Then some curry powder, some sliced red peppers, chopped parsley blah blah blah and - of course - the mussels. Apparently it's a stunner, incredibly quick to do and everyone oohs and aahs and thinks you're marvellous and presumably you get laid. Oh, and as a brief aside, he happened to mention that all his girlfriends of late had very nice names but none of them could bloody cook. Too posh, presumably.

Smug then turns his attention to The Quiet One and asks what he's like on the cooking front to which he gets the reply 'Well, since I haven't got a girlfriend I can't really be bothered to cook'. Short and to the point.

Smug then sat back smugly in his chair as his moules marinieres a la La Rochelle arrived - only to be truly disappointed. There followed a detailed critique, much questioning of the long-suffering waitress as to the exact ingredients of the moules marinieres, to which she was unable to come up with anything more illuminating than: mussels, onion, garlic. She forgot to mention the white wine (possibly because Chef had forgotten to add it) and the dish was then subjected to intense scrutiny from Smug and Shaggy (Quiet clearly couldn't give a shit) as to whether or not they could find any onion in it. They found one piece, sneered, and Smug then followed with a diatribe on how appalling it was to be in the land of moules frites and have such a poor example of the signature dish. I should have suggested he gave Chef his recipe....

Replete with slightly sub-standard food, we wandered back through the stone porticoes and narrow cobbled streets of old La Rochelle, being reminded, somewhat unexpectedly, of many a northern Italian town. It was very pleasant, really, and we came away satisfied enough with our little detour but happy in the knowledge that we might not be troubling its road systems again any time soon.

Departure

2011-07-30T21:02:00.011Z

Saturday, 23rd July 2011

It was with an overwhelming sense of relief that I finally got into the passenger seat of a car packed to the gunnels on Saturday afternoon. The last job was done, the last thing thought of - and for anything else it was too late. I was officially on my way to holiday.

The journey down to Portsmouth was mercifully unremarkable - free of the dramas of flat tyres and broken down cars or horrific traffic jams all conspiring to make us miss the ferry. No, we managed to get to Portsmouth with half an hour in hand in which to enjoy a quick drink at a sun-kissed bar and write two important birthday cards (to my parents) and get them in the post. Finding a letter box around the absurd set of dual carriageways and one-way systems which beset the area around the ports proved more testing - another scraped alloy wheel as I pointed to a red pillar down a side road and N attempted some sort of emergency stop in two lanes of traffic. Much squabbling later we finally found our way back to it, having abandoned that first attempt; it was sited outside the Naval Acadamy which was looking decidedly shut and deserted up the dead-end street, rather like the post box. It also said on the little plaque that the next collection was, somewhat inexplicably, Tuesday. Still, I threw caution to the wind and chucked them in anyway before we missed the ferry.

Safely on board, we then found we couldn't open the boot any more. This was going to make unpacking the car at the other end somewhat tedious, but we left that as a problem for another day and went, under slight pressure from the crew to leave the car deck, to find our cabins. Needless to say, we always book too late to get any with a window but since we go straight to eat when we get on board, and in St Malo it's always raining, this does not strike us as a loss.

So, overnight bags deposited, we headed off to the 'posh' restaurant, always citing the first time we used this ferry crossing four years ago when we had the blow-out on the motorway and caught the boat by the skin of our teeth, falling on the maitre d' of the restaurant with a certain lingering desperation in our eyes. He responded and found us a table and it was one of the best meals we've ever had - purely because of the relief of being there, eating good food and drinking good wine, after the stress we had undergone to reach that point. This being the fourth year running, of course it doesn't now hold the same thrill, but nevertheless it marks the start of the holidays and it is always good to go out on deck and watch Portsmouth recede under a pink-hued sky. Such fleeting freedom from domesticity is always a moment to relish.

Tyring Times

2011-07-22T23:05:00.016Z

Monday 18th July

So here I am again at Selecta Tyre in Buxton, seemingly my second home. Tyres are a bit of a theme in my life at the moment. I was here just a few weeks back getting my snow tyres removed (safe to say that even here in the High Peak the risk of snow had passed by June!); I was meant to go back and get the bolts checked after 50 miles (didn't) and am now here instead with N's car which always bowls us a googly just days before we are due to travel long journeys in it, fully laden with luggage, children et al. We've had blow-outs on the fast lane of the motorway down to catch the ferry; we've had collisions with motor-cross bikers on our lane as we've set out for holidays; and on Saturday we managed to hit the blasted pot hole that's been on the main lane out of the village for nearly a year (a foot wide and four inches deep, right on a corner) and knackered the tyre. (Mercifully the wheel didn't get cracked which was what happened just a few months back, if you remember, and would have meant another emergency trip to the welders.) The tracking, of course, has also been thrown and has had to be sorted. The same pothole has also thrown the tracking on my car, so I need to come and have that sorted at some point, but in the meantime I am also purchasing a further new tyre for my car too because, the other Friday, I managed to burst one reversing out of my own drive. How so? you may rightly ask...

Well, with the usual extraordinary bad timing which rules my life with a rod of iron, I had four tree surgeons and four builders who had been swarming around house and garden all day causing mess and chaos and who all decided to leave at 4.30 on the dot. So just as I was meant to be getting in the car to collect four girls (four seems a bit of a theme here too) from the bus stop, I was suddenly and pressingly required to discuss the works, write cheques and God knows what (not helped by the fact that one of the tree surgeons is an ex-babysitter of charm and good looks and a well-honed body who I was catching up with - he was a favourite with the girls, no surprise, and is also a fantastic yachtsman who is winning left, right and centre and has been up for young Derbyhire Sports Personality of the Year - but I digress). Two of the girls I was meant to be collecting were not even mine - extra responsibility, therefore, to make sure no-one got crushed crossing the busy and rather dangerous main road (the bus stop is rather perplexingly sited on a sweeping, fast corner which is a little odd in this world of Health and Safety madness: I think it would make more sense to allow me to take a not-even-wet umbrella into a shop and have the bus stop sited somewhere considerably less dangerous than confiscate my umbrella - an incident which happened in Zara in Manchester on Saturday - and have a bus stop pouring out young children on one of the most dangerous parts of a main road. But who am I to say, eh?).
Sorry, digressing again. Back to the story. I therefore left in a bit of a rush and N had left my car in a ridiculous position, wedged up against the side of the house in the corner of the courtyard, and I had to perform about 20 manoevres (and I'm a good driver) to get it out. However, because I was now all stressed and in a hurry and concentrating hard on the left-hand side of the narrow exit from the courtyard (which you have to reverse out of) where the rough dry-stone wall cunningly splays out at it's base (and has claimed many a victim), I completely failed to pay attention to the other side where there is a stone plinth which people used to use to stand on to mount their horses; and because the wheel was at an angle which it isn't normally because of the ridiculous position which N left my car in (so it's all his fault of course!), I managed to completely burst my front tyre. So, four girls, probably already splattered on the tarmac at the bus stop, now had their Responsible Parent with a burst tyre in her own drive. Stunning. Now, this is where the absurd luxury of a third car (sorry - it was going cheap from N's work, if that helps to justify it), comes into its own. I at least had another vehicle, wheels intact (albeit with bald tyres, it now transpires - another trip to Selecta beckons before it will pass its upcoming MOT), in which to go and scrape bodies off the tarmac.

Thus I arrive hassled and apologetic (as ususal) and pathetically grateful that they are all intact and playing happily on the swings and climbing frames at the pub opposite the bus stop (and at least not in it ordering pints). Now, one of the great things about living in this village is that I have a lovely garage mechanic at the bottom of my lane. Given that my car is now 10 years old, and that N's has always got something wrong with it, this is very handy indeed. So I bobbed in there on my way back home and waved my female-in-distress flag and got a promise out of him to come and change the burst tyre for me (so that I could conceal the evidence from N) when he had finished what he was doing. And needless to say, the poor man pitches up and blocks me in the drive again just as I was rushing out to get L to her ballet lesson (late again). So just as he'd opened up the van and got all his tools out (so to speak) I had to ask him to move. (There were people who didn't buy our house before we did because of the drive situation and I am beginning to understand why!).

Now, I didn't drive my car all weekend, but N did. And he put it back in the same ridiculous position in the courtyard. So on Monday morning I go to take the girls to the school bus stop (late) and have to perform same silly manoevres with same silly levels of mounting stress and frustration and am concentrating so hard on the left hand side of the drive (sound familiar?) that I failed to pay attention to the right and CRUNCH! Yep, that will be the wing mirror then. Smashed to smithereens. I could have wept. I simply couldn't believe that, after eight years of rushing in and out of this driveway, I had inflicted major damage to my poor old car twice on the trot.

I kind of thought that that would be the end of the bad luck, bearing in mind that I already have my work cut out for me getting the family away for five weeks to France and all the sorting, packing, organising, laundry, ironing, admin, fridge clearing and garden panicking that that task entails - let alone the hair appointments, the optician appointments, the entertaining children in the holidays activities which also accompany it. But no. Last Friday (a rare sunny day) I passed through our back hallway only to notice a puddle of water on the floor. I looked up. Huge crack in ceiling, plus drip. Oh. Can't leave that for five weeks. At which point the doorbell goes. Woman to read the Water Meter. How serendipitous is that? So I take her down to the cellar where the meter resides, only to find water dripping there too - from the main stop cock which the plumber had 'operated' (Water Board Woman's word, not mine) just the day before when he was fixing a broken tap in the girls' bathroom. So I now have leak in hall and cellar (which may or may not be being caused by leaking loo). Good. Call to plumbers again, burst into tears (rather unexpectedly and embarrassingly - think I'm rather stressed) and get someone booked in to come and check it all out on Tuesday. So, just as I have rid myself of 16 weeks of builders, I now am about to have my house ripped apart by plumbers while I am trying to pack and sort and organise for going away. And, of course, just as the children are on holiday, the weather has turned unspeakable and is doing nothing but piss with rain (that wind-swept slanting kind which you should really only get in winter) with the clouds touching the fields, so I can't even kick them outside.

On the same day that I discovered the leak in the hall, I also found myself peering into the washing machine wondering why I couldn't open the door. I turned the whole thing off and waited the requisite few minutes for the door lock to release, only to be met with a flood of water and a very wet kingize duvet cover. My faithful Bosch had suddenly decided it no longer wanted to spin and drain. So I remove sodden linen and wearily ring up appliance engineer who, mercifully, had left his details on a helpful little sticker on the top of the machine from when he came to fix the dryer. The dear man said he could come on Sunday morning to fix it and that is indeed what he did (cause of malfunction = numerous shreds of something hard and unknown, highly likely to have been lurking in youngest's school blazer pockets). But you just don't need it do you? Why do these things befall you just when you are at your most squeezed?

So that was five things, could there be any more? I hope to God that I have been punished enough. And to the villager who saw me UTTERLY lose it in the lane after the pothole incident on Saturday (you know who you are), I can only apologise. If it had been caught on camera it would have seemed like a scene out of Fawlty Towers where Basil rants and raves and has steam coming out of his ears and froth from his mouth with his blood vessels bursting out of his head and neck and goes into irrelevant Nazi goose walk. Well, that was me. On full display, the talk of the town no doubt. It is completely humiliating, yet it has happened so often of late that the girls seem unaffected. It is just Mummy being normal. God help me. My husband does not think it normal at all and we are having big problems trying to communicate. He is stressed and over-tired; I am stressed and overtired. It is not a good recipe and sometimes the pot simply boils over, as it did then. And I was bursting for a wee and had to stomp off into a field with NO-ONE in it when I settled down, but hey, before I knew it a black dog had appeared from nowhere with its owner and was running over to me and barking while I had my bottom open to the four winds. Quite unbelievable.

Safe to say that all dignity has now been lost.

Meanwhile, everyone says to me, reassuringly, 'you'll be on holiday soon'. I know I will, but N won't. He has two major transactions going on (why do the b****d clients always have to choose August to do this?) and will be spending most of his time travelling backwards and forwards on a plane rather than having much-needed and certainly deserved down time with his wife and children. And the knock-on effect is that we don't relax either because we are sad and irritated and inconvenienced by all his comings and goings and troubled that he is not getting the holiday that he desperately needs. Added to which, he pushed through a project (much discussed and agonized over) which I was broadly against, to have a pool put in in France. Everyone waved hands waftily (including the pool people) saying it would all be done in a few weeks, sans problemes. I envisaged problems and problems there have been. Electricity cables running in just the wrong place (unmarked on the site map), water table being much higher than expected (by all except me) which meant the hole was flooding, so the depth of the pool has had to be reconsidered and gallons of underground water pumpted out. Oh, and the bit which, for me, was most predictable and most understandable - the neighbours. They hate us. One lot have been to complain to the Mayor on a daily basis (despite having a pool herself which presumable must have been constructed at some point rather than fallen from the sky) and our immediate neighbours with whom we have until now enjoyed an easy relationship with who are pissed off and are being obstructive. And someone's nicked the wood from the tree that was cut down and which we were going to re-use in the landscaping. The pool people and the electrician have had their own Basil Fawlty moment in the garden, screaming bad language at eachother, just to further upset the neighbours. Because of the problems encountered, it will not be finished before our arrival and instead I will have another building site to live with.

There is no peace for the wicked. Or, looking at it another way, I always said that too many possessions were a burden. For years and years I have been trying to advocate a simpler life, in a well-chosen place close to sea and mountains and good state education; a place where you do not have to spend a fortune on holidays just to get away from the endless English rain, or the madness of the rat race; a place where Nature is on your doorstep offering you all that you could need, in a political system and society which works. This is of course Utopia. But, there are still better and worse lifestyle choices and I have to say that Italy came very close (if you ignore the politics!) and we are still toying with a year living in Bordeaux, with the girls in French school, just to see if it is any better...

I think though, my energy reserves are a little low for more major upheaval. Perhaps it should go on the back burner for now.

------------
Footnote 1:-
N and I were sitting eating supper late and exhausted tonight when he came out with the bombshell that the awkward neighbours in France have indeed managed to get the building of our pool halted. So we now have a huge unsecured hole in the ground and no garden. They will begin work again on 1st September, three days after we leave. It is possible we will not be there next summer which means we may not get to put a toe in the wretched thingl until 2013. More disappointing and frustrating than any of that is what I was hoping for my mother who is coming out for a week with my father and brother. Since her stroke she is not very steady on her pins and she is worried about walking across the large stretches of sand at the beach. She also still gets very tired. So I was looking forward to being able to offer her the chance for some real rest and relaxation, some quiet time by the pool, and the chance to do some gentle water exercises to try and help her regain some strength. Now she will probably just fall into the hole. I think I may join her.

Footnote 2:-
Since writing this, the shocking massacre in Norway has happened and put all my irritating troubles into perspective. Wherever you look, there is always far worse happening to other people. I am alive, I am loved, I love and I am very lucky.

Interlude

2011-07-20T22:45:00.008Z

A week or two back, while I was revising for my final gardening exam, I took a break out in the garden. This is what I noted down before turning my mind back to Weeds, Pests & Diseasess:-

Monday 4th July 2011

The garden never ceases to enthrall and frustrate. Just a week ago, I went to the top of our plot to look at the reducurrants, spurred on by the copious berries resplendent on a friend's bushes in Staffordshire. I have just one rather pathetic offering, but it was full as it will ever be with berries just the week before. I curtsied to my pruning efforts in February. Yet returning to view the harvest, with reducurrant jelly in mind, I was dismayed to see the whole lot stripped. Not a berry left. Pigeons, the buggers. I made a note of it for my pests & diseases paper. P for Pigeon, P for Pest.

Picking myself up from my disappointment, I was pleased to see that the raspberries were flourishing. I picked and ate and enjoyed, and even found some in the hedge alongside the main lawn. How on earth did they get there? Pigeons I presume. I suppose they have their uses.

As I strolled back towards the house the delphiniums were filling the herbaceous border with an inky blue of startling intensity, while purple Nepeta released her minty, musky scent underfoot. Roses of red, yellow, pink and white - all shades and shapes and tones; aphids gathering, rocket rocketing, cabbages struggling, bees buzzing; wasps munching anything wooden for their nests God knows where; a dead bird, a decapitated rabbit; chicken shit and Alchemilla mollis everywhere. Tomatoes in the greenhouse; sweetpeas in pots; nettles and cleavers creeping through the borders, hungry for light and moisture. The birds sing, the midges fly, the grass grows.

Nature, in all her myriad forms, casting light on an otherwise dull day.

Demanding Times

2011-07-14T22:00:00.009Z

Sunday, 10th July 2011
Today is the first day in many weeks where Time (always my enemy) has deigned to loosen her sturdy chains around me just a tiny bit. As I write, two small girls (one not mine) are downstairs watching Amercian rubbish on telly, blisfully happy in pyjamas and dressing gown with a small bowl of biscuits at their side, while a clearly exhausted husband still snores in his bed. The cup of tea I have just made and brought up stirred him briefly, but he has returned happily enough to the Land of Nod. He was up at 5.45am (having got to bed at 1am) to take E on her Year 7 trip to France, the highlight of the school year (more anticipated for the reunion with the boys, their former classmates, rather than for the cultural experience, it has to be said). Last night he made bravado talk of not returning to bed after the early morning drop off but cracking on to deal with the mountain of issues piled up on his desk. I for one was pleased that, when it came to it, he took the decision to catch up on some much needed rest instead, and went back to bed. Meanwhile, middle girl G, our living dynamo, is away on her Year 6 Leavers Acitivity Weekend, climbing ropes and abseiling, crawling over obstacle courses, canoeing and hiking. Oh for the energy of the youth: I have woken with an aching back and as much energy as a deflated balloon. Just enough, it seems, to move fingers over a keyboard, at last.

The garden through the window is dappled in gentle sunlight, reflecting on the Happy Birthday banner which hangs forlornly from the summer house, the sellotape losing it's battle with the wasp-chewed wood. Three balloons, equally deflated, hang in a now desultory fashion from the Public Footpath post opposite our house. I must remove them forthwith as there is nothing more depressing than deflated balloons or a vase of dead flowers. Beyond this, there is not too much evidence of the party which took place here for little L yesterday afternoon. Nine friends came to celebrate the imminent arrival of her 9th birthday (12th July), an event far less daunting than in recent years when G and E have also shared the party (G because her birthday is on 11th August when we and everyone else is away, and E because you can't have a garden party in January, which is when her birthday falls) and we have had upwards of 30 children screaming around the place. It was a strange feeling not to feel completely stressed as you attempt to meet and greet, organise party games, get food out on time, provide endless drinks, mop tears, find plasters, light the candles on the cake and sing happy birthday before parents come to take children away, and make sure everyone leaves with the right towel and swimsuit (the party relies heavily on good weather and the water slide) and party bag. No, this year was calm and controlled. We did all the usual races in two teams - running, sack, egg and spoon, skipping - as well as pass-the-parcel, painting plain china mugs to take away, apple bobbing and a treasure hunt. There was swing ball and netball and badminton and a good time was had by all. Certainly as far as L was concerned who, as we waved the last people away, two hours after the party officially ended, she burst into uncontrollable sobs at the idea that her party was over. She had been planning it and looking forward to it for weeks. It is part of the summer ritual. I picked up her skinny little frame, wiped the tears from her hazel eyes and hugged her tight, trying not to think that in a year she probably won't seem like this little girl anymore as Time marches her inexorably out of this blissful stage of childhood into a new era of self-consciousnes and dissolving innocence. Catch it while you can.

It has been a hard few weeks and the passage of Time has left its mark in many ways. The day after I last wrote here it was indeed my own birthday. The day was passed at college (we managed some Prosecco out of plastic cups under a tree at lunchtime) but come the evening we went out for a lovely meal with friends at a favourite hotel in the Peak District, The Cavendish at Baslow. A few years ago we went there for the first time on my birthday and now it has become a bit of a tradition. The drive over is 30 minutes through beautiful countryside and on a warm evening you can sit outside and contemplate a bucolic vista of trees and hills while sipping a glass of champagne. The food is excellent - more refined and skilled than the ubiquitous yet competent pub food so prevalent these days. We are often the only ones in the restaurant, arriving later than most other guests, but we make our own party with animated chat and raucous laughter with the great friends we have made since our move up here eight years ago. It is always a special and memorable night.

Shortly before we left for the restaurant, I had taken a call from my parents. We were in a rush to leave so the conversation was short and a little chaotic but somewhere in there I thought something was perhaps not quite right. I couldn't put my finger on it beyond the fact that my mother didn't seem to be hearing what I was saying however many times I repeated it. It was if she was in her own little world, kind of going through the motions. It was two days later, on the Saturday afternoon that my father phoned, just minutes before we had guests arriving for the weekend. It was the call I had long dreaded, the one where you are told that something is wrong with one of your parents. He was clearly choked and in shock as he told me that my mother had had a stroke. She had not been feeling 'right' for about a week (we had been with them on return from half term holidays, just a week before, and it seemed that all was well then; but she had deteriorated slowly through the week and her behaviour, as witnessed at an event she attended with my mother-in-law the day after my birthday, was a little bizarre. Time suddenly had no meaning to her, she was walking incredibly slowly, she seemed distracted and disconnected to the world going on around her. This is so not my mother, always sharp as a pin and fretting and worrying over the next job or commitment, firmly rooted in the minutiae of her daily environment. By Friday even my father had noticed that 'Mary was not herself' and, spurred on by the observations of my mother-in-law and their trusted cleaner, he took her to hospital. She had had a small stroke of the kind that depletes the brain of oxygen over a period of days rather than one that wipes you out in one fell swoop. Damage has clearly been done - she has lost much strength in her legs (I had to help her out of the bath) and she cannot write like she used to. She has lost interest in reading (she was an avid bedtime reader) and she feels exhausted much of the time. The drive and motivation are gone for the time being. It seems she has had another small stroke at a previous date on the other side of her brain - a fact which, looking back, makes sense of some small changes I had noted in her (oh, the frustration of living so far away). Her cholesterol is through the roof (stress induced) and is now being controlled. She, the woman who told everyone else how to look after themselves but would never apply (or heed) the same advice to herself, has had a wake-up call. It could have been far, far worse and I am at least glad that now she is being looked after too. I had always muttered that, despite being the youngest of the remaining parents, due to her inability to relax and sleep and her endless worrying about things, that she may well be the next one to go. Literally worrying herself to death. It has been a hard lesson for her to accept.

So I went down and spent a weekend with them, my brother having been down the weekend before, and helped and supported as much as I could. Leaving again to head back north was one of the hardest things I have had to do. My father, at 83, has been doing a marvellous job of looking after her but I could see the strain and worry was getting to him. How I wish I could be closer to spend precious time with them and help relieve some of the burden.

The next two days were filled with a desperate cramming for an exam I had on the Wednesday, my concentration and energy fuelled solely by adrenaline. The day following the exam I was fit for nothing. I tried to do some desultory jobs around the house, a domestic wasteland abandoned in the heat of other pressing matters. I have been living with builders since the beginning of April, a situation I am deeply weary of. The whole place is a filthy mess, almost no room untouched by plaster dust, filth and unfinished jobs. Our possessions are piled up in every bit of free space so the whole place looks like a dump. I live with bad language and Radio 1 at volumes that make my head spin. I have to plan my movements around the movements of the builders, unreliable at the best of times. Their van continually blocks my drive and I am forced to leave my car in the lane while my study (a teetering pile of unlooked-at paper) remains a hideous monument to my lack of time to get on top of things. I tried to treat myelf to a bit of Wimbledon - the highlight of my summer - but again, circumstances conspired continually against me. But you know what, dear Reader? I will stop there for now, before this post becomes wearisomely long, and I will pick up the threads another day.

The Gift Bag

2011-06-07T12:28:00.013Z

I have been musing gently on the subject of The Gift Bag. When I was a child (to coin a phrase), such luxuries did not exist. Crepe paper, yes. Tissue paper, yes. Cheap wrapping paper from WHSmith, yes. But not gift bags. No, these are an invention of the late 20th century, nay, even the 21st century. In fact, does anyone out there know when the Gift Bag became de rigeur?

As some of you may know, I have three daughters. That means lots of parties. Either their own, or those of their many friends. And girls seem to go on having parties longer than boys. And girls love girlie stuff and making things look pretty, and so do their mothers. I imagine many a boy would have long ago ditched any notion of pitching up at a mate's party with a poncy present in a bag. But girls, well, they just love it. The more expensive the better, of course. And preferably with shredded tissue and/or shiny 'confetti' in the bottom of it too ('confetti', by the way, being the invention of the Devil, especially when it lurks unexpectedly inside a card which you rip open with gusto only to have thousands of tiny coloured sparkly things engrained into your carpet and stuck behind your radiator grills for ever more).

Now I, thanks to my three daughters, have an enormous supply of Gift Bags in my cupboard. They lie with the saved bubble wrap, the padded envelopes and the jealously hoarded cardboard (for those 'Please do not Bend' moments). Every summer, to date, they have shared a big summer party where swarms of children come and run around the garden causing chaos and havoc and a huge pile of Gift Bags. I feel I am almost more excited by the Gift Bag these days than the present inside. This, I also feel, is quite sad. But what joy - think how much money I have saved! They don't come cheap, after all, do they, these Gift Bags? They can sometimes add disproportionately to the cost of the present (a fact I find myself struggling with, and frequently find myself attempting mental equations along the lines of Outrageous Cost of Bag versus Time and Fiddle of Wrapping Paper and Ribbon). I usually come to the conclusion that I should bite the bullet and buy the bag and then end up elaborately wrapping the present anyway - and then popping it in the bag for ease of transportation and the added delight of the recipient (who will probably like the bag more than the contents anyway). At which point the whole process becomes predictably ridiculous, time-consuming and expensive. But at least you have the small pleasure of a beautifully presented gift which has the desired effect of making the recipient feel suitably special and loved. Well, that's the general idea, at least. Unless you're a boy, when you don't give a shit.

Hence, dear bored reader, my delight at the pile of 'free' Gift Bags which arrive to replenish my stocks every summer. It almost makes the horror of the party worthwhile.

2011-05-20T23:13:00.014Z

Mid May. What an exquisite time of year. Not long ago the lanes were lined with yellow daffodils and gaudy forsythia and then just as soon dotted with yellow dandelions. Now they are more subtly laced with blousy drifts of cow parsley, the precursor to all things good. The chestnut trees have been carrying their white candles with all their usual majesty and the hawthorns have washed the landscape with white. Laburnums are now the only splash of yellow on this natural canvas, the sweet-scented yellow gorse also having passed its prime. The pink blossoms have dropped, swept away in sharp May winds, while in the garden the yellow pom-poms of kerria are now absent and the sweet perfume of the yellow azaleas, their delicious perfume hanging heavily in still air, is fading fast. How quickly Mother Nature changes her clothes. It is like a game of grandmother's footsteps: turn away at your peril, or before you know it each fragment of the ever changing season will have crept up on you and, in the blink of an eye, it will have left as swiftly as it arrived, leaving you yearning for another year.

April

2011-04-29T22:52:00.030Z

What have I been doing these past few weeks? Well.....

....I have been entertaining friends in the hills of the High Peak and the flatlands of the French Landes;

I have been plunging through aquamarine Atlantic waves;

and wandering the streets of Bordeaux;

I have been visiting family and celebrating Easter and N's birthday in Sussex;

I have been chugging down the Thames on a boat in the sunshine with a glass of red wine in my hand, good food in my stomach, and sunshine and bunting all around;

I have been walking through Cornish gorse and granite, picking wild garlic, feeling sand between my toes and the warmth of friendship in my soul;

I have watched the Royal Wedding;

I have been packing and unpacking; cleaning and cooking; gardening and studying.

I have been slowly recovering after months of lingering illness; I have laughed, I have cried, I have comforted and cajoled.

But most of all, I have had special times in an April filled with sunshine.

Hope yours was good too.

Primroses

2011-04-12T09:09:00.026Z

As the swathes of snowdrops around my garden were at their height, I was on the search for primroses. All too soon the pretty white blanket would be pulled back and with that a new, warmer earth would be revealed and needing something in sunnier hues to enliven it and remind us that Spring was here: a much needed lift after all the damp grey weather of recent months.

My attachment to Primula vulgaris (also known as Primula auculis), our wild native primrose, comes from my youthful wanderings through the Sussex country lanes with my mother and paternal grandmother. How she used to love to pick them! But oh how quickly they faded even when wrapped in damp tissue and plunged quickly into a little vase of water once home. No, I think they are best left outside, decorating the shady banks beneath woodland trees.

In these harsher northern climes and landscapes of the High Peak where open windswept fields predominate over woodland, it is hard to spot primroses in any number in the wild. I did see some on a walk in Edale at the weekend - but they were in an enclosed piece of private copse nestling amongst the trees. Still, I am lucky enough to have banks in my own 'dingly dell' at home which badly need some life between the fading of the snowdrops and the rising of the bluebells. True, there are daffodils (and I am planting more each year), but there is a particularly bare spot where we cut down a conifer and I decided it was the perfect place for some primroses.

I spotted some on a dash through the garden centre sometime in early March. Sadly there were only two pots left and I grabbed them both and planted them enthusiastically on the spot intended. I added some cyclamen too but they didn't survive for some reason, so I badly needed more primroses. I went back and back to the garden centre but still no more came in - just the rather garish mass produced ones which have never really appealed to me as they just seem so, well, false. Too bright, too cheery, no modesty or humility. I left my name and number but the call never came.

Then last week I found myself in the shop at Chatsworth and spotted some seed packets (Suffolk Herbs) of my favourite litte primroses. I bought a couple and I shall attempt to grow them myself. I shall let you know how it goes.

Meanwhile, I shall just share with you a passage which I found this evening while thumbing through my copy of 'The beauties of a Cottage Garden' by that High Priestess of gardening, Gertrude Jekyll. It describes her very own primrose garden:-

The Primrose garden is in a place by itself - a clearing half shaded by Oak, Chestnut, and Hazel. I always think of the Hazel as a kind nurse to Primroses; in the copses they generally grow together, and the finest Primrose plants are often nestled close in to the base of the nut-stool. Three paths run through the Primrose garden, mere narrow tracks between the beds, converging at both ends, something like the lines of longitude on a globe, the ground widening in the middle where there are two good-sized Oaks, and coming to a blunt point at each end, the only other planting near it being two other long-shaped strips of Lily of the Valley.

Every year, before replanting, the Primrose ground is dug over and well manured. All day for two days I sit on a low stool dividing the plants; a certain degree of facility and expertness has come of long practice. The 'rubber' for frequent knife-sharpening is in a pail of water by my side; the lusciously fragrant heap of refuse leaf and flower-stem and old stocky root rises in front of me, changing its shape from a heap to a ridge, as when it comes to a certain height and bulk I back and back away from it. A boy feeds me with armfuls of newly-dug-up plants, two men are digging-in the cooling cow-dung at the farther end, and another carries away the divided plants tray by tray, and carefully replants them. The still air, with only the very gentlest south-westerly breath in it, brings up the mighty boom of the great ship guns from the old seaport, thirty miles away, and the pheasants answer to the sound as they do to thunder. The early summer air is of a perfect temperature, the soft coo of the wood-dove comes down from the near wood, the nightingale sings almost overhead, but - either human happiness may never be quite complete, or else one is not philosophic enough to contemn life's lesser evils, for - oh, the midges!

I may not have a nightingale, and I do not have hazels, but I have wood-doves and a pair of pheasants who seem to have decided this is home. I watch them every morning when I come down to the kitchen, nodding their way across the lawn and trying to pinch the bird food in the feeder cups in the borders. Occasionally there will be a kerfuffle and a squawk and an elaborate flapping of wings when I disturb them in the dell. I have Lily of the Valley and some more waiting to be planted. And yes, I have midges. In abundance. Human happiness may indeed never be quite complete, but with a sunny bank full of primroses and the spring air full of promise and birdsong, I think I'm getting pretty darn close.

---------------------

Footnote:-

Miss Jekyll, I was pleased to note, also wrote this about sowing Primrose seeds in March (but up here, April will be fine):-

The seed is sown in boxes in cold frames, and pricked out again into boxes when large enough to handle. The seedlings are planted out in June, when they seem to go on without any check whatever, and are just right for blooming next spring.

So I shall now sow them with renewed confidence!

Fool's Friday

2011-04-01T17:04:00.043Z

Bleak day. Bleak mood. The first day of April, but where did Spring go? All is grey and chill without, and reasonably similar within. Rest assured, not as bad as a week or two back, but sunlight is certainly lacking in mind and soul.

I should have used this grim day to get to work in my study: I could have been clearing it out (the teetering piles are clogging all thought at the moment) without any worry that I should be outside enjoying the elements. I could have been adding some more paragraphs to my book (a task I should be completing daily but at which I am failing dismally). I could have been revising for my gardening course (more exams loom after the Easter holidays). I could even have put a wash in. Instead, I have driven three girls to school and gone to the gym where I had a positive enough experience last week to wish to repeat it.

Before you get the wrong idea, I have not been to the gym for months and months. I have lost track of how many it has been, but it must be getting on for nearly a year - and if it's not a year, then the times I have been in the last twelve months must be countable on one hand - or hoof. Thus last week, having had to drive eldest in to school after a doctor's appointment, I decided I would Bite The Bullet. Now, if you went to your local leisure centre and asked at the kiosk for 'One adult to swim, please' and they piped up 'Thank you, that'll be £200 please', I trust you would tell them where to get off. But, effectively, my swim last Friday must have cost me about that. Mad, isn't it? Yet I know that if I cancel the membership I'll regret it and will then only have the local leisure centre pool to resort to for exercise. Which I would never do because the last time I was ever there I saw a man blow his nose into his hands and then swish them around in the water. I still feel queasy thinking about it, despite the fact that I know far worse things have no doubt gone into that water - not least the levels of chlorine. But it's the whole package isn't it? The wet, muddy changing room floor with the ubiquitous grubby plaster. The wretched metal lockers. The whole echoey unpleasantness of it all. All of this being the reason I cling to my gym membership so, at the very least, my swim can be half enjoyable and I get to go in a jacuzzi and steam room as well. And have a nice cappuccino and a nice slice of brown toast and honey and a nice large glass of freshly squeezed orange juice (no bits) served by a nice lady.

So that is how I spent the first couple of hours of my morning, though less enjoyably than last week because I was looking out on a cold grey car park rather than a bright warm sunny one as I did last week while sipping my coffee and catching up with my emails. And also the stump man was there - the one who leaves his leg propped up by the side of the pool, complete with blue sandal - a little unnerving the first time you see it. He is a wonderful man, of course, and fantastic that he keeps up his swimming clearly on a more regular basis than me but, I am reluctant and ashamed to admit, I am Not Good With Stumps. Despite my youthful desire to enter into medicine, I had the presence of mind to understand that there are many aspects of the profession that I probably wouldn't cope with: deep slice cuts, jagged bones poking out through flesh, scalps being torn back prior to brain surgery and stumps being just a few of them. I fear age has not lessened these aversions, something of which I am not proud. However, I am not scared of mice.

Before the gym interlude, I had been to the Co-Op and bought myself a whole pile of housey type magazines (we're embarking on much needed work on the house and I need inspiration), together with The Economist (so as to gain a better grasp of all that is going on in the Middle East), and a copy of the Macclesfield Express because it had an article in it about the retiring Head of Foundation at the girls' school - and in which I gleaned that he is 58, his wife is an historian, he likes travelling and gets the odd photograph published in National Geographic. However, this does not excuse him, in my view, for winning the raffle at the school musical last night and not having the good grace to turn it down so another member of the audience could benefit. Call me old-fashioned.

From the gym I wandered into town (sporting my bright pink raincoat which I found in the boot of the car in an attempt to lift my spirits) because I thought there was a lunchtime concert at the Church which the school was involved in and which I enjoyed very much the last time I went. But there wasn't. So, to make the most of the extra hour I had just paid for parking, I popped into Fat Face for a browse. I managed to find 8 things to take into the changing room. All hopeless. Please remind me that I am now a middle-aged woman and that pretty Little House on the Prairie style floral print tops and dresses Do Not Suit Me Anymore. If they ever really did. Whatever, they certainly don't now and I could have saved myself half an hour. From there to The Works to check out the gardening books. Picked up three, including one on growing fruit and one on growing vegetables. I don't really need them as I have all my gardening course notes and a hundred books at home already, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. I also picked up another one for 59p which was full of quotations around gardening which I shall pepper about the place in subsequent posts. Bet you can't wait.

Thence back to the cold grey car park and over the equally bleak (but beautiful) Cat and Fiddle (lots of moorland, lots of sheep, lots of out-of-place speed cameras) to Buxton's industrial estate. I lead a glamourous life, I can tell you. I found my way to Swift Welding to pick up our Volvo wheel. N hit a pothole the other day on his way to Manchester which not only burst the tyre but cracked the wheel too (he swore he was only going about 30mph...). Enquiries at garages had us staring at a £500 bill for a new wheel. But my old friends Selecta Tyres had mentioned a local welding operation so I had gone to check it out the other day. While stumbling around the industrial estate, rather incongruously set amongst the hills and dales outside Buxton, I discovered a huge depot for Norbert Dentressengle, a French haulage operation which I associate with our times in France rather than the grit and limestone of deepest Derbyshire.

Swift Welding, on the other hand, was certainly devoid of any Gallic glamour. Its yard was like a scene out of Steptoe and Son and the 'office' was a ramshackle old caravan pitched at an unnerving angle as if one were on a boat furnished with a counter top and two manky chairs two manky dogs in residence on them (one with a dodgy white eye which gave me the creeps). The place stank and the stench was still trapped in my nostrils half an hour later. Incongruously, in amongst all this, was a very nice lady whose style and manner rather belied her circumstances. Let's just say that if you saw her in the street you would never imagine that this was where she spent her days. We had a nice little chat and she said that fixing the wheel would be no problem - they do hundreds of them - so I hauled it out of the back of the car and left it with her, remembering only at the last minute to ask how much it would cost. £30 she said. A little better than £500 don't you think? So, tip of the day: if you crack your wheel on a pothole, find your local welder. Good as new.

From here I resisted the temptation to go via Waitrose to pick up some food for the weekend and instead headed back to Chapel to Morrisons where I knew I would contain my spending. I got a brisket of beef and some root vegetables, in case you were wondering. Then I went to the petrol station where Unleaded has reached new heights at 132p per litre. My final stop was the dry cleaners to pick up N's shirts and chat to the lady who works there whose husband dropped dead in January. She's only just come back to work, poor thing.

Once home I unpacked the car - wheel included - and put the kettle on. The girls would be home soon for a quick tea and turnaround before heading back to school for the final night of the Year 6 musical. Last year, you may remember, it was E's time to shine as Belle in Beauty and the Beast. This year G is bouncing around in the chorus of Guys and Dolls. Such a different show to Beauty and the Beast and, I must admit, I wasn't sure how good it was going to be. But I am suitably humbled because it is fabulous. This year's Year 6 is a particularly large yeargroup with 75 children - about 20 more than last year. So they fill the stage with colour and energy - the set's fantastic, the main parts all perform brilliantly, having really grasped the American accent and the swagger of the crap shooters. It is hard to believe they are only 10 and 11 years old. As last year, I have again been one of the Props Ladies and we've been having a blast. It's great fun to be part of all the backstage shinnanigans and you really get to know the children and parents that you previously hadn't come across.

So with that, dear friends, I must leave you. The Show Must Go On, after all, bringing some much needed light, colour and music into an otherwise grey April Fool's Day.

State of Mind

2011-03-15T13:36:00.005Z

Tuesday 8th March 2011

Just over a week ago, on a gloomy Monday, I felt as fragile as a glass bauble hanging too close to the end of a Christmas tree branch. My heart felt swollen and about to explode and every aspect of my life was overwhelming me. My spirit and will to go on was as low as in the worst days of my depression and the only constructive thing I could do was sob uncontrollably. Today could not be more different. It is a stunning day outside: the sun is out, the garden filled with light and shadow and the air is alive with birdsong. Three chickens, two pheasants and a squirrel are going about their business on the lawn. The atmosphere is one of hope and joy. I have just come off the phone to my parents and learnt the glad news that my father does not apparently have the myeloma that a recent blood test and prolonged lower back problems had possibly suggested and there was a whole new lightness in his voice after weeks of introspection. He is 83 this year. I realise all over again the comfort that my parents bring. We do not see eachother often, they being down the southern end of the country - a fact that bothers me greatly now they are in their later years and given we have the only grandchildren; but when I learned that my mother is going to a meeting about doing the Easter flowers in church this afternoon and that she has been out weeding the rockery, and when my father signed off saying they were about to have their cup of coffee, I was infused with a sense of wellbeing. They were continuing their lives, busying themselves with inconsequential domestic and community tasks. Is this not really what it is all about?

Last Monday, a grey damp lifeless day, that sense of wellbeing was utterly absent. It is the surest sign of depression when you feel like that - not fleetingly, no, but when the feeling simply will not go away, whatever the weather is doing, whatever you are doing and when you can find nothing that will bring even small crumbs of comfort. When you are well, you can find comfort in a cup of tea and a biscuit, a chat with a friend, in cooking supper or sometimes, gasp, in doing the laundry. It is about feeling on top of things, feeling there is a point and a purpose to it all; feeling you have a future and there are things in it to look forward to.

State of mind is a curious thing. Is it a subtle set of chemical balances in the human brain or is it the state of your soul? The truth has to be a mixture of the two as, surely, they are inextricably linked. I know that when I was so severely depressed over so many years, it was due to exhaustion and defeat: the seratonin (the 'feel good' chemical) in my brain had reached such low levels that my own body was no longer able to reproduce it. The way I always describe this is to use the petrol tank analogy from a motor bike: you have the main tank and a reserve tank. If the main tank is dry, you switch to reserve. But if you let that run dry then the machine stops functioning. Your body cannot then reproduce seratonin by itself - and that is when you have to have it artificially replenished with drugs. There should be no shame in this. It is a simple fact.

But I will not go on with this today as we will begin to wade through dark waters and it is too beautiful a day to do that, and my mood is too good for me to want to destroy it. I will go out into my garden and join with the forces of nature. I will listen to the birdsong and see the new shoots of life emerging. I will smell the soil and the air and revel in the continuing cycle of life in all its emerging beauty.

Chapel, Venice of the High Peak

2011-03-03T10:59:00.010Z

It was on this day, March 3rd, last year that I wrote this piece but never published it. I thought I would give it an airing now, but please do not judge me by it. I love where I live and I would never seek to bad-mouth it. These are just observations of ennui in two places of extraordinary difference yet managing to engender similar feelings.

Chapel, Venice of the High Peak

Chapel-en-le-frith and Venice are the same: spend too much time in either of them and you go a bit peculiar. But that's probably where the comparisons should end. While Chapel may lay claim to being the 'Capital of the Peak' and 'Home of Ferodo brake linings' (the smell of burning rubber suffuses the town), I think it fair to say that Venice has bigger things to shout about (food, architecture, art, music and culture to mention just a few). Having said that, I did notice The Chapel Playhouse for the first time today after six years of driving past it and not. It's a reasonably imposing stone building (though clearly not that imposing if it's taken me over half a decade to spot it), but it hardly matches the Baroque splendour of Il Teatro La Fenice, home of Italian opera in Venice. But beggars cannot be choosers.

So, why on earth was I thinking of Venice as I was going about my mundane business in Chapel this morning? It's not an obvious connection, I admit. All I can say is that, having spent a morning at the dentist (worse, hygienist), the chemist, the dry-cleaners, the one-horse vets, the lightless Londis, the humourless newsagents (paying paper bill), the kids exchange shop, Morrisons (and the horrors of the passport photo booth), the flower shop and the handy hardware shop (duck tape, bird seed, light bulbs, baskets and ribbon) I was pretty well ready to shoot myself. Ok, I exaggerate. But I had certainly been plunged into mental 'weird world'. I find it a little hard to explain this as, over the seven years since I moved up from the south, Chapel has slowly but surely become part of the fabric of my home - yet the same sort of feeling swept across me that I often got in Venice in the days when we lived just down the Brenta Canal and I was a frequent visitor to this most stunning and extraordinary of cities. Chapel is certainly extraordinary in terms of the number of pubs that line its High Street and has secured its place in history thanks to Oliver Cromwell paying a visit here in the 17th century - but I think most would agree that 'stunning' it is not. Good grief, I hear you ask, where is she going with this? I'm not sure I know myself, but maybe it's something about extremes...

Venice is at one extreme of civilisation - and Chapel at the other. The former dazzles with it's uniqueness and beauty, a place whose former prosperity was rooted in both the arts and its trading prowess; the latter hits you with its utter ordinariness and plainess, and the solidity of its grey granite and working roots. A quick trip into Venice made you heave heavy sighs of delight at every corner; a quick trip into Chapel makes you think 'it's not a bad place really'. But remain just a little too long and the impressions morph strangely into sighs of a different kind. In Venice I always found that the thrill soon turned to melancholy; in Chapel, the gentle pleasure of an unremarkable small local town, albeit surrounded by great natural beauty, turns swiftly to alarming feelings of mild depression. Especially on a dull, damp, murky day. I loved Venice in winter, without the crowds of tourists clogging the bridges and alleyways and swarming all over St Mark's Square as abundantly and oppressively as the pigeons. But before long the milky mists, the damp smells of the grey-green canal water seeped through your nostrils and began to leave a gloomy, suffocating impression on your brain. What is this splendid city? Who lives here? Is it real or is it a stage set? At a certain point you just want to run away, back to a familiar world of real streets and real shops and real people living real lives. Get back to a place like Chapel. Or maybe not. For stay too long in Chapel and I develop an equally urgent need to escape the solemn granite and functional shops - to return swiftly to my green and oh-so-pleasant haven: my village, my house, my garden, my view, my breathing space, my sanctuary. A place that seems worlds apart from the small grey town just down the lane. And both are a world away from Venice.

Masterchef - A Masterclass in Dumbing Down

2011-03-02T22:30:00.008Z

Masterchef has effortlessly reached new heights of sentimentality and melodrama. Just a short series ago, all we had to endure was a mildly watery eye in the waiting room after an arduous task was completed, or a slightly dizzy phonecall to a partner to say they'd made it through (followed by the ubiquitous hysterical screaming down the line while the contestant stood looking dazed and confused or grinning like a mad thing while choking back tears).

In the new, re-vamped, over-worked series, our patience is being stretched to new limits. In the first programme we were subjected to a wholel new range of friends and relatives hugging, laughing, crying, high-fiving, back-slapping and generally expressing unrepressed, nay wanton, encouragement to their warrior cook. If there was any dignity left in the programme it is safe to say that it has been chucked out with the vegetable peelings and the old set.

Such was my weary exhaustion at the end of the viewing hour, I did not even bother to go back to it till tonight. Things have not improved. I missed the first 15 minutes getting children to bed, but it quickly became clear I had actually missed nothing at all (though I'm glad I did not miss the spectacle of Gregg Wallace in a grey tweed flat cap and green barbour trying to do 'country' up in the Scottish Highlands). The levels of camaraderie seem to have no limits now. At every excuse, they are all embracing - men as bad as women - and punching the air and jumping up and down and looking aghast and surprised and flaring eyes and nostrils while clasping hands to mouth. And let's not forget the mantras of disappointment (I'm just not ready to go home'), or of success ('I just don't want this to stop) together with the ever-more irritating breathy voice-over of India Fisher announcing that the contestants 'are about to face their toughest test yet'. You don't say. As if all this wasn't disturbing enough, John and Gregg have clearly been instructed to ham up their naturally hammy characters even more. We are now watching caricatures of caricatures with ever more face-pulling, frowning, head-shaking and raised eyebrows. And even they are now embracing in a way never seen before. Two have become inextricably one. Certainly when it comes to leering at one contestant's perfect skin and perfect cleavage. No wonder they put her through. Oh, and just in case one should be in any doubt as to the deity which can be achieved by becoming a Masterchef Champion, a 3-line whip was drawn up of previous winners, all now looking suitably smug and enjoying their new status of judge rather than contender.

By the end of it all I was left with a bad case of indigestion and a strong desire to scream, intelligence duly insulted. Masterchef has become the latest victim to the misery that is reality TV. Shame on the BBC.

Signs of Spring

2011-02-14T21:11:00.011Z

It was Thursday 20th January and I had taken myself outside despite the chill air to feed the birds and have a potter, idly pruning a few things here and there, when I noticed the first open snowdrop. It was hiding under a low-growing azalea, sweetly, singly with its delicate white head bowed shyly towards Morther Earth. What a fragile symbol of hope and rebirth it was.

And now three more weeks have passed and those little white ladies are dancing all over the garden. They choose the most unlikely places sometimes, squeezing their way up through cracks in slabs of granite - or they find their natural showplace carpeting the brown leafy ground at the base of the stately beeches in a fresh new pattern of green and white.

The daffodils, too, are starting to poke their noses out of the ground. If the weather continues in this warmer vein, they will be amongst us before too long. A friend came to coffee yesterday clutching a couple of simple, tightly closed bunches in elastic bands. I put them in a glass vase immediately - no need to arrange - and before she'd left they'd already started to reveal sunny glimpses of their inner beauty.

What could be better on a dank grey day? The yellow daffodil, the true harbinger of Spring.

Friday, 11th February 2011

Please click the following link for:-

Gardens to visit around the UK at snowdrop time

Notes from my Garden

2011-02-04T14:52:00.011Z

Propagating Blackcurrants

Having to drop everything and get out when the sun shines is a must round these parts. I'm so glad that I got out in the garden when I did yesterday. Thick grey clouds carpeted the sky by late afternoon and by the time I got home with the girls the wind was hurling itself around the place like there was no tomorrow. Luckily tomorrow did come, so here I am this morning looking out at an inky grey, dimly lit, soggy garden after a night of howling gales and lashing rain. I would not be rushing to get out there today. Instead I have put the kettle on and I am going to finish what I started writing yesterday....

So, I began with a further inspection of my blackcurrant patch. I had pruned the three large bushes a week or two back after more than 8 years of neglect and not a secateur going near them. No wonder they seemed to be getting less and less productive. I had often glanced at them and thought that I should probably do something, but I wasn't quite sure what. Anyway, while I had been revising soft fruit - and the pruning of blackcurrants in particular - I had gone out into the garden and performed my own little practical. I took out all the old dark wood, and all the branches that were lying too close to the ground. You are only meant to remove about a third of old wood, but since they had not been pruned for years, I decided I could be more radical and gave the poor bushes a good old clean out. The idea is that you let in lots of light and air to help prevent disease and, when the bushes are in leaf and flower and ultimately fruiting, there is plenty of light to help the berries ripen up. You are also meant to remove any dead, damaged or diseased wood (the 3 Ds) - but mercifully mine didn't seem to have any of this (Big Bud Mite is the blackcurrant's greatest curse - you have to destroy the bush if it gets this badly). I think we are very lucky here with the purity of the air - the garden seems incredibly healthy. And I know for a fact that there are lichens which grow on the drystone walls which line the top half of our lane and the boundaries of our garden which choose to flourish only where the air is particularly pure. Proof, you see. Anyway, by the time I'd finished the bushes were looking splendid. So much less congested than they were. Rather more loved.

Having done a further blackcurrant pruning exercise at college last week, as I described yesterday, I took another look at my previous handiwork. I decided that I could prune some of the stumps I had left a little further back and I decided that the middle bush of the three had probably had its time on this earth. Another thing that I had learnt at college was that blackcurrant bushes have a productive life of about 10-12 years, after which they are in decline and have probably had it by the grand old age of 14. Well, I have been here nearly 8 years now (how the time flies) and I imagine they had been planted a while before I appeared - which means they are surely in their twilight years. So yesterday I yanked out the middle bush - it barely resisted which more than suggests it had given up on life - and decided that this then was where I was going to place my propagated blackcurrants.

'How do you propagate blackcurrants?' you may, or may not, be asking. Well, having foolishly got rid of the prunings from my own plants, I grabbed some from the pruning we did at college last week. They will probably be more vigourous anyway, having come from younger bushes. I had left them soaking in a bucket of water as it had been a week now since they were cut. You take a branch, preferably pencil-widthed, which has lots of healthy looking buds on it. You then cut it to a length of about 8 inches (20cm). You cut a clean cut just below the bottom bud of the cutting and a slant cut just above the top bud. You then insert it into your prepared soil to a depth of about 6 inches with 2 inches above ground. The buds which are below the surface produce shoots which come up through the ground to form what is called a 'stooled' bush. You can either plant these cuttings in a 'nursery' line, about 8 inches apart and move them into a pot or their final position in a few months time when, hopefully, they will have happily rooted - or you can insert them directly into the ground where you want the mature bush to be. I chose to do the latter, having created space by digging out the old bush. Much less palava.

I cleared away all the grass and moss which had grown all around the blackcurrants and the raspberries. This was such an easy task. I just pulled it all back, part by hand, part just with the spade tip and it all came away incredibly easily with no real effort revealing soil which was friable, moist and a beautiful dark brown - almost black in fact. I have never bothered with this small task in the past - I've just let everything grow up through the rough grass - raspberries and gooseberries included - but I decided to do it a little more 'textbook' and see if it made any difference. Grass, of course, competes for water and nutrients - but on the other hand its immense system of little fibrous roots helps improve soil structure and, I would argue, to a certain extent acts as a mulch and actually helps retain moisture. Maybe I am being heretical. Anyway, just for a change, I did what I'd been told and we shall see what we shall see.

So I took my cuttings and pushed them down into the soil in two little groups - with the intention of creating two more bushes in the space where the great big old one had been. Even with a spade I was struggling to create insertion slots which were 6 inches deep (I think the roots of the other bushes as well as the raspberries crawling around the place were causing the problem) but I inserted them as deeply as was possible. I then went and got my wheelbarrow and filled it half full with some beautiful leaf mould which has developed over a few years in a pile near the copper beech (we used to dump our cut grass here and I added leaves every autumn to mitigate the sliminess of the pile. I now have this beautiful dark, sweet smelling, crumbly leaf mould mulch). I took it back up to my little blackcurrant babies and scattered it liberally all around and between them. Then, of course, I gave them some water and that was it, job done. I shall eagerly monitor their progress, hoping it will be positive - but nothing is ever sure in gardening, is it?

In pictures:-

1. cut a pencil-width branch with lots of new buds into 20cm lengths.

3. Insertion of the cuttings in a cluster form

2. Getting leaf mould mulch

Beautiful stuff...

4. Mulching with the leaf mould (don't be confused by the longer darker canes in this picture - they are new raspberries coming up and I can't be bothered to move them!)

5. Job done!

Notes from My Garden

2011-02-03T23:06:00.007Z

Blackcurrants

It was midday and I had been inside all morning doing catch-up chores - fascinating things like washing up pots and pans, unloading the dishwasher, replying to texts, making beds, tidying rooms and doing the laundry. Too tedious for words really, though essential to the smooth running of a busy household, more's the pity. The sun was out and the garden was calling me. I had blackcurrants to plant, after all.

I told you, didn't I, that I'd embarked on a gardening course in September? It's a City & Guilds course in Practical Gardening which has numerous modules running over a two year period. So every Wednesday I get in my car and drive an hour and a half down to Reaseheath College in Cheshire and leave my world of dirty socks and pants behind. I'm studying with a great bunch of like-minded people and I always come home tired but inspired.

Last week we had to prune established blackcurrant bushes and then go and prepare a trench in which we were to plant loads of new young blackcurrants. Digging over grass and weed-covered alluvial soil, with a certain amount of clay content, after the winter rains was no easy task. It made me appreciate all the more the beautiful loamy soil I am blessed with in my own garden - so very fertile and so much easier to work. Still, it was a job well done and we finished with a fine row of bushes which we then pruned right down to encourage them to produce vigourous new growth which will produce fruits on the new wood in just over a year's time.

We have been studying fruit growing this term among other things - top fruit (apples, pears, plums etc) and soft fruit. It has been marvellous to learn things in the classroom that perhaps I didn't know before and, armed with that new knowledge, stride confidently up to the top of my garden where my own little collection of fruit grows.

Now, as you will rightly observe, I am hardly in the best neck of the woods for prolific fruit production. The High Peak, with its relentless winds and rain, does not boast bucolic fields of orchards and bountiful fruit farms urging you to 'pick your own' as I grew up with in the gentler climes of Sussex, located as it is in the south-east corner of our blessed isle. Compared to here, the south-east seems positively Mediterranean to me these days. But, as I have learned, many cultivars of blackcurrants and raspberries have been developed up in the Scottish highlands and lowlands (known, respectively as the Bens and the Glens) and, therefore, have become suitably acclimatised to these sturdier northern temperatures.

And so it is, as I head up to my inherited fruit garden (in fact just a casual patch hemmed in by drystone wall, rhododendron and greenhouse), that I am lucky to be able to play with blackcurrants, raspberries and gooseberries. (Truth to tell, I moved the gooseberries - they were originally located in a large but ramshackle border near the house and, while trying to develop it, I tired of snagging my cardi on their vicious little thorns.)

But you know, I have to go and get the children now and buy a pruning saw while I am at it (no connection intended), so I shall finish this story tomorrow.

Quick Update

2011-01-22T18:41:00.008Z

Just to let you know, I've posted a new entry over at Fridge Food - a little pasta number (taglierini with a lemon, cream and watercress sauce) which you can knock up in minutes, so perfect for a quick and easy supper.

Hope you are having a good weekend.

I am still up to my eyes in Botrytis and Powdery Mildew, revising for my first Practical Gardening exam next week. I am too old for this. (Maybe that's why I'm going mouldy).

G took her 11+ exam on Friday so we're all being a bit nerdy at the moment.

N got back this morning from a day's shooting in Anglesey yesterday - I'm told there's a bird hanging around outside. Hope it's the feathered kind. He's hunched over his computer too as off to the States tomorrow morning for a few days. We continue to pass as ships in the night.

So, time now for a drink, I think, and my slow cooked Brisket of Beef (if it turns out ok I'll post that one up too).

Cheers.

Ode to Skiing

2011-01-12T21:08:00.030Z

I wasn’t looking forward to coming home. Who would be after a week pounding the sunny slopes of the Three Valleys in the French Alps with bountiful good food, good drink, good company and laughs a-plenty? This is my one real holiday of the year. The one where I don’t have to do anything other than get up and ski. Someone else cooks. Someone else looks after the children. Someone else cleans and does the laundry. All my other holidays involve me continuing my domestic and maternal duties in some shape or form but this one, and only this one, lets me off the hook almost completely. True, I have to get up quite early and then do a lot of physical exercise. But who cares when it’s what you love? Skiing is my absolute passion in the sporting world. I don’t care if it’s sunny or a white-out, on-piste or off-piste, flat slopes or moguls, alone or in company. I love the fact that it can be challenging and solitary, or easy and companionable. It changes with the day, the mood, the weather, the snow, the mountains. Skiing, for me, is a dance with life.

I first strapped on wooden planks at the age of 9 in Aviemore, Scotland. I don’t remember it in huge detail, just in snapshots: the curling rink, the sheet ice on the White Lady run (a good testing ground for budding ski racers if ever there was one), the wooden T-bar lifts which I only mastered at the end of the few days we were there. I remember laughing with my brother, and the feeling of exhilaration when I finally stayed up on those wretched lifts (mercifully now defunct apart from in the odd eccentric skiing outpost of Austria perhaps).

My next foray into the skiing world was when I was 11: an altogether less enjoyable experience. It was in Val d’Isere in the French Alps in January. Memories of white-outs, grey skies, snow and more snow; sickness every morning as I looked out onto a bleak expanse, knowing I had to go out into it and mix with a group of strangers who were four times my age and didn’t speak my language with a bugger of an instructor who lost patience with my falling off the lifts (button lifts this time, but still I struggled). For anyone who has come a cropper up a steep rocky incline on a drag lift in a white-out when you have barely mastered the snow-plough, this will surely resonate. These were meant to be holidays, time off school, time to have fun – not be tortured and abused by geography, weather, man and leather (boots were not as they are today – it took hours just to lace them up and work out how to get them into the complicated configurations of metal which they called bindings). No, this was no happy union of man and mountain, I can tell you.

As Fate would have it, I broke my leg a year or two later. Not skiing, just skateboarding. Well, not even skateboarding but rather attempting to skateboard. It was 1977 and I was hanging out with some lads who had embraced the new craze from America with fervour. I was determined I was going to be the coolest skateboarding chick on the block. It didn’t last long. First run down our steep drive and I decide I didn’t fancy hurtling over the pavement into the road. I put my trainer-clad foot down on the tarmac. It sticks like glue while the one on the board hurtles on. I twist and fall; it snaps and dislocates at the ankle. Painful. Very. And no anaesthetic for hours because I’d just eaten breakfast. The discomfort and inconvenience of the next three months in a full leg plaster was not something I was rushing to repeat, so I had my perfect excuse not to ski. I left it to my brother and father for the next couple of years.

But time moves on and time heals. I got to 16 and another family trip loomed. It was 1979 and the ski world had moved on too. Great new shorter skis made of lighter, more flexible synthetics – new clip in bindings, new clip boots. Things were looking up. I took my Dynastar Pulsars, I took a friend. We went to Argentiѐre, the skiing mecca at the top of the Chamonix valley – where the British first ‘invented’ skiing. It was April and the sun shone. We had a groovy young instructor who carried a packet of biscuits in the kangaroo pouch on the front of his jacket. He taught us stem-christies till they were ingrained forever. The stem-christie – the tool of survival on the ski slope. It teaches you all you need to know about pole placement, forward stance, ‘bending ze knees’ and standing up around your turn – in short, the techniques which stand you in good stead for the rest of your skiing life. From there I never looked back.

It dawned on me soon enough that if I took a week’s skiing holiday a year I would be old before I would be good. What I needed was a season in the mountains. First I managed to organise my year out as a teaching assistant in a French Lycée at the foot of the Pyrenees. Not bad for starters: skied as many weekends of the winter as possible sporting a lemon yellow and white all-in-one suit with a navy blue sleeveless puffer jacket (all courtesy of C&A) over the top. Nice. I think I even had a perm at one point. Actually it was a Bananarama root perm gone wrong, but hey, the bottom line was I looked like a poodle on speed.

Moving swiftly on, I came back and completed my degree in 1986. Thatcher’s Britain. I felt there were enough Bright Young Things hurtling headlong into the financial strongholds of the world and that a little more creative thinking wouldn’t go amiss. Hurtling headlong down a ski piste instead certainly had some appeal. So I had a chat with the boss of a local schools tour operator and managed to wangle my way into a job in the Alps. Ah yes, The Rep. Apart from a couple of days a week wrestling with paperwork and French bus companies, I had all the time in the world to sit on chairlifts and admire the scenery. So much better a perspective, I felt, from up there than down in the jungle of the stock market floors. I would swing my skies, contemplate the majestic vistas, breathe the clean air and contemplate life – and my day’s skiing.

And so a fantastic six months in the Three Valleys ensued. I skied my socks off and made some friends for life. I strutted around in a navy blue Nevica two-piece with a fluorescent pink stripe across the back, and clutched the same pair of Rossignol 4s slalom skis as the ESF instructors. And the longer the better. Good times indeed.

Left to my own devices I’d have stayed on in the Alps. I’d have worked my way up to regional manager or some such thing. I’d have married a Frenchman like I’d always intended – a skier, of course. I may even have considered training to be an instructor. Then again, I probably wouldn’t have done – in the same way that I toyed with the idea of race training for Britain (but I was too old by then, of course), as I accompanied my father on some of the World Cup circuits, him writing about it, me watching it. Though I loved the idea of playing with the big boys, I realised that actually, by skiing every day of my life, as a career, I would take away all the pleasure it gave me. It would become a job, a chore, and that was the last thing I wanted it to be.

For me the pleasure of skiing is in its freedoms. It is the one area of my life where I can truly mix elemental living with excitement and physical pleasure. Gardening does that – in a more gentle way of course - in my daily life, but skiing is the ultimate escape into the majesty of the natural world. The birds of prey riding the thermals around the snowy peaks, the glimpse of chamois clinging to rocks, the tracks of unknown creatures across otherwise virgin wastes, the squeak of fresh snow, the smoothness of the ski gliding through it, the puffs of white crystals catching the sun’s rays, the elemental loneliness of skiing in a white-out, the knowledge that friendly mountains can just as quickly become foes, the feeling that you are truly alive. You are dancing with life.

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HAPPY CHRISTMAS!

2010-12-23T11:22:00.014Z

Herewith a little ditty I penned for Christmas (John Betjemen need not worry yet! - though he may turn in his grave) which some of you may empathise with. Just a bit of fun at a hectic time of year:-

The Merry Go Christmas Round

The halls are decked,
The tree is up,
It’s time to make the Christmas cup:
Pour in the cider,
Pour in the wine,
We’re going to have a fine old time!

Blue lights flashing
everywhere,
Anymore and I’ll go spare:
Blow up Santas,
Golden sleighs,
Let’s have a party, weh hey hey!

Big fat turkeys,
Ribs of beef,
Christmas fayre is such a treat.
Where’s the stuffing?
Where’s the pud?
My, oh my, it tastes so good!

In-laws coming,
Out-laws too,
Let’s cook up a turkey stew.
All those presents,
All that booze,
Time to go and have a snooze.

So that was Christmas
Don’t you think?
Too much time at the kitchen sink.
Roll on New Year
Roll on fast
Bloomin’ heck that’s another year passed!

Bah Humbug!

And my Christmas gift to you all (wait for it...) .... is a new Fridge Food post (hurrah!) which may give you an option if you're looking for an easy, but hearty, meal over the Christmas and New Year period when you're feeling fed up with cooking anything even vaguely demanding. And if you're fed up with bloody turkey and ham. Click HERE if you are interested.

Ok, that's all folks for now! Have a very MERRY CHRISTMAS if I don't get here again (folks are driving up the motorway to land on me as I type - AND I'M NOT READY!!) and I've a drinks party to prepare for tonight as well. So...

....start popping the corks!
x

Ps: my blogging and Purplecoo friend, Tattie Weasle, has written a far better ditty over at hers. Click here to read it for some more Christmas merriment!

PPS: my father sent me an email with a YouTube link called 'The Digital Nativity'. It had me crying with laughter. Click here if you fancy a giggle.

Reflections on a Funeral

2010-12-11T09:48:00.006Z

A week has passed since the funeral of our farmer and I am looking back and reflecting. One of the hardest things about any funeral service, or service of remembrance, is listening to the eulogy. You often learn so much more about the person in that one speech than you might in a lifetime of acquaintance. Even with good friends or relatives, the people who have lived closest with them, on a daily basis, are really the only ones who know the person well. I always end up feeling slightly cheated, that I wish I had spent more time with them, that I wish I had asked them more questions, had more conversations. But suddenly it is too late. Time has been called and you've missed your chance.

We learnt some details of the farmer's life and character that we hadn't known before: the fact that his farm and farmhouse was the very same in which he was born and brought up; the fact that his own father died at 64 (just one year younger than himself) and how devastated he was and how, at a young age, he took on the work of the farm full time. We heard the stories of him as a lad, more interested in the sheep and the dairy herd than in his schoolwork; how he would hide in the meadows and do almost anything to avoid being locked in a classroom. We heard tales of mischief and tales of his dedication to his own family and close friends: how he would take his own son around the daily duties of the farm just like his father before him; how he loved nothing better than cooking and eating in his own farmhouse kitchen with those he loved most around him; how he relished his Sunday roasts and freshly shot game (if you were a vegetarian at the wake, you would have gone hungry); how he loved his horses and traps, his rare breed sheep and all the traditional, old-fashioned methods of farming. He could be a rascal and a bit of a bugger too, but always with his pipe in his mouth and a twinkle in his eye. It was no surprise, then, when it came to lowering his coffin into the frozen ground, it wouldn't fit. They tried every which angle, but to no avail. As his widow said, it was as if he was shouting 'I'm not bloody going in there!' and in the end she was reduced to shouting out 'Has anyone got a crowbar?' before suggesting stamping on it herself. Humour to the end. What a fitting tribute.

In sadness, joy can usually be found, if you look hard enough. As I have driven up and down our lane this snowy week, passing their farmhouse at the end of it down by the village pub, I have often thought of the family left behind. Yet though a huge part of it is missing in person, the spirit is still there. The son is taking on the farming duties around his job as an electrician - as he has been doing anyway throughout his father's illness. He surrounds himself with his mates who come and help him when they can - a bunch of lively young lads who stumbled out of the pub, slipping and sliding in the snow, on the way to the church laughing and saying 'You'd never believe we're going to a f****** funeral'. Death is not something the young usually fear even if it brushes close by them. Even if you have secret worries about it (as I have done from the age of 13 - an unhealthy preoccupation with the passage of time), you can reassure yourself that you've probably got a few years left yet and can shove those darker thoughts to the back of your mind. But the truth is, none of us know when our number will be up. For that reason alone, it is so important to try and find joy every day - in the simple tasks of life, in the world that surrounds us, in our family, and in our friendships. For me that is perhaps the truest definition of 'living life to the full'. Every day we wake up and see the sun rise is a bonus, every day we see the sun set is a blessing. The rhythms of life will go on long after we are gone. While we are here, we should simply try and enjoy them. The farmer enjoyed his life and there is much we could all learn from his simple priorities: family, food, farming, fun. It was a kind of no-fuss life as far as I can see, and a wonderful tonic in a world that, in these modern times, too often spins too fast.

Thursday, 9th December 2010

Eternity

2010-12-01T12:41:00.006Z

I am sitting at my bedroom windowsill looking out over the fields and hills that I loved from the moment I first set eyes on them. The sense of eternity embraces the valley in a way that I find hard to put into words. Perhaps it is the fact that the rock and mineral that shapes the landscape has been here for millenia more than us, pre-dating an Ice Age which we can never imagine (although perhaps more easily today in the blanket of snow which covers us). This horseshoe valley was shaped later by glacial erosion and left behind the vista we see before us now.

A weak sun illuminates the scene from time to time, warming gently from on high. The fields in front of me are empty of sheep, the gate swings open and tractor tracks pattern the snow on the lane. My mind is wandering around the corridors of memory, searching for images of the farmer whose sheep filled the land in front of me. His was the old Land Rover which passed by on the day we first came to view the house, locked into the rhythms of rural life, of tending flock and pasture.

In an hour or two we will be at his funeral. He prematurely left this life in mid November on the day my late father-in-law was born. His presence in this valley has been slight since just before lambing time, his life ebbing away as new life was born. His family have farmed the land for generations, they are part of the historical framework of the village. Black and white photographs in the pub bear testament to the characters, once in abundance, who shared the burden of rural life in these hills and valleys. As each year passes they become fewer and fewer, their spirits absorbed into rock, moor, stream and meadow.

As I look across these frozen fields today I see only a man standing ruminatively with flat cap on his head, pipe in mouth and sheepdog by his side, watching over his flock. It was a real image, one day when I opened the curtains; now it is just in my mind's eye.

But the time has come to step out into the softly falling snowflakes, into a landscape suffused with peace, to commit this well-loved man to God and earth. To eternity.

The twists and turns of life and tyres

2010-11-25T10:56:00.003Z

Life has taken some extraordinary twists and turns in the last week or so and I'm still in the middle of some difficult stuff. I've found myself without time or energy to write despite fragments of ideas coming to me at strange times and places when I am without pen, paper or computer.

So much has been happening but so much that I can't write about for various reasons. I'm finding it hard to put words to emotions anyway - something which normally comes easily enough to me. There is much around me at the moment that is in limbo, and limbo is a state which is always de-energising.

I have found this brief moment to write while waiting at Selecta Tyres to get my winter treads put back on. It hardly seems a moment ago that I was having them taken off, yet here we are suddenly only a few weeks away from Christmas (quick panic attack). Mercifully, unlike the first time I had this done, I have snuck in before they have felt the need to drape tinsel over the tyres in the waiting room or plug in their flashing 'Merry Christmas' sign above the drinks dispenser. Instead I am just freezing cold and am dying to go to the loo. I came in at 3.30pm, they said I'd be done by 4pm and it is now nearly 5pm. All the other things I planned to do I've had to abandon and I've just texted E to let her know I'll be late collecting her from choir practice at school. I'm watching MotoGP on a loop - lots of fast bikes and nasty crashes (obviously haven't got the right tyres on) - and trying to decide whether this is preferable to the promotional video about the benefits of wheel alignment which I had the pleasure of seeing about 50 times while I sat on this same sofa last year.

Two years ago everyone looked at me slightly quizically when I said I had winter tyres on my car. I was clearly a bit of an oddball. But having lived in northern Europe where winter tyres are obligatory in many places, and now ensconced in a suitably harsh climate in the UK, it was a logical step. Now, of course, after last winter's countrywide freeze, the whole nation has suddenly decided that it's not such a silly idea after all and I'm now pissed off that I can't seem to get tyres for N's car for love nor money. In retail speak, There Has Been a Rush on winter tyres and now I'm irritated that I've been beaten at my own game. Should have kept my mouth shut. Particularly annoying as I am due to go to York this weekend and snow is forecast and we need the bigger capacity Volvo. Still, there's a spray can of 'Liquid Chains' on the counter. £28.99. That will do. And if it doesn't work we will be enacting one of the alarming skiddy shut-your-eyes horror crashes that I have just been witnessing on the reassuringly large Sony flatscreen. At least I am mentally prepared.

Watch this space.

Things I have done today

2010-11-12T17:52:00.006Z

Friday 12th November 2010

Things I have done today:

1. Woken up to Classic FM – Saint Saens ‘Dance Macabre’ – scared the cat off the bed.
2. Woken girls who fell back to sleep after their alarm went off.
3. Made cup of tea.
4. Fed cat.
5. Chivvied children.
6. Taken them to school bus.
7. Missed bus.
8. Taken them to next stop.
9. Gossiped with neighbour.
10. Made another cup of tea.
11. Emptied dryer.
12. Paired a laundry basket full of almost identical (but not quite) white socks.
13. Done an hour’s ironing while watching ‘Lorraine’. Apart from the fact it was with Fiona, not Lorraine. Not good. Remind me not to do that again. Felt slightly queasy by end.
14. Made toast and marmite.
15. Texted friend whose father gravely ill. Felt very sad.
16. Emptied dishwasher.
17. Loaded dishwasher.
18. Unloaded dryer and washing machine and put stuff in dryer.
19. Put dark wash in (two muddy coats – one is the gardener’s which was lying around the potting shed and I felt generous; the other is mine from when I went arse-over-tit in the mud outside ballet on Monday).
20. Took rotting stuff out to compost heap.
21. Noticed bird feeder on ground (blown off in gales) and brought inside to wash having learnt on Autumnwatch last night that greenfinches currently dying hand over fist due to dirty bird feeders. Mine even had bird poo inside it, so clearly high time to do some Bird Housework.
22. Missed a phone call from Brother-in-Law while dallying at compost heap.
23. Phoned Brother-in-Law back. Informed me that Woman’s Hour about to do a feature on the exhibition I went to see with him at The Lowry while he was visiting earlier in the week. Discussed Christmas presents and plans for New Year.
24. Listened to the feature on Woman’s Hour and then got sucked into another one on Housework. Very apt.
25. Called School Bus company to see if friend’s child’s mobile phone been found (doing this as favour to said friend’s mother who’s currently looking after children for two weeks while friend in Mexico. All right for some.) Phone found. Phew.
26. Phoned worried grandmother to give her the happy news. Offered to pick it up for her on Monday. Offer accepted.
27. Stripped double bed and put clean sheets on (including pillowcase protectors which have been meaning to change for months).
28. Made girls’ beds (they should have done this – considered leaving them but have babysitter coming tonight and did not want to appear slovenly or uncaring, especially in light of radio feature on Housework).
29. Had shower.
30. Sorted out a pink wash from the girls’ dirty clothes baskets.
31. Taken out previous wash and hung up by Aga to dry.
32. Set pink wash off.
33. Made cup of frothy cappuccino and eaten two Abernethy biscuits (reward).
34. Texted N to wish him a good lunch (posh one at L’Escargot in London to celebrate (??) 25 years of working for the same company)
35. Swept up leaves (as gales conveniently blown them into relatively neat piles and currently neither howling gale nor pissing with rain – grab moment when you can round these parts).
36. Potted up two cyclamen and put by front door. Rearranged pots, cleared leaves and took pumpkins inside (never did get round to carving them).
37. Pruned, in slightly desultory fashion, cotoneaster, a rose and wisteria. Will return to do more thorough job when have more time.
38. Cleared up debris and made mental list of everything there is to do in garden (including major tree surgery).
39. Put fat balls in feeder and noted continued presence of mouse in potting shed eating bulbs and bird food.
40. Looked over piles of crap in stable and felt faint.
41. Peered into plastic shopping bags and sorted Christmas presents into a box.
42. Took box down to cellar.
43. Looked over piles of crap in cellar and felt faint.
44. Fiddled around down there for a bit trying to impose a little order on the chaos. Tip of iceberg.
45. Made lunch (wrap with houmous, rocket and cherry tomatoes).
46. Sent text to friend about travel arrangements for tonight.
47. Turned on computer.
48. Checked emails.
49. Sent email.
50. Got phone call from friend about tonight’s travel arrangements. Sorted.
51. Called to arrange massage and spa session in Buxton spa before gift voucher (given to me for my birthday in June) expires.
52. Made mental list of everything I still had to do before picking up girls from bus.
53. Felt faint.
54. Collected girls from bus.
55. Listened to girls’ tales from school.
56. Made lasagne from the weekend’s Bolognese sauce.
57. Helped with homework.
58. Got ready to go out.
59. Drunk too much.
60. Suffered legless husband, freshly pissed from Big London Lunch.
61. Gone to bed too late.

Things I have not done today.

1. Too numerous to mention.

Coming Home

2010-11-10T19:36:00.008Z

Coming back from holiday is rarely joyous: mountains of mail blocking your front door, a reminder of all you left behind; dust and cobwebs; sagging house plants; the dead flowers you forgot to take out of the the vase in the rush to leave. In our case the house was also perishing cold as our heating is leading a life of its own at the moment and clearly decided to take a holiday too.

Yet, despite all this, for once I was neither downcast nor despondent. I put on the kettle to make a cup of tea and let my eyes fall on the garden, so changed since we left just over a week ago. The late afternoon light was golden, warming the burnished autumn colours still further.The skeletons of the trees were starting to reveal themselves a little more clearly as they slowly shed their yellow, brown and red coats onto the still green lawn below. The sky above was clear October blue. I stepped outside and smelt the subtle shift in season too: a new sharpness to the air laden with woody undertones and memories of Autumns past. How strange it is that at this seasonal winding down towards winter and hibernation, Autumn, which holds the new scholastic year, is a time of new beginnings for so many.

As we had flown back into Manchester, for once through cloudless skies, I chanced to look out of the window just as we were passing over Combs Moss - the magnificent horsehoe of high moorland which cradles the glacial valley in which our village lies. I had never seen it so staggeringly clearly before, standing proud and unmistakeable in the Peak District landscape: the iconic shape of Castlenaze and its Iron Age fort, the deep V-shaped cuts in the mountainside down which wild streams flow, the bumps and grooves of its majestic silhouette which I have come to know so well. It is this view that I look out on every day from my windows, a view which never ceases to inspire in all its seasonal moods.

I returned to the boiling kettle and made a cup of tea. We were home.

Castlenaze

September rainbow

Dolphin Delights

2010-11-04T08:57:00.005Z

Just as an aside, I wanted to alert anyone who's interested to the programme I watched with the girls (when they were meant to be doing their homework!) on dolphins last night as part of BBC 2's Natural World series. Not only was the photography stunning and set in the extraordinarily remote and beautiful Shark Bay in Australia, but the insight into these remarkable animals is unmissable.

I always knew how intelligent they are but this programme revealed whole new levels of knowledge on the social framework of dolphin communities - with one of the central characters being a female who they have been watching for 23 years I think it was (one of the girls spoke just at the wrong moment!). This soulful matriarch, with her family of at least 8 I believe, could teach lessons to many a human mother, that is for sure.

The other point of interest for me was that, by strange coincidence, I have just finished reading Bill Bryson's book on Australia, Down Under, in which he makes a visit to Shark Bay to view some unique and fascinating things called Stromatolites which are the oldest known form of life on the planet. Having read the passages he wrote on this with great interest it was good to see the physical reality and beauty of Shark Bay on screen.

If you have enough broadband width to watch BBC iPlayer (sadly I don't), then make yourself a cup of tea or coffee, or pour yourself a glass of wine and click on the link below (or the one in the opening paragraph). And in the process of writing this post, I also came across a great site which had an article on Shark Bay, the dolphin project and the ecological significance of Shark Bay. It's worth reading. Here are the links again:

BBC 2 Natural World

Shark Bay

A Moment of Reflection

2010-10-12T14:31:00.013Z

I have just eaten my lunch outside on the front terrace in soft September sun. Of course, it's actually October, but today feels like its softer sibling. The sun is hot yet burnless, warming my back as I write; the air is slightly milky and completely still. Save for the buzz of flies, the crisp rasp of a dry leaf as the cat shifts her position in the sun, the distant barking of a dog, the caw of crows, the lowing of cattle and, way across the valley, the intermittent drone of a chainsaw and the calls of playing children, all is calm. A plume of grey smoke, too far away to scent the air, drifts gently upwards from the green valley floor to the blue sky above where not a cloud breaks its perfect cian expanse.

Sitting at my round white metal table, this vista before me, I wish I'd come out earlier. Chores, as ever have kept me inside. I had paperwork to sort out, calls to make, bills to pay. I had not even noticed that the day had turned so good. Only when my stomach rumbled, and a baked potato and coleslaw called, did I discover what I had been missing.

In a few days' time I am on the move again. There are bags to be packed and things to sort out. It is the half term holiday and we are using one of the two weeks we are given in this long Autumn term to go and find the sea again, the last splash of latest summer before the clocks turn and all becomes dark and cold once more.

Although just a few posts back I was writing of our summer in France, that all seems a lifetime away. This first half of term has hit me like a juggernaut. In nearly seven weeks I do not seem to have got to grips with everything that has been thrown at me. I have felt nothing less than bamboozled by life, yet I am not quite sure why. I have struggled with the events happening around me to my friends and family (death, divorce and debt among them), and I have struggled with keeping on top of everything that has been going on with the girls at the busy start to this new school year. My diary has been a constant zone of head-on collisions, all of which have to be worried about and sorted. There has been an endless flow of events scholastic, business and social, all of which need managing, organizing, preparing for.

I am trying to get used to my eldest daughter being in senior school and helping her, in turn, get used to the new independence expected of her. I am trying to remember the new forms, teachers and activities that they are all involved in. Pantomimes, musicals, ballet exams, Brownie camps, trips, tests, matches, races and competitions all vie for attention amongst the daily grind of homework and housework. N is a nebulous presence in the background of our days. If we were divorced I somteimes wonder if it would make any difference (yes, I quickly answer, as it would mean less food to prepare, less nagging from him about mess around the house, fewer work dinners to go to, fewer shirts to launder...where are the papers, I'll sign, I'll sign!). But no, I do believe that we would miss that presence, however nebulous, truly I do. It just needs to be less crabby, less stressed. That is no way to live. He needs a proper holiday. I don't want him to bring a single paper of work, yet I fear he will and the complete break he so badly needs, and never gets, will remain just out of reach.

Tomorrow I am away to my gardening course and I must learn my latin names for an identification test. I have two bay trees to re-pot, tomatoes to tend, plum jam to make. I should be writing up notes for the gardening club I run at the village school (I passed by this morning just to check on our pumpkins and carrots, cauliflowers and parsley). Today is a day for being outside. The lawn has had its final cut of the year and is looking soft and alluring. The trees are turning, all in their own time: some are dusty grey-green, others have golden highlights on their leafy crowns. A few lupins still colour the garden, white and pale pink anemones too; red berries of cotoneaster, the hips and the haws. Dark pink cosmos and sedum, white arenaria, bright yellow hypericum and antirrhinum, and the pale mauve of scabious all add their notes to the harmony of the autumn borders. All nature is calming down, save the fruiting trees, in preparation for the death or dormancy of the winter months. The sap is returning to the earth from whence its energy came, before rising again next Spring in the continual cycle of regeneration.

But now the hour of sublimity I have alloted myself is sadly past and I should return to the tasks before me. As I tread gingerly back over the chicken shit and the headless mouse by the back door, I am grateful for this moment of reflection. I know how lucky I really am.

New Fridge Food Post

2010-09-29T23:01:00.004Z

It's been a long time coming, but have finally got round to posting something new over at Fridge Food - a thrown together supper of tomato, chorizo and bacon pasta. So easy, remarkably good. Go see.

x

Coming Home

2010-09-23T10:52:00.013Z

Our journey back north from the south coast of England was uneventful compared to the same from the south to the north of France. The most notable element was stopping at Warwick Services on the M40 for a quick food shop at the small Waitrose branch they have there – surely the most civilised aspect of the place – and we were even seduced into buying a ‘cool bag’ for a quid (when you spent £15 or more). Ah yes, we were back in England all right.

This was further confirmed as we approached Buxton which was living up to its status as the wettest place in England as high winds drove rain hard and horizontal at the car. Welcome home! Spirits were not high at this point but mercifully the rain eased as we drove into the village and N noted how it was the first time for as long as he can remember unpacking the car from a holiday a) in daylight and b) without it pissing with rain. Reasons to be cheerful, then.

And so we put the kettle on (it was still only 10.45am as we had disembarked from the ferry at the ungodly hour of 7am) and tried to accustom ourselves again to these northern climes and atmospheres and this old stone house.

The sun was strong enough and the wind weak enough to be able to enjoy lunch outside on the front terrace, next to the lane. As we chomped we admired the beautiful view around us and admitted that it wasn’t a bad place to live really. In fact, I don’t believe we have ever eaten out on the front terrace before and it was therefore wildly peverse that not long after we’d sat down we were suddenly crowded out and being made to feel self-conscious by a load of horse riders who congregated right in front of us; this followed immediately by three stinking old Land Rovers who then pulled tight up against our low wall, belching fumes to let the riders move on before deciding that they’d made a wrong turn. So they then sat there even longer deliberating noisily before, one by one, they used our drive to turn around in. All this in the 15 minutes in which we were trying to sit outside and enjoy a peaceful lunch. Quite unbelievable! But we had to laugh...

The following few days, before the girls were back at school, we were blessed with fine weather. The September sun bathed the fields in golden light while the farmers busied themselves with haymaking. We watched as tractors plied up and down, first cutting the meadows, then coming back to spread the cuttings with whisk-like attachments. Once dried, they were back to heap the hay into long lines so all the fields became deliciously stripey, before finally returning to bail it up into neat rectangles.

The air was sweet and dusty and full of the sounds of rural work. I almost felt moved to go out proferrring jugs of cool homemade lemonade to the hot field hands but decided this was a little too Tess of the D’Urbervilles for my own good. And they might get the wrong idea with all those haystacks about (...who am I trying to kid?! an old hag like me…).

We even managed to get the bikes out and cycle down the lane and through the village to a favourite spot by the stream which meanders through the valley. We took a rug and picnic, paddled and played pooh sticks while cattle and an ageing mare (no, silly, not me!) drifted lazily around us. It was all very Cider with Rosie – and the sort of gentle summer holiday pursuit that I always dream of doing with the children but rarely achieve because it’s pissing with rain and howling a gale.

The girls were back at school before we knew it. We’re still trying to get back into the routines of term time and I am still trying to come to terms with the fact that E has moved on to senior school. She will grow up so fast now.

While I have been away a baby has been born, a friend’s father has been dying, someone else has been made redundant and much more in-between. Life continues to change for everyone and I have felt a strong desire to change something too. So I have ditched yoga (for now) in favour of a gardening course. I know it is the right decision – it has made me very happy already. A long time ago at university, reading Voltaire’s ‘Candide’ from his ‘Contes Philosophiques’, I took on board his advice on the last page of the tale: ‘Il faut cultiver notre jardin.’ While, of course, this was philosophical in intent, the literal and practical implementation of it leads back to the philosophy: when out in my garden, digging, planting, nurturing, maintaining and creating, I am simply playing out the fundamentals of a contented life. There is hope and expectation, hard work and disappointment; but by being physically in touch with earth, air and water, and the cyclical energy of death and renewed life, my spirit is entirely at peace. I understand more and more, as each day passes, that this is the direction my life is taking, that this is where my experience of the world has led me, and that this is where fulfilment lies.

September 2010

Sunset over Rennes

2010-09-06T19:13:00.021Z

As we hurtled our way towards the northern French seabord, I glanced left just as the autoroute climbed higher ground and suddenly revealed a beautiful red orb eaten into on its lower circumference by the silhouetted skyline of Rennes. The Eagles were filling the car with a live version of 'Tequila Sunrise' (not literally, of course - would be a bit cramped) and though it was the end of the day, not the beginning, the conjunction of image, mood and music was sublime.

We had left the house far too late, as usual (just trying to finish off those last jobs and close things up for the next few months), and endured a nail-bitingly slow journey up the western edge of France as everyone returned home, like us, from their holidays, cars stuffed to the gunnels with suitcases, pushchairs, surfboards, bodyboards, spare loo rolls and nappies: long queues at the peage, smoke drifting listlessly out of open windows. 25 degrees, blue skies, a few puffy clouds - a perfect day for basking on a beach - but here we all were, heading home on hot tarmac.

We finally cleared Paris traffic at Niort and were able to really put our foot down - and put our foot down we really had to do. We had three and a half hours until the end of ferry check-in time and about 350 miles to travel, with two cities, Nantes and Rennes, still to get round. You can do the maths. Forget pleasing notions of 'the last supper in France' - it was a hastily purchased ham and cheese sandwich for the second time that day, crisps and some mini saucisson (surprisingly good).

Still, this was an improvement on last year when we congratulated ourselves on reaching St Malo just in time for supper before tipping onto the ferry - only to discover, replete with good food and wine, at a completely vehicle-free check-in, that we were in the wrong port. Divorce was on the cards when we burst an expensive tyre at 1 o'clock in the morning on a ridiculous piece of high pavement jutting unexpectedly out into the middle of the road as we drove round in circles trying to find the hotel that we'd hastily had to book in Caen before trying to get a place on the first ferry out the next morning. N and I were screaming at eachother, the children were crying, my bladder was about to burst and in the end I had to relieve it, sobbing and exhausted, by the side of the road while N changed the tyre (which necessitated unpacking and re-packing the entire contents of a hugely loaded boot to access the spare). A costly supper indeed, and the car still bears the scars of the impact with a now permanently bent wheel rim which judders irritatingly around 70mph.

Meanwhile, the year before that, we got the time wrong of the ferry and had to book hotels and change ferry bookings in the car on the way up - so you can see, our record is not good. Even this year N thought we were returning home on the Sunday not the Saturday - at least I'd double-checked that one. I'm learning.

The sunset stayed on our western flank all the way up to the approaches to Caen, bleeding rouge into the darkening sky, and the Eagles stayed with us too. Unfortunately (though not entirely unpredictably), as they sang out 'Down a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair' our own dark highway was suddenly lit up by a blue flashing light which kindly accompanied us to a side road with a helpful message in glowing red lights saying 'Suivez-Moi'. As we finally pulled up in some back lane off the autoroute I grabbed the small green bottle residing in the drinks holder on the dashboard hissing 'God, hide the beer bottle!' An open window, 'Bonsoir Monsieur', and the happy knowledge that we had been clocked doing 183kmph ensued. N was naturally accused of being either drunk or on drugs but the breathalizer mercifully showed 0 (I'd shared the beer with N and he'd drunk half a litre of water too).

Feeling the situation rather desperately required a context, I chipped in helpfully with 'Non, non, Monsieur, it's just that we're in a hurry because we have to catch the ferry at 10.30' (voice pitch rising slightly to suggest urgency).
'Ah, ok' replied one of the officers, adding with surprising accommodation: 'Then I shall be as quick as I can!'

There followed the inevitable filling in of forms and a request for 90 euros. We only had 100 and they had no change, so they got a beer on us. Annoying, but possibly fair in the circumstances. We were advised that just 5kmph more and the driver's licence would have been removed. Good to know.

So we were cut free from the restraints of a 'fair cop' at 10pm which left us half an hour to get to the ferry. By now the warm red glow in the sky had turned to cool silvery-gold, as a waning full moon had taken over the choreography of the skies and was dramatically backlighting a large cumulo-nimbus cloud directly ahead of us. N was still fretting and I kept having to repeat, soothingly, 'Don't worry, we're going to make it' and (slightly less soothingly), 'But for God's sake stick to the limit!'

It was notable that we saw not one other British car on the approaches to Caen and on the way to the port at Ouisterham, presumably because they'd all got there in marvellously good time and had enjoyed a splendid 'last supper' at a leisurely and digestable pace.

We finally drew up to the ferry check-in at 10.20pm on the dot. Seven hours and 20 minutes of somewhat stressful driving from the bottom left-hand corner of France on one of the busiest travelling days of the year - and we get there right to the minute! This was particularly pleasing for me, the navigator, as it was the EXACT time that check-in began and validated all my original calculations as to the rather 'juste' nature of the task ahead of us - and N's endless questions about how many kilometres we had still to go, so he could work out what average speed had to be achieved on any given section of the journey. But that's the trouble with us Bodens - every minute really does count.

The icing on the cake, however, was when we drove onto the ferry and were directed onto the ramp. We were just catching our breath and sorting out the chaos within the car when one of the crew started banging on our window rather tetchily and asked us to 'Hurry up!' We had done nothing but 'hurry up' for the last seven and a half hours, for God's sake, and here we were being told to again! It seemed they needed to get the ramp pulled up presto so that they could get the rest of the cars loaded underneath. So with that, swearing mightily, I had to scramble about clutching and dropping passports, handbag, overnight bags, cabin tickets, coats, rubbish and all, and get the hell out of Dodge so they could pull the wretched ramp up. Absolument Typique.

With cabin eventually located (5 of us in a 4-bunker - joy), we were quick to deposit our stuff and scuttle out again in search of a well-needed drink. In fact we felt we had perhaps earned that good supper after all and were pleased to find the secluded 'Comptoir des Plaisirs' area, away from the hordes hanging out noisily at the bar and the canteen, where we shared gin and tonics and a bottle of Loire red and enjoyed a surprisingly good one-course meal with a plate of cheese and coffee to follow. The girls explored the ship a bit and then settled down to a game of cards nearby (they were taught a new game rather charmingly called 'shit-head' by friends early in the holiday and had become complete card sharks playing it at every opportunity whether that be on the beach, in the car, in their beds - and every time I saw them at it I imagined the green baize table-top, the yellow pool of light and the shiny green visors like a scene out of The Cincinnati Kid or something).

In due course, tired but replete, we took a brief stroll out onto the deck before heading to our quarters. The moon was leaving its own silver wake on the inky water below and in the distance colourful fireworks were exploding silently into the night sky. The holidays were over; we were on our way home.

-----------

PS: have tried in vain to publish a really boring video with this post. For the moment you have been spared, but if I ever crack it I will come back and torture you with it!

Letter from Les Landes, Saturday 14th August

2010-08-26T21:38:00.021Z

Our lunch was rudely interrupted yesterday by a youngish man in camouflage-patterned combat trousers and T-shirt enquiring who owned the land next to us. We told him it belonged to the 'commune' (i.e the Mairie, or Mayor) and politely enquired why he was asking. He didn't seem inclined to tell us, so when I said that, actually, a part of the land was ours (true enough, though sadly only a metre-wide strip the other side of the stream) and that therefore we had reason to know, he informed us he was looking at buying some suitable 'parcelle' of land to make a botanical garden. The piece of land in question, full of natural springs, would, of course, be ideal and save a lot of watering...

Although, to the outsider, this may seem an admirable enough idea, his plan was to encourage tourists and schools visits which seems a little inappropriate in a narrow residential lane squeezed between two houses, thus ruining the privacy and tranquillity of both. When there is miles of forest in all directions, it seems a tad perverse to come and trample over our space - like the people who come and sit pretty much on your towel when there's acres of beach all around. The young gun in combats then further aided my sudden attack of indigestion by announcing that 'better this than a house'. I muttered that the ground had been declared 'inconstructible' - i.e un-buildable on - because of the aforementioned natural springs which have their source there. To this he countered, ominously, 'all ground can be made 'constructible' ' and that sure as eggs is eggs there would be a house on it one day. I was not amused.

This brings me neatly to a current large juicy bone of contention (not just here in France, but in my hilly English home too): it seems that wherever I find to rest my caravan that is beautiful, and which I love for its peace and natural wonders, there's always some bastard who wants to come along and destroy it. Back home, many other local residents and I are currently engaged in a battle against Barratt Homes who are in cohoots with the local authorities and want to build 550 unremarkable houses whose need has not been justified in a valley of remarkable beauty. There has been a face-saving consultation period, civil objections - and now we discover there is the stench of rotting fish within the local authority which potentially seems happy to take a quick back-hander at the expense of the local community (not least of which being that the local secondary school would have half its playing fields removed if the proposal were to go ahead). So much for democracy.

Out here in rural France, meanwhile, we are being assailed at every turn by cheap housing, supposedly for the local community, but in fact (apart from the high-density lotissements) mostly bought or constructed by second homers. (Please excuse my apparent hypocrisy as a holiday home owner, but we love this area - like the many who have found it before us - and would do anything to preserve its character and uniqueness. This is of course lost on those who have lived here all there lives and perhaps see any old building programme as progress.) The point of my objection is not in the building per se, but in the nature of the seemingly unchecked process where the Mayor seems omnipotent. Our Mayor has been in his position for 35 years and his father was Mayor before him. It seems that the local community has voted him in - but maybe it was the case of the devil known. He is not all bad and has done much to enhance community life - but he will allow no building on his side of town where he lives in a fine house with a fine private lake behind a fine dense hedge surrounded by 'la nature'. Our side of town is, of course, another matter and he is currently wreaking havoc in what seems, to the outsider, a slightly ambitious, not to say misguided, 'plan d'urbanisme' wherby forest and field is being given planning permission almost hourly, it seems, in the headlong rush to make a quick buck and for the unnaturally hasty 'aggrandissement' of a rural community. The raison d'etre for all this would appear to be more about the aggrandissement of Monsieur le Maire's ego rather than anything more altruistic. Here, as in my home town, there is a serious risk of throwing the baby out with the bath water. But hey, who am I to tell them that? I will, nevertheless, try...

And if the bloke in combat trousers manages to persuade the Mayor that his plan for the Mezos equivalent of Kew is actually rather chipper, then I shall have to consider opening up my house for tourists as a 'Classic Landaise Farmhouse', rather like the Ecomusee de Marqueze (watch this clip for a giggle!) - if you can't beat 'em, join 'em, eh?! I'm sure the Mayor would approve as he also has plans for a golf course nearby.

Meanwhile I'm just going to pop down the Amazon for a few choice piranhas to chuck in his lovely lake....

Letter from Les Landes, Friday 13th August

2010-08-16T23:05:00.012Z

And so I have moved my charabanc to France. The last time I was here the call of the cuckoos and the drill of the woodpeckers reverberated in the woods around us; now it is the soft coo of the woodpigeons or the harsh drone of hedgetrimmers and strimmers which accompany our daily rhythms.

The days pass easily enough in a mix of sunshine and clouds. When sun prevails we are on the beach, when clouds win the battle we find other amusements. There is always a wash to put in, a floor to sweep, a meal to prepare, a bed to change or a visit to be made. N has had work trickling through since we arrived nearly three weeks ago and as I sit on the beach writing this, he is at home taking a conference call. All this annoys me greatly as he is never truly allowed to rest, it seems. He deals with it by putting his head in the proverbial sand and saying that it is only 'normal'. I, meanwhile, yearn for the days pre fax and email and mobile and Blackberry - the days when you couldn't be contacted, you couldn't respond, so no-one expected it of you; when you could escape and just 'be' for a while. It doesn't seem to me too much to ask, but in this mad, arrogant, demanding world we now live in, it seems that I am wrong. It is me that is being unreasonable.

I therefore cherish the moments we have in the sea - where the elements rule and not the human ego. Forget that humility at your peril - the power of the ocean, the capriciousness of its currents can quickly show our physical frailty with little remorse.

Today the water is not too angry. The girls are out in a group of other children learning to use her power for their pleasure. I have watched them running along the beach, jumping and skipping, warming up before plunging into the foamy surf, pulling the boards they are learning to ride behind them. Philou - patient, kind, tanned and wiry - has them under his watchful eye.

They count the times they have managed to stand up and come running up the sand at the end of each hour they have been learning, announcing their scores to me proudly. And as I watch them in the waves I see how each girl tackles the task in accordance with her personality: the oldest watches, takes her time, goes out deeper and manages fewer but longer runs in; the middle one stays closer in and attacks each and every little wave with gusto and determination, always coming back with the highest score; the littlest has her chin stuck out, her sticky legs goose-pimpled, part-determined, part-lazy, but always stubbornly in control of what she does or doesn't want to do, which wave she does or doesn't want to take. I look on, fascinated, with the love of a mother.

These mornings on the beach are the best time to be there - the tide out and benign for surfing or bathing, the huge sweeps of wet sand reflecting the strengthening sun; the beach bar serving hot coffee to the early surfers or their patient partners, the soft dry sands newly swept and clean inviting you to place your towel. By mid afternoon the atmosphere will have changed completely from this sense of calm and well-being to full-on holiday hubbub.

But now the girls have ended their lesson and are running towards me in their shiny wetsuits like exciteable sealions. They will tell me their scores, I will help them struggle out of their clinging black prison and we will then all head back into the waves again for a lark about with a new sense of freedom as the water touches skin not rubber. We will then head home for lunch and to do a few chores before returning late afternoon to the beach, as the hubbub starts to subside, to share these elemental pleasures with their father too as is only right and good. He may take his board and fight it out with the waves too; we may play bat and ball, fly a kite, or just lie and read while the girls make castles and roads and endless imaginary scenes from driftwood and detritus. We will then retire sandily and saltily from the beach to find a favourite place to eat and watch the world go by. The world on holiday. A holiday world. My world for now.

Dunge Valley Gardens

2010-07-21T08:40:00.046Z

I went to Dunge Valley Gardens on a sunny afternoon towards the end of May. It's a treasure of a place hiding deep in the beautiful Goyt valley above the Cheshire village of Kettleshulme. I first discovered it soon after we moved here, now seven years ago. Whenever I arrive in a new place I have to go exploring - it's a way of connecting with my new environment and putting my small life into a wider, more meaningful context. But when I followed the small brown signs with the enticing sounding name, like Alice through Wonderland, I truly never expected to find something quite so surprising and alluring on the apparently bare green hillsides around me.

Since that first discovery, I have taken family, friends and French teenagers there and every visit has never failed to delight. I am filled with a sense of wellbeing every time I visit - but I have always chosen my days and timings carefully.

The best time to go is towards the end of a sunny day in May when the rhododendrons and azaleas, for which it is particularly renowned, are at their blooming best. By arriving a little later in the day you are more likely to have have the place relatively to yourself. Or you could sit and have a cup of tea on the terrace above the lawn and wait for the other visitors to drift away before you plunge yourself into the lushness.

It had been a few years since I'd last been, but having carved out some time from my own heavy gardening schedule, I grabbed my camera and set off as bright early summer sunshine played hide and seek behind white puffy clouds. The light was sharp, shiny and sublime, the sun hot and the air clean and fresh, yet warm and still.

I drove up through the Goyt Valley hills before turning off down a long descending driveway. I recalled the first time I had done this thinking 'Where on earth is this going? What can possibly be down here of any interest?' Then suddenly you find yourself in a sunlit gravel car park with an attractive long low stone house in the background and a makeshift entrance booth surrounded by pots of rhododendrons and azaleas and other shrubs for sale.

You are greeted by the owner - an unusual character who sometimes gives you the impression he'd rather you weren't troubling him, but I have learned to accept his nature over the years and always attempt some friendly conversation. When you see what he and his wife have created since 1984, you can forgive them any idiosyncracies - even the slightly bossy signs which greet you from time to time telling you to stay on the paths, or not to touch, or some such slightly terse instruction (which are no doubt born out of the tedious business of dealing daily with the general public - which can test the patience of saints, after all).

I always start my visit with a drift around the lawns which stretch below the flagged terrace surrounding the house. In May the grass is acid green and all the generous borders are bursting with fresh new life. A lady in a floppy straw hat and her slightly effete son sit talking on a bench in southern tones while I admire the rich dark blue forget-me-knots, the emerging broad leafed hostas, the sky blue meconopsis.

I then take a short wander along the narrow little paths which weave around and through the wide borders, ducking under specimen trees and brushing past shrubs and roses, with the chink of tea cups and light conversation in the background.

This done, I set off down the pale grey gravelled paths which lead off behind the lawns to the wilder world beyond. They take you down towards the stream where giant gunnera grow, over small wooden troll bridges (thoughtfully covered in chicken wire to avoid slipping on damp days) before climbing up the hill through bright green blades of grass and clumps of green headed hellebores bowing gracefully to the rays of sunshine which illuminate their beauty.

From here I descend the path back towards the lawns, crossing another bridge which takes you across the small boggy pond full of marsh marigolds and irises and other water plants, before another path loops me into the lower end of this narrow hidden valley in which the gardens have been formed.

You duck under, around, past and between a sumptuous array of rhododendrons with their endlessly diverse flowers and foliage.

For dedicated plants people many of these are helpfully labelled. A tiny specimen caught my eye - a 'wren' azalea - and then just after this came a 'giant' rhododendron with leaves over a foot long - so outsized that they twist your perspective and render the other plants out of proportion as very tall people do 'normal' sized people. As I continued up this path on the left hand side of the valley I was struck, as I always am, by the stark juxtaposition of bare sheep-studded hillside with lush valley. It is such an unlikely combination, and yet feels entirely natural. The trees are tall and the canopy high, so you do not feel claustrophobic - there is always a glimpse, a vista, of the world beyond which helps to create the incredibly strong sense of place as you wander through this tiny Himalayan kingdom in the middle of the Peak District.

There are little wooden seats at almost every turn, inviting a moment of contemplation (a game I once had with the girls when first I took them here was to make sure they sat on every one of them). Some are hidden amongst the exotic shrubbery where you can sit and be enveloped in the sweet earthy scents and the watery tunes of the two or three little streams which tinkle down through the valley to the accompaniment of a wealth of beautiful birdsong. Others are perched at dramatic viewpoints such as at the waterfall or high up at the head of the valley where you can look down on all before you. It was up here, I was told, that two young owls often perched, but I didn't manage to see them. Instead just the green hills behind me and the magical world below me, a moment of peace in which to sit, feel, think, listen and appreciate.

The meandering paths shift from gravel to stone flags, to bare earth and roots and back again. I always find myself madly follwoing every twist and turn, muttering to myself like the White Rabbit at the sheer pleasure of it all.

It is indeed a children's paradise but, as you might expect, there are typical requests from the owners that say children should be seen but not heard. Harsh, perhaps, but an instruction I nonetheless appreciate as this is a peaceful place where only natural sounds should reign.

Having lost myself for an hour in this little slice of an exotic Himalayan kingdom where I draw much inspiration for my own small 'dingly dell' back home, I returned to the house to peruse the plants for sale, enthused by all I had seen.

I found myself a beautiful lemon rhododendron, a blue azalea, a sweet-scented viburnum and a number of those dark blue forget-me-knots and meconopsis. As I was choosing, I fell into conversation with Jenny, the owner (who told me about the owls and the fact that they were nesting in an old tree down near the hosue) and asked why, this year, the gardens are no longer open in July and August. She told me that too many recent wet miserable summers had made them decide to open just from March to June, 'and besides', she added, 'we're getting older'. I suppose it will not be long now before they decide to retire and it is not clear, despite a daughter living with them, that there is anyone in place to continue this labour of love. I fear that one day soon they will just close the gates and keep it to themselves - and it will leave a huge hole in my celebration of early summer as well as being a great loss to the area. So hurry - you don't want to miss it - and I shall republish this post next year, hopefully, in time to remind you to visit.

Meanwhile, I would have loved to stay for a cup of tea and a final few moments of quiet calm, but I had children to meet from school - and a boot full of plants to find a new home for. It was time to say goodbye, for this year at least.

Information:

Dunge Valley Rhododendron Gardens, Windgather Rocks, Kettleshulme, High Peak, Cheshire, SK23 7RF.
Tel: 01663 733787
david@dungevalley.co.uk

If you spend £12 on plants from their Hardy Plant Nursery then entry to the gardens is free.
'We have one of the largest collections of Rhododendrons and Azaleas in the north of England with Magnolias, trees, shrubs and perennials for sale. Meconopsis Sheldonii (the Blue Poppy), Prunus Serrula, exotic double flowering Hellebores, and Tropaeolum speciosum (the Flame Creeper) bring customers from all over the country.'

Online Catalogue: http://www.dungevalley.co.uk/

[Please note, this is a completely independent review. I just love the place and wanted to share it with you]

A Moment in Time

2010-07-09T08:34:00.022Z

Saturday 3rd July 2010

As I write this N, recently returned from Nigeria, is quietly downstairs in his study fiddling with the new watch he bought himself on the plane, while outside my bedroom door there is the intermittent patter of small feet across carpet as G and L rush around gathering new bits and pieces for their endless games of Barbies. I have just found them in the bathroom discussing new hair styles for Rapunzel, chuffed that they have finally released her tresses from some manky old elastic bands which were curtailing her beauty. The house never seems quite complete when one of the girls is missing - E is off with her Year 6 classmates on an adventure weekend in Castleton which happens to be just 15 minutes away from our house. It is nice to know she is nearby.

It is really noticeable how she and her muckers have subtly grown up in the last six months. Until Christmas the boys in their year seemed more of an irritation than anything else. There were complaints, even during the rehearsals for Beauty and the Beast (Year 6 puts on a musical every year), of the boys just being silly and disruptive. Now though, softly softly, they have infiltrated themselves into the tight little groups of girls and are starting to be embraced as fellow friends, potential boyfriends, and people who will be missed when they all get split up in September as they move into Seniors (the boys are on one site, the girls on another).

With the end of the school year drawing nigh, there have been a stack of Leavers events and activities over the last few weeks (let alone all the normal end of year stuff), all of which I seem to have been heavily involved in and N has been absent for, his work commitments leaving me playing the part of Single Parent once again.

I spent the day with them all at Alton Towers a few Tuesdays ago. (This is a theme park nestled unexpectedly, and surpringly attractively, in the rolling green Staffordshire moorlands in the grounds of a once stately home.) We were all split into groups and another parent and I were in charge of five girls (including our daughters) and six boys. It was a day of high adrenaline, hot sunshine, getting wet and having fun together. True, there was also a lot of queuing, a lot of walking and much hurtling through the air at high speeds which meant we all came home exhausted - but very happy.

At the end of the week was the School Walk where the entire junior school does a 7 mile hike up and around the hills surrounding the school. Another glorious summer's day and my memory filled with large groups of children walking alongside cool canals then climbing up high and gamboling through flower-filled meadows, down stoney paths, along lanes and through villages back to the school for a big picnic.

The Junior School Talent Show followed the picnic lunch. L was singing a Take That duet with a little Year 3 boy called Sam who's taken a shine to her and they're often seen hand in little hand. Parents were not allowed to watch but I managed to lurk and catch them on stage doing their stuff in front of a sea of faces - two tiny seven year olds in shorts with huge microphones, looking like rabbits in headlights but singing beautifully together. I was so proud. I couldn't do that now, let alone at their age.

After school that same afternoon was Summer Fun Friday (the equivavlent of a school fete) with stalls and bouncy castles, cheerleading displays and all the usual stuff. I helped set up. I helped clear away. Another fun but exhausting day, finished off with supper in a pub garden with friends where N was finally able to join us. The long light evenings made it far too late a night for all the children, but one to savour.

Then on the Sunday of that weekend was the Leavers' Party. I could hardly believe it had crept up on us - so long in the planning and now suddenly here. A band of parents arrived at school early to set everything up. It was another glorious summer's day, perfect for a happy send-off into the next stage of life. I donned apron, hat and silly plastic gloves ('elf and safety') and helped behind the barbecue, serving up hotdogs and hamburgers to hungry folk. I watched the scene from my corner of the playground - a bucking bronco, a treasure hunt, a red sofa on the playing field where a photographer was taking pictures of them all, and a Leavers 2010 banner with all their names on it, wishing them luck, which made me choke with emotion when I first saw it. Time spun forward to the day when they are adults looking back on this moment that we were living now. One of those days which we all have tucked away in our own adult minds - a special day when we were once children, long ago in the mists of time. I took a photo of E and some of her friends standing under the banner, knowing that one day in the unknown future they would look back on this and remember...

As I served my hotdogs to mothers and fathers and watched them go and sit down at a table with their families, I wished N was there to share this rite of passage with me and our daughter. But he was up in those big blue skies above, on a plane to Africa. What different lives we lead.

A disco followed and I lay down my plastic gloves and hat and managed to go and have a peek at them. As I watched their dance moves, their smiles and laughter I was reminded of the Christmas discos they've had in the last four years and noted the subtle changes which have taken place in comportment and body language. They were growing up, for sure. One boy, who I watched doing extraordinary break-dance moves with his sunglasses fixed firmly on his nose and who had dedicated his talent show song to E earlier in the afternoon, gave her a present at the end of the disco. It was a black leather cord looped through a golden butterfly. It was sweet, it was perfect - the girl with the golden hair and clear blue eyes, the girl with her feet on the ground and her head in the clouds, the girl who had played the role of Belle in Beauty and the Beast, a part that was made for her and her voice of an angel.

So as my eldest daughter takes her first significant step towards adulthood I think of my youngest, with her little sticky legs poking out of her shorts, who has spent the afternoon gamboling around with her friend and singing partner, giggling and getting into mischief. I will savour that for now, because I know that all too soon she will be at that Leavers Disco too, with a different look in her eyes and different thoughts in ther head and maybe Sam will be handing her a present too...

Nice Smells and Nasty Smells

2010-07-06T20:22:00.011Z

Kitchens should be full of nice smells - the frying of onions, a waft of garlic, toast and the aroma of fresh coffee. Today mine has been a far cry from this idyll. I came down this morning to be met by an updraft of cheesy stench which I spent some time puzzling over. Now, at some point over the last 24 hours - and I really can't remember if it was last night or this morning - I heard a big bang. It sounded like something had fallen down or over, but I couldn't see anything obvious. It was only when I went to take my tea mug to the sink at around 9am that I was overwhelmed by the hideous odour. Bit by bit, my senses took in the information: a breakfast plate put down in a puddle of something which came to light only when I picked it up to put it in the dishwasher; a large amount of white spatters all over the cupboards next to the sink...and then finally the penny dropped. Yesterday I had been sorting the fridge out a bit - things liquifying in the vegetable drawer, a mouldy punnet of strawberries, you know the sort of thing (let's not pretend we're all domestic goddesses, eh?) - and had also removed a well-out-of-date but not opened carton of single cream (lid slightly swollen) and a very bloated packet of mozzarella cheese. Both these were victims of our sailing holiday - never got round to eating them before we went away and didn't get round to eating them when we got back because vaguely conscious they were past their sell-by-date and would probably be less than palatable (nothing worse than cream or milk that's turned -specially when you've just put it in your tea or on your cereal! highly gag-worthy). My eyes fell on the packet of mozzarella next to the sink which I had put there yesterday and was summoning up the courage to open and put down the waste disposal in the sink (such is my obsession with recycling, you see, that I didn't just dump the whole unopened lot in the bin - a decision I now regret). I noted that it was no longer bloated. Indeed. Such was the build-up of gas and putrification inside it (especially since removed from cold fridge and left in warm kitchen) that the wretched thing had exploded. Oh joy. I then spent a merry half hour or more disinfecting, washing down, bleaching and generally trying to eliminate the hideous smell which seems to have seeped into every pore of the marble worktop and grain of the wooden cupboard doors. It's been with me all day - even under my fingernails, which will not disappear despite endless washing and much gardening.

Then, to cap it all, this afternoon, having picked up the girls from the school bus and been to the library and the doctors' surgery, I then found myself having to 'age' paper for G's history project on Great Explorers of Tudor Times. I have been putting sheets of photocopying paper in the top oven of the Aga to make them turn brown, then taking matches and pretty well using up a whole box and making a whole load of mess, let alone risking life and limb and the house insurance, by burning the edges to make it look more authentic. Tonight, of course, trying to do too many things at once, I burned them all not once, not twice, but three times - releasing acrid burning smells into the kitchen every time I opened the oven door and realised I'd cocked up again.

Ah yes, my home is a joy to be in right now. A far cry from glossy interiors mags where scented candles glow romantically in every corner and piles of home-made cakes and freshly baked bread are arranged enticingly on the perfect country kitchen table....No, let's get real shall we?

On the up side, I have managed to scribble down a new Fridge Food post, long overdue, if you want to pop over and take a look (and if the antics I describe above haven't put you off!). Here are a couple of photos to tempt you....

Washing Around in Cyberspace

2010-07-05T23:05:00.005Z

This is a quick impromptu post based on a couple of unwanted Followers. It's quite unnerving to log on and find that your latest Follower is sporting a lot of provocative breast. I clicked on the icon, expecting the worst, and the worst certainly came. Bits of a female you can't see without a mirror and a cucumber suddenly filled my screen. This is not really what I want. In fact, I suddenly feel rather lost and alone, and really quite vulnerable, out here in cyberspace. Where have all my 'friends' gone? There just seems to be an aching silence and a feeling of use and abuse pervades this place. It makes me feel rather sad on a day when I was feeling sad enough already.

So Where did Last Week Go? - Final Part

2010-07-03T12:37:00.024Z

Tuesday Evening, 8th June

This turned out to be as nice as I hoped it would. We were joined by our four best friends up here, and everyone had taken the trouble to dress really smartly, which added to the sense of occasion. We sat and talked in the low lit, comfortable lounge (it not being warm and fine enough to sit outside as we normally would), sipping champagne, perusing all the deliciously tempting menu options and making lively conversation. The evening continued in the same vein - and as we were quite late we were the only ones in the restaurant, but it made no difference. We made more than enough atmosphere all by ourselves. We came away from it replete, happy, and filled with a tremedous sense of wellbeing. What more could you ask for on your birthday?

Wednesday 9th June

There was an inevitable flatness to today after the joys of yesterday. The weather was still unseasonally cool and I had to contend with yoga after a late night and lots of alcohol. It was a bit of a struggle. I really had no desire to hang upside down on ropes or exhaust myself in demanding, body-aligning, body-strenghening positions. But I knew I had to go through with it to get me in the mood for the evening when I was due to teach some yoga to the Combs Brownie Pack. I had been knobbled by Brown Owl a few weeks earlier who had fixed me with her beadly little eyes and given me no option but to smile and agree. I spent the afternoon back at home trying to devise a routine suitable for a bunch of Brownies. I realisesd this whole little exercise was stressing me somewhat - largely because I had no notion of how successful it would be, given I've never taught yoga in my life before. Would I be up to it? As ever, I take these sort of things far too seriously and worry too much about doing a good job. So, when the time came, determined not to be late for once, I slipped into my yoga kit, grabbed my mat (unwrapping it for the first time since I bought it three years ago - I'm not good at practising at home!) and headed down for the village hall, nicely on time. And as is always the way with me, when I'm on time, everyone and everything else is late and when I'm late everyone and everything is on time. So there they were, in a certain amount of chaos finishing one activity (the theme of the evening was 'pyjama party' and they had been allowed to invite a friend each so there were twice the amount of Brownies there than usual - a key fact I had been unaware of) and were about to be given marshmallows dipped in a chocolate fountain. I could not help thinking that this was not an ideal yoga situation: an overcrowded room full of hyperactive kids with blood sugar count about to go through the roof...

So, with now only 20 minutes to go before parents came to collect the little cherubs, I attempted to create some order (difficult with Brown Owl, Tawny Owl and three helpers all clattering around clearing up the chocolate mess and talking to eachother) and give a little intro talk about yoga before launching into the set of positions I had selected during the afternoon. All things considered, it went reasonably well, if not exactly textbook, but it was all a bit of a rush and I was darned glad it was over. I had done my bit.

Thursday 10th June

The notation in my diary today was '9.10 Dentist - fillings'. This is not a good start to anyone's day. If you're late they strike you off the list and as this is the only National Health dentist for miles around and a bloody good won at that, I bust a gut to be on time but still find myself hurtling along the lanes at an unsuitable pace. Not helped this morning by the fact that the answerphone message I'd received from the dental receptionist the day before (they always remind you of your appointment in an attempt to save you from getting yourself struck off) told me the appointment time was 9.30am. It was only by chance that I looked at my diary just before 9am and saw that I'd written 9.10am - and I wasn't even washed or dressed. So I threw myself into the shower, hastily brushed and flossed my teeth to save too much embarrassment and admonition, and flung myself into the car. I arrived, panting, at 9.15. The receptionist looked up calmly and told me my appointment was 9.30am. Still, it's the first time I've ever been early, so I resisted the temptation to go off and squeeze another job in rather than hang around the (slightly smelly) reception for a quarter of an hour more than I needed to, I resigned myself to the pile of slightly dog-eared magazines. Most worryingly, instead of the glossy interiors mag, I found my hand reaching out for the Saga mag. Now, for those of you who don't know, this is for pensioners (i.e the over-60s). What is becoming of me? Have I lived too long in the High Peak to be bothered any more about style and glamour?? This is a worrying development and one I shall have to ponder on more deeply. Meanwhile, I was happily flicking through the Saga pages finding plenty to interest and entertain me. Not least of all a rather wizened and world-worn John Humphrys (oh so famous news journalist and long-term presenter of the probing 'Today' programme on BBC Radio 4) who's tale of buying land in Greece and building a holiday home thereon, with all the usual beaurocratic and territorial complications (which clearly nearly killed him), made for a reasonably compelling read. He rents the house out when he or his son's family are not there and gives the income to charity. I even found myself opening my notebook and scribbling down the contact details (email him at kitchentablecharities@googlemail.com or visit The Kitchen Table Charities Trust for anyone else who's interested).

By now it was 9.45am so I'd been in this smelly place for half an hour. Suddenly, though, my name was called and in I went, with a certain amount of trepidation. The last time I had a crown done, it was agony (she'd attempted to do it without anaesthetic, till I could take the torture no more). This time I was having an old grey filling taken out, a small amount of decay removed and a shiny new white filling put back in. I lay back in the chair (not before she'd put a pair of outsized green plastic joke glasses on my nose - she likes a laugh, this one) and watched an equally outsized needle, with (she told me) a particularly outsized dose of extra-strong anaesthetic ('just to make sure') in it, head inexorably towards my mouth ('open wide') and into my back right cheek/gum area. She held it there for what seemed an eternity - then the next thing I know I'm told to go back to the waiting room. I hadn't reckoned on this. Apparently I had to wait 20 minutes for the anaesthetic to do its job. Well, already as I was getting down from chair I felt rather peculiar. My heart was racing and I could barely walk in a straight line. I was told this was the adrenaline in the anaesthetic. Great, I thought, as my heartbeat hit new heights, now I'm going to die. And all for a filling. So I staggered back out to the waiting room, no doubt alarming some onlookers, and went outside to make a phonecall to one of the friends I was meant to be meeting for a (belated) birthday lunch. I warned her I might not make it. Or at least to bring a bib for me as I was likely to be dribbling a lot. I then teetered back in, feeling decidedly queasy by now too, and continued flicking through the Saga mag. This time I read all about its glamourous and very posh ex-editor, Emma Soames (Churchill's granddaughter), who had surprised everyone when she quit her job as editor of the Telegraph magazine (having previously been editor of Tatler) to go for this seemingly rather downgrade job. Still, she made a great success of it - which was probably why I found myself choosing that over the other mags in the pile. She turned it into an interesting read rather than just a repository for cruising and Stanner stair-lift ads.

By now I'd been in the waiting room for well over an hour. I can think of better ways to spend a Thursday morning. Eventually my name was called again and I found myself back in the chair, this time with more sensible glasses on. She asked me if my lip was feeling fat. 'Not particularly' I replied, which was true. 'Oh', she said. 'Are you sure?'. I thought about it for a wee moment (she's scottish) and decided that no, my lip definitely did not feel particularly fat. It was tingling a bit though. 'Oh well', she concluded, 'let's give it a go.' Out came the drill. Out came the scream. 'Ok' let's give you another shot. So another needle was produced and, mercifully, did the trick. I could be operated on in blissful ignorance apart from a slight aching of wide open jaw.

It was completed in a jiffy and I departed, glad to be alive, for my rendez-vous with the girls at The Highwayman, a newly re-opened pub on the way to Macclesfield, with its magnificent hilltop view of the Cheshire plain beyond. In the 20 minutes it took to drive there, I'm pleased to report that the numbness subsided so that when I sat down at the table I was restored to full working order and went on to enjoy a fabulous meal (the new owner-chef trained in Michelin restaurant and his food certainly reflected that). Not a bad end to an otherwise slightly grisly morning. Equilibrium had been restored.

Friday 11th June

I was pleased to note, when I looked in my diary, that I had a free day today - though I had a Ball to go to in the evening. As you do. Just call me Cinderella. This was the day when I was finally going to get round to making up my photographic cards for the local florist-cum-deli-cum-greengrocers. He'd asked me for a 100 cards weeks ago and it had been preying on my conscience. I'd got the photos chosen and printed out, but had rather stalled on putting it all together as sailing holidays and numerous other things kept getting in the way. I had called him the day before we left for Turkey to ask if it was ok to get them to him the week I got back. He said that was fine. But now it was the end of that week and I really had to deliver. So I determined not to get side-tracked by dishwasher or washing machine, garden or phone calls until the job was done. I set my stuff out on the kitchen table, turned on the telly to watch the tennis at Queen's as I worked, and had a happy time making up the cards. It was great to finally get that one ticked off my list.

Having done duties with children I then ran upstairs to change into my 'ball gown' (less glamourous than it sounds - but I was pleased to be able to give one of the dresses I bought in Manchester on my birthday its first outing) before being whisked away in a taxi to Stockport Rugby Club (which, curiously, is actually in Bramhall. So I would have thought it would be called Bramhall Rugby Club. But it isn't. All rather confusing.). It was called 'The Crystal Ball', so everyone was suitably attired in something glittery and you could wear a tiara if you wished. I stuck to crystal necklace and earrings, being short on tiaras, but there were a spattering of men sporting black tie and the required head gear. It as a charity evening to raise money for the NSPCC. We'd gone last year for the first time and the theme was 'tropical' - on one of the coldest wettest windiest nights I can remember. The rain was flooding in under the sides of the marquee. We were there with Italian friends who were living locally at the time. Funnily enough they left the north-west and went back to Italy soon after that.

By the end of the evening England had performed dismally in their first World Cup match, and I had swollen sore feet and a bloated aching belly from consuming a large slice of chocolate tart which was curiously sprinkled, in an experimental sort of way, with sea salt and exploding sugar. Still, it was all in a good cause.

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So that, folks, was where my week went and by the end of it my sailing holiday seemed far, far away - but that's a story for another time.

So where did last week go....? Part 2

2010-06-30T21:28:00.011Z

With apologies for the rather pregnant pause between 'So where did last week go? Part 1' and this continuation, may I just remind you, dear reader, of where we were:

...So I bumbled out of the restaurant (N relieving me of some of my bags) and scooted off down to House of Fraser, which was the one shop I had originally intended to go to. I had about 10 minutes at best to pop in and then grab a cab for the station. As I hurtled through the cosmetics on the ground floor, heading for the lift, a voice called out 'Have you got a minute?'....

...well, I had about ten, as I said. I really didn't have any to waste on a sales assistant, standing slightly forlornly by his stand, eyes begging me to respond. I guess it must have been the drink and my general good humour which made me give in to his request. 'Just one minute' I said, trying to sound firm. 'yes, just one minute' he confirmed, unconvincingly. He looked like a throw-back to some early eighties pop band: all dark spikey hair, high cheekbones and pale face. Camp as a row of tents too - but then I guess that goes with the territory if you're a bloke flogging women's cosmetics. I can't see N rushing for that one. I edged towards him, a tad nervously. What was I about to be screwed for? (I knew I would be, I always am). He asked to see my nails. Oh God, no. Not my nails. As he perused the skin on the back of my hands, parched as a pygmy's arse, I found myself muttering excuses - 'I do a lot of gardening, you know' - for the dark lines of dirt under my unpolished, shabby fingernails. Having thought I'd dressed quite well that day, I suddenly found myself feeling decidedly un-glamourous. He pounced on the gardening bit saying how he had just the thing for my 'gardener's hands' (think Carol Klein). Oh-oh, I thought. Fell right into that one. I glanced at his own fair delicate digits (decidedly more feminine than my own) and suddenly spotted the unnervingly shiny nails glinting in the store lights. Didn't seem quite right on a bloke. He continued burbling away while I took in some more details. Strange accent. Where was he from? Then I noticed his lapel badge pinned to his black shirt - 'Vlad'. So, a Russian then. Or something equally exotic for House of Fraser on a wet Tuesday afternoon in Manchester. He smelt a bit. I felt like trying to sell him some deodorant. Obviously the stress of the job coming out. He wittered on endlessly with much false jollity and I'd hardly noticed he was rubbing away at my nails with a natty buffer thingy and producing quite startling results. I mean, I have a drawerful of nail buffers which Father Christmas keeps giving me - but this was something else. I was hooked. Help. I suddenly found myself dishing out cash for the set - buffer, nail file, cuticle oil, hand cream. A gardener's dream. He was right. Sensing blood, he moved in with the speed and accuracy of a Great White, sharp glisteningly white teeth barely veiled behind those pale lips. The clock ticked. He thrust a hand mirror in my face and asked me which of the wrinkle sets under my eyes looked the worst. I said they both looked as bad as eachother (should get to bed earlier). In an instant he was ripping open a new box, reassuring me that the volume of cream inside (10 times the amount of a normal eye cream) justified the price. I supposed he had a point. He then hooked a small amount of unguent out of the pot with his ring finger in the swift deft way that only those flogging creams to poor fools like me can muster and started dabbing it, rather intimately, around my right eye. I felt tingling (that was the ginseng, he assured me). It felt nice. He shoved the mirror in my face again and asked if I could spot the difference. No, I , said. I couldn't. But it was a nice sensation, and it was my birthday, so I parted with my cash in a happy, it's-my-birthday-and-I'll-do-what-I-want-to kind of way. Then realised I had precisely eight minutes to catch my train on the other side of Manchester. I rushed out of the store, abandoning the reason for my original entry therein, and hailed a cab. I threw him the money ('keep the change') at the traffic lights and ran into the station, casting around to see which platform I needed for the Buxton train. I flung myself at it, sat down in the first empty seat I could find and the wheels started rolling within about 10 seconds of my sitting down. Another precision operation from Yours Truly where, in my life, every second literally counts.

Feeling faintly smug, with the thought of dinner with friends still to come, I whipped out my newly acquired super-buffer and enjoyed a happy half hour filing and buffing and creaming my gardener's hands into something closely ressembling Christy Turlington's. I felt a bit girly, but sod it, it was my birthday, after all. Vlad would be proud of me (as he giggled all the way to the bank).

(to be continued)

Historic Tennis on a Wednesday Afternoon in June

2010-06-23T23:31:00.022Z

Right, sorry folks, I know I should be finishing off the last story, let alone telling you about my sailing holiday and a load of other things in between, but, as is often the way with blogging, something else has cropped up.

I am a big Wimbledon fan and I've been battling with the TV remote control, flicking desperately from England's paultry achievements in the World Cup to the antics on the grass courts in south west London. Why does good sport, like buses, all come at once? (as well as the busiest time of year at school which makes ANY telly goggling an achievement). Anyway, I just had to tell you about the most extraordinary match that has been going on over the last two days. Yes, two days. They had to stop it last night due to lack of light. It re-started this afternoon in the expectation it would be soon over (they were into the last set), but that last deciding set, where no tie-breaks are allowed, has just gone on, and on, and on, and on....we are currently at 59 games all in the fifth and final set which (with extraordinary mathematical ability, ahem!) I can compute as 118 games in the last set alone. The match has broken every record going: longest ever match in the history of tennis, most aces (between them they've nearly topped 200), longest ever set, highest number ever of games in a set (and it's not over yet!), highest number of games in a match etc etc etc. They have been playing for 10 hours, for God's sake.

The American, John Isner, is the seeded player; Nicolas Mahut is a qualifier, though we've seen his tenacity in previous matches at Queens and Wimbledon. He looked the fresher player when they called a halt this evening - John Isner was pretty much on his knees (which is saying something given he's 6'9" tall - Mahut is a dwarf in comparison) but was still capable of smashing out ace after ace. There were very few rallies and those that were were short, but usually involving brilliant shots. There was no electronic eye for replays of dodgy line calls, yet there were no arguments either over any calls that the players clearly saw differently. It has been a match played in the best of sporting behaviour which has entertained, stunned and beggared belief.

Yet possibly the most surprising statistic is the fact that in nearly 7 hours neither player went off for a bathroom break - not even as a tactical move. Nor either the umpire, who was probably rather relieved at least to stretch his legs momentarily as he had to climb down from his chair to sort out the net chord instrument which had got hit during play. It seems testament to the players' remarkable focus - especially Mahut who served 57 times to stay in the match and has, so far, saved Match Point three times, usually with a stunning ace. Quite remarkable.

John McEnroe (who I love to bits) was saying in one breath how fantastic it was for tennis as a sport - that finally the players would get the kind of sporting respect they deserved for their endurance, athleticism, fitness, mental attitude, entertainment value etc - and in the next breath that they should really put a limit on the number of games that can be played in a deciding fifth set. But I feel he was rather arguing against himself. The whole point is that they have earned this respect from the extraordinary circumstances of this match - had the fifth set been played by the rules of sets 1 to 4, then the game would have been as ordinary as any other which has to end on a tie-break and the players would never have been given this opportunity to show the world what they, and the game of tennis, are made of.

It all starts again tomorrow. Will it all be over in a couple of games? We'll have to wait and see - and I suspect the result will lie with the player who has best been able to recover overnight from an absolutely extraordinary battle of physical skill and mental and emotional will-power, the like of which will probably never be seen again. France's national football squad (not to mention England's) could learn much from them.

So Where Did Last Week Go?

2010-06-18T13:30:00.011Z

My battle with Time is legendary, but last week just seemed to disappear in even more of a blink of an eye than usual. One moment it was the beginning, the next it was the end. And I'm not quite sure what I achieved in between.

Looking back, it's fair to say it was a week of ups and downs. We know it started badly (previous post) with post holiday blues and a general sense of dislocation from my normal life. Tuesday was unexpectedly up; Wednesday was down-ish; Thursday was up-ish; and Friday was, well, the end of the working week and the start of the World Cup. Say no more.

The weather remained vile and unseasonal all week which clouded my mood considerably. The house felt dark and lonely and the garden - normally my sanctuary - looked cold, unappealing and so very sad as its early summer finery was lashed by winds and rain under leaden grey skies. All was lightless, both within and without. I love tennis, and Queen's was on, but even that seemed melancholy under the same grey, cold skies. Summer should be about sunshine and Pimms, smiley faces and Ascot, hot summer colours and long warm evenings. Yet here we are, fast approaching the longest day, and still it feels like winter. Why do we live in England? Let alone the north west. It is a question I have frequently asked myself these last seven years...

Yet today, as I write, I am looking out on a tranquil, green, bucolic, quintessentially English landscape, with sunshine fading in and out from behind white fluffy clouds and my question is answered for me. It can be so very beautiful.

So, if you remember, Tuesday was my birthday and it was looking bleak on Monday night. The usual birthday girls' lunch had fallen by the wayside because of a clash of dates with a school trip that one of my friends was accompanying, having forgotten it was my birthday. We re-arranged for Thursday, but it left me with nothing to do on The Big Day. If the weather had been good it would have been no problem - I would have been happy as Larry (who is Larry anyway?) at home in the garden in the sunshine. But a day cooped up indoors with nothing but my chores for company and rain lashing against my windows was not wholly appealing as a way to celebrate my declining years.

When N got home on Monday night I was past caring about my stupid birthday. I had resigned myself to nothing much. The one set of friends I had called - my special Italian friend and her pilot husband who we don't see enough of these days - were hoping to come but hadn't confirmed because he was only flying back home from Jo-burg that day and had to get back up here from Heathrow with a car with a dodgy exhaust, sleep deprivation and a Governors' meeting to go to. The others I would have loved to see were only just back from two weeks in Spain and might not be able to get a babysitter at such short notice. N took control (mercifully). He grabbed the phone and booked a restaurant I love which we only ever go to on my birthday. It is at the Cavendish Hotel in Baslow. On a fine summer's evening you sit outside at white wrought iron tables, sipping your drink and perusing the menu with a splendid Peak District view stretching before you. The food is fabulous and the dining room lovely - a beautifully proportioned room with tall Georgian windows reaching up to the ceiling and down to the ground. I am very happy there even if the weather's too awful to sit outside first. There's an equally attractive seating area with oil paintings, sofas, armchairs and low lights to calm the soul. I was feeling better already.

Birthday morning dawned with much whispering outside the bedroom door, cups of tea, home-made cards and a smattering of presents. I opened the girls' cards but then they had to dash for the school bus so we left the rest till later. N returned from taking them for an hour at home before heading off for a meeting. He suggested I come in to town and have lunch with him. Behind the curtains the day was as foul as predicted, so a little shopping in Manchester and lunch seemed highly preferable to all the jobs which were lining up for me at home. So I had a shower and drove to the station, getting there as the train pulled in (my timing was a little tighter than even I had expected). I spent the journey responding to Happy Birthday texts and then stepped straight off the train and into Accessorize. And then Monsoon. By the time I was nearly due to meet N I hadn't even progressed out of the station concourse! Still, I was happy and had bought a couple of lovely dresses and some other bits and bobs. No shoes. Can never get shoes. Tricky feet.

I hopped on a tram, feeling very grown up and independent suddenly (too many years now spent in parochial small towns) and had flashbacks to another life in London. Seems so long ago sometimes. We met at our favourite Italian restaurant, Piccolino (though not before I'd managed to squeeze in a flying - and successful - visit to DKNY. It was my birthday, after all). Although it is part of a small chain, the Manchester venue is unarguably the best. Its atmosphere and style really makes us feel, for a brief moment, that we are back in Italy in a glossy yet gritty urban sort of way. It just has BUZZ. And I particularly love it at lunchtime. We started with a glass of prosecco (a lifetime's habit begun in our Italian days) and eased smoothly into a nice glass of white. Paper thin prosciutto, ciabatta toast and a delicious olive tapenade were produced, on the house. We then had a fantastically garlicky tomato bruschetta and I followed that with a small risotto (which they enlarged for me!). N and I had a lovely chat - so nice actually to spend time with him, during the week, without the children. Again, it reminded me of our pre-children Italian days when I would go and meet him for lunch on a regular basis, so easy in Milan and Padua, so much more difficult here. I always felt it was a way of staying connected during the day, especially when his days are so long. We ordered coffee and the bill. It came, but not without three of the waiters first producing my favouite pudding (affogato - vanilla ice cream with expresso coffee and amaretto poured over it) complete with candle and a fulsome rendition of happy birthday. The whole restaurant clapped. It was a lovely moment. Very simple, very sweet. The child within is never far away, I sometimes think.

So I bumbled out of the restaurant (N relieving me of some of my bags) and scooted off down to House of Fraser, which was the one shop I had originally intended to go to. I had about 10 minutes at best to pop in and then grab a cab for the station. As I hurtled through the cosmetics on the ground floor, heading for the lift, a voice called out 'Have you got a minute?'....

(to be continued)

The Start of a Long Week...

2010-06-15T11:15:00.003Z

I'm writing this while I have a potato in the oven. Not a bun, dear reader, no, I am far too old for that, tsk, tsk. Just a potato, baking nicely. The potato is to be my breakfast. How odd, you must be thinking. Indeed. I am on a diet, the GM diet (I think GM stands for General Motors), this week. It was really meant for N more than me but he has wriggled out of it at the last minute with excuses that he has lots of dinners and lunches on this week (all right for some). My diary, on the other hand, was noteworthy for its lack of foodie frivolity - and anyway, I'd bought all the bloody stuff last Friday in Morrisons. I had sported the most bizarre kind of Yin-Yang trolley-load at the checkout. One half of it was virtuously piled high with fruit and veg of every origin and denomination: the other was piled equally high with biscuits and sweet snacks and crisps and things for the children (before you suck in your teeth, we had loads of 'healthy' snacks still in the larder - I just had to stock up on the 'treats'). Oh, and there wasn't a bottle of wine in sight (more's the pity). So, having stitched myself up nicely, I've had to get on with it.

I started with some enthusiasm yesterday morning as Day 1 was the day where you ate just fruits. Oh, and homemade vegetable soup. So I started with melon (slightly under-ripe), then water melon (too many pips), then a few cherries (slightly tasteless - they were going cheap), then I picked out a few non-mouldy raspberries from last week's punnet. I opened the fridge and peered in and assumed fruit juice was ok. So drank a glass of apple, raspberry and pomegranate. I then had half a kiwi and some more melon and, unsated, poured a few glasses of tomato juice down my neck (tomatoes being technically a fruit, no?). Bananas were not allowed, which was good as mine hadn't ripened yet. I then had some home-made lemon and rosemary tea, then some white tea, then a glass of water....and so on and so forth throughout the day. I really didn't get much done as I seemed to spend my whole time eating or chopping and peeling.

I went to pick up L and her friend from the school bus to take them to ballet. As usual, I threw a snack in the car - chocolate orange club biscuit - and found the smell of sweet chocolate on their breath a little taunting. Thence I drove to Macclesfield to collect the older two girls from afterschool rounders practice (E) and an away rounders match (G). E had been given an apple and a packet of salt and vinegar crisps by After School Club and I had provided a chocolate brioche. I didn't envy her the apple much (funny that), but the crisps and the tantalising smell of soft, sweet brioche were hard to take. I sat there with my tupperware bowl of chopped, under-ripe canteloupe melon, diligently eating away and discussing our respective days. Then, when all melon had been consumed, I found this little voice sneaking out of my lips saying, 'Erm, Lel, you wouldn't mind just giving me a crisp, would you?' as she crunched away happily while talking me through how she just missed a catch: 'Those balls are really hard, aren't they, and, well, your body just REACTS when they hit your hand and you jerk away and then you drop it'. I nodded sagely in agreement, remembering my own slightly dodgey record on the rounders field, and proffered some benign advice on the art of catching. 'Ok then', she said, 'but JUST ONE' as she handed me one small crinkle cut crisp. I crunched and wished for more. My wishes were not granted.

By the time we got home, and after stuffing another snack pack of raisins and apricots down me, I decided enough was enough and it was time to make the 'WONDER SOUP' (the diet specifies that this can be eaten at any time in any quantity you like throughout the whole week). This required copious amounts of onions. I realised this was about the only legume I had not purchased last Friday as I was under the impression that I had lots at home. I did. But it turned out they were all sprouting enormous green shoots and/or had gone mouldy and stinky within. So having discarded all the white onions, I moved on to the red. They were in marginally better shape and I salvaged all but two. As I was wearing my glasses not my contact lenses, I donned an old pair of ski goggles that I keep in the drawer to prevent the agony of streaming eyes. So think of me standing there, goggles on, tummy rumbling, peeling countless little red onions when all I wanted was a bloody biscuit. From there to chopping courgettes and carrots, slicing cabbage, crushing garlic and opening a tin of tomatoes. Vegetable stock, celery salt, chopped fresh herbs (parsley, sage, lemon thyme, tarragon, basil, chives, rosemary), dried herbs (with fennel seed - adds delightful little moments of aniseedy surprise to the end result). At last it was done (while quiche in oven for the children) and it was with a certain relief that I finally spooned something meaningful and tasty into my mouth (she says, choosing to ignore the two sneaky handfuls of peanuts that she stuffed in while soup was boiling).

Now the weird thing is this: I often have soup for lunch and normally one bowl is more than enough. I sometimes have a slice of bread or toast with it, but often do not. But I managed to consume not one, not two, but THREE bowls of the stuff yesterday evening. And I was still hungry. Normally I have three meals a day with not much snacking in between. On a normal day breakfast is a bowl of cereal or toast, lunch is soup or salad or ham and egg or something like that, and then I have a better supper (just main course, no pudding). And I don't spend those days feeling starving all day. Today, on the other hand, I ate ALL DAY - and at midnight I was still hungry! I also suddenly had a desperate craving for just something a little sweet (and believe me I really do NOT have a sweet tooth) and found myself unwrapping a bar of Green & Blacks dark cooking chocolate in sheer desperation. Just two little squares. Really bitter. Really sweet. Perfect.

Just three little relapses then (1 crisp, 2 handfuls of peanuts, 2 square of chocolate) in a nutritionally long day. Bearing in mind the diet said that you may lose up to 3lbs on the first day, I stepped confidently onto the bathroom scales when I went up to bed and voila! ....I had gained 3lbs! I think perhaps I haven't quite got the hang of this dieting lark yet.

I'll keep you posted...

Blue Monday

2010-06-07T20:29:00.008Z

Coo-eee, I’m back!

Well, sort of back. I think I left my head and heart elsewhere actually – perhaps somewhere between a limpid patch of turquoise Mediterranean sea and the darkness of Gatwick Airport. I certainly have not got them here in the High Peak with me today. They are resoundingly lost luggage, I’m afraid. I feel dizzy, fuzzy-brained, washing around, slightly low – and am still rocking from the movement of the boat. It is a grey day and inclined to rain, which mirrors my mood exactly – and is certainly not helping it.

My brain, currently, can barely string a coherent thought together, let alone put it into a sentence. I have been trying to analyse why I feel like this. Low blood sugar? I have tried food and cups of tea, but to no avail (the milk was off). Lack of sleep? But I slept a full seven hours last night. So I have tried to fling myself into the myriad mundane domestic tasks I should be performing: I have collected the cat from the cattery; I have made a brief inspection of the garden; I have made a few necessary phone calls; I have attempted to look at my emails, but find even the spam stuff rather daunting, let alone the necessary communications with friends and others. And all this has done is make my brain even cloudier than ever, now clogged with guilty thoughts of long-neglected friends I should be in touch with which then sets off another toxic chain-reaction of thoughts about all the never-ending jobs and tasks around house and home and family life which weigh constantly and heavily around my neck. I have no energy for any of this. Nor for the fact that my printer is not working properly because it got left on while I was away and now all the ink nozzles have dried up and clogged and I cannot seem to get it clean and working again despite all known methods and plunges into cyberspace wisdom. So I can’t even get on with my admin. The cat, rescued from the cattery this morning, is clearly as discombobulated as me and is pacing around the place mewling pitifully and not knowing whether she is coming or going. We are a right pair got together.

Possibly the over-arching cause of my gloom is the knowledge that tomorrow is my birthday. As I currently feel, this is a cause for cessation rather than celebration. Why cheer another lost year, another inexorable step towards oblivion? I’ve always believed that you should feel special on your birthday – one day a year is not too much to ask, surely? N is not of the same opinion, coming from a long line of birthday humbugs (not helped by the fact he is one of only two brothers, both of whom have the singular distinction of being born on the same day – 23rd April – two years apart. For a number of years, younger brother handed older brother present, older brother handed over younger brother one in return. Younger brother eventually declares ‘Oh bollocks to this!’ and they have never knowingly exchanged birthday present since. When you are dealing with this sort of attitude, it is an uphill battle to specialdom, I can assure you). But this year I’m not sure that even I care. The forecast is for rain and the only birthday present I want is a sunny day. I had a birthday lunch planned with friends which now has to be moved due to their various other obligations. I have not yet planned anything with N. A babysitter is on standby but a night in with the telly and catching up with the final episodes of '24' (DON’T TELL ME WHAT HAPPENED!!!) is perhaps all I will be in the mood for. I have no desire to flog a dead horse. Me being the old nag, of course.

On the subject of livestock, I had a curious experience when I went to get into the car this morning to fetch the cat. It had been sitting in the garage while we were away, garage door open. As I went to get into the driver’s side I noticed some curious brown splat marks on the concrete floor – and a slight whiff of urine. ‘Gosh, large swallows this year’, I thought, as I peered up into the nest they habitually use in the back corner of the garage. I noticed a small extension to it this year (a little extra straw thatching above the main muddy construction), but the rather larger brown splat I then spotted on the ground beneath it I didn’t believe a swallow - even one with serious bowel problems - could actually produce. I then noticed that our neatly stacked log pile had collapsed at one end and that there were even brown smear marks all over the garage wall, quite high up (somewhere around my mid torso). I then peered more closely at the car and spotted brown smears all across the paintwork and the petrol cap. The wing mirror was bent back and there were also splatters all over the alloy wheels. Conclusion: cow goes into garage, has major panic attack ‘cause gets inconceivably trapped in what would be a very small passageway for a large cow, shits itself a few times and then rubs its arse all over our wall and my car in its frantic attempts to reverse itself out of its situation. Now, in all this, I simply cannot imagine what sort of scenario there was to have the cow end up in the garage! My already befuddled mind is still boggling over this one….

Oh yes, and I came out of the study and my wrestles with the printer to find equally befuddled and confused cat had pulled herself together enough to catch a mouse and leave nothing but the warm green squiggly bits on my hall floor.

It’s good to be back.

♫I am sailing, I am sailing……♫

2010-05-28T13:36:00.025Z

Ok, quick update from yesterday:-

Well, I, with singular aplomb, managed to miss the girls in all their key swimming races. I always get lost trying to get to the Leisure Centre in Macclesfield and yesterday was no exception. Got there 15 minutes after the start and the girls were in all the races in the first 15 minutes. Story of my life. To lie, or not to lie? Did I pretend to them that I had been there from the start and seen it all? My friend said yes, but I just couldn’t do it. Instead I got them to describe in minute detail how the races had gone (E would have won, apparently, had not biggest girl in her year lurched into her lane and spent the rest of the race kicking into her face!) and then talked enthusiastically about all the bits I DID see. Still, it was all a bit tricky trying to get to grips with what was going on as there were so many kids, some with swim hats coded to their House colours, but many without - so I spent half the gala thinking there was an unfair preponderance of Adlington House (= blue) children competing, before I realized that half of those kids were wearing the standard old school swim cap which always used to be blue, before they brought in the colour-coded ones (doh, I am a bear of little brain). It was also nigh on impossible to watch two of my own children and all of my friends’ children while also marvelling at the child pounding out front and feeling for the one flailing out back, whoever they were (impossible to tell in swim caps and from a distance). So, all in all, the gala was a mixed success from my point of view, though much more fun and exciting than I was anticipating (have horror of such things as used to dread them when I was a child – have always hated idea of such raw competition. Two of my daughters take after me, one doesn’t. She’s like her father).

From here I dropped children at Afterschool Club from whence a friend was collecting them and looking after them until N could get home, as I had another pressing appointment. One I had also, like the gala, been rather dreading. Yes folks, I was due to go and see Rod Stewart in concert at the MEN arena in Manchester. Ageing Rocker inevitably comes to mind. Well, he is, isn’t he? I worked out he must be 65. Friend with smart iphone checked, and 65 he is. Still, he didn’t do badly for an old bloke. In fact he doesn’t look much different to when he first came to my attention with Maggie May on Top of the Pops three decades ago. That is a great song. As a young teenager I really identified with it. Though, thinking about it, I’m not sure why! I’m female for a start and have never been into older men and was a model (well, -ish) student. Never a day’s truancy, me. So, yeah, not quite sure where I’ve got that idea from. Anyhow, he played it as his last song (before the encore at least), so he must think it’s rather a good one too.

My friend had bought the tickets for another friend’s birthday and it had seemed churlish of me not to accept, despite the fact it was the night before we were leaving on holiday and I am notoriously chaotic and stressed trying to get everything packed and ready and the house sorted for abandonment, cat in cattery, dishwasher done, bins emptied, plants watered, security lights set etc etc etc. It’s all a nightmare. So I needed Rod Stewart like a hole in the head. But you know what? As with all things you don’t look forward to much, I really enjoyed it. It was a great show by an old pro with some fab songs which have stood the test of time. He’s engaging, self-deprecating, this son of a plumber – now a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE)for his contributions to music. The boy done good. He’s got wife No.3 who’s known to a friend of mine in the village from the days when they lived in Bermuda – she used to throw great parties apparently – and went back to England to marry their mate but somewhere along the line, before the big day, met Mr Stewart and the rest is history. Well done Penny Lancaster. I bet they have a right laugh together. I think it’s all rather lovely. And they have a young child who did a scribble which Rod put on a T-shirt and was selling for charity last night. Really, all seems well with his world. Oh, and he’s still got a good head of hair. So maybe being a pensioner’s not all bad, y’know.

Right, well I’d better get going. Am meant to be planting out some runner bean seedlings, finishing off the last bits of packing, watering the pots, closing up the house and getting on my way. We are off sailing – hopefully not Rod’s stormy waters as we’re going to Turkey and pottering around a few bays. Lovely. Did it last year. Everyone thought we’d hate it and/or drown. We did neither. In fact, we loved every minute. It was superb. Wall-to-wall sunshine and the most free-ing holiday I think I’ve ever had. Life on the ocean wave. Not bad. Not bad at all.

So, me hearties, I’ll see you all in a week or so. Tell you all about it when I get back. If we get back. Ashclouds, perfect storms etc permitting...

PS: I've been most industrious while I should have been packing and have also published a new post over at Fridge Food. Go take a look if you have a mo.

♫‘The hills are alive with the sound of bleating…’♫

2010-05-27T11:34:00.006Z

First week of May

Until recently I was lamenting the fact that the field opposite our house had been devoid of sheep for some time. It always seems a bit empty when they’re not there ambling about their business. I learned from our neighbour, who owns the field, that this was because he was dealing with a rather persistent mole problem. Indeed, the top field was riddled with small piles of earth and N was muttering something about hoping they wouldn’t cross the lane and get onto our lawn…

I saw our neighbour out there on an almost daily basis, setting traps and - while he was in the mood for housekeeping - re-building a fallen down dry-stone wall, with a little help from his wife. It seems all this hard work paid off as there is a line of dead moles hung up by the side of the field (a rural tradition), not an earth pile in sight, and a green field full of expectant ewes and diddy little lambs. It is a joy to behold. And to listen to. Every time I step outside there is a cacophony of bleating and baaing as mother talks to child and child to mother. The farmer pulls up regularly in his Land Rover either to take a ewe away or to arrive with some newborns.

The girls leap up every morning and peer out through their bedroom curtains to count the lambs and see how many new ones have arrived. Sometimes though the lambs just get on with it by themselves. G noticed one pushing and groaning the other day and pointed it out excitedly to me: ‘Mummy, that sheep’s having a baby’. I went outside to take a closer look but things seemed to have calmed down. I assume something appeared during the night because the girls counted an extra lamb in the morning. Meanwhile, last Friday, N was working from home. His study looks right out on the field and about coffee time he called out to me that a lamb had just been born. He hadn’t seen it actually happen, but he did see the new arrival all covered in blood and with the umbilical chord still hanging down. I couldn’t resist taking a few pictures and watching to see how mother and lamb bonded...

Three weeks later

The field explodes with noise every morning about 9.30am when the farmer comes up to give the sheep extra feed. He opens the gate opposite our driveway, drives in, honks his horn and they all come running in a small stampede to where he lays the feed on the grass. They seem to know the sound of the Land Rover for the symphony begins to build even before he has appeared. Amusingly, they sometimes get it wrong – it’s the bin lorry or another tractor – and the whole place reaches fever pitch then dies away into a rather embarrassed silence as the vehicle concerned rides right on by.

The lush green grass of just a few weeks ago is now looking well-chewed and is strewn with white clumps of sheep’s wool like giant dandelion clocks. The four week old lambs are getting nice and sturdy now, with only a few smaller, later arrivals left. One got out from under the field gate yesterday and was enjoying some lush long grass on the verge. We tried to herd him back in but he just tried to shove his silly head through the wire fence, with singular lack of success. In the end I opened the gate wide (hoping there wouldn’t be a sudden dash for freedom from the whole flock) and eventually he understood and came in the right direction – but the silly creature still squeezed under the gate rather than running through the large gap I had created. He still has much to learn, clearly.

But you know what? Sheep aren’t as stupid as you may think. We have consistently had three or four who have escaped their confines and enjoyed many many happy hours munching away in our garden. We’ve lost half a hedge thinking it was frost, then waking up to the fact that the woolly blighters were coming in over night and having a good old chew.

One of our favourite things, though, is watching the new lambs springing about in the air. They wag their little tails and suddenly go flying upwards. It’s hilarious. And as they grow more confident they start to hang around the field in small gangs, larking about and winding Mum up. Just occasionally, she gives in to their mithering (good northern word, that, covering a multitude of sins – it means ‘nagging’ or ‘bothering’ or ‘hassling’) and you suddenly see the whole lot of them go shooting off round the field, jumping and skipping and having a laugh. Somewhere I have a video of that, but I’ve just been searching my files and I can’t find it. If I do, I’ll add it later.

Right, talking of lambs, I’ve got to go and see mine now in their school swimming gala, so’d better dash, or guess what? Yes, I’ll be late. Again. Thence to the garden centre and then a Rod Stewart concert at the MEN. I'm not quite sure which is the lesser of the two evils...

Good Grief!

2010-05-21T12:03:00.010Z

Good Grief! I just popped in to my blog - having been doing some other stuff online - to see if anything was going on and have just discovered, wonder of wonders, that I've become a Blog of Note overnight! Now this is rather wonderful, and I'm deeply flattered, but it is also a little spooky as, just the other day a blogging mate, Maddie Grigg, had just received the same accolade and I was planning to pop over there to congratulate her later today. Now it seems the honour, most unexpectedly, is mine too.

So I just want to say a huge THANK YOU to Mr Google Blogger Person who has chosen me amongst others this month - and to all of you who have read his (or her) recommendations and therefore found me here. WELCOME to all of my new friends and thank you so much for reading. I will endeavour, as time allows, to visit you all eventually. Bear with me, though, as Time is not always on my side...

New Fridge Food Post

2010-05-18T23:06:00.005Z

Just to say that I've just published a new post over at Fridge Food if anyone's interested. Two ridiculously easy meals - an Italian salad lunch and an English pub supper.

Sign of the Times

2010-05-11T23:35:00.002Z

Tuesday 11th May, 2010

Well, this is all very jolly, isn’t it? I have been listening to the news tonight and watched how the media have got themselves into an absolute frenzy over this Conservative-LibDem coalition government thing. There is no doubt that it is hugely historic – nothing like this for 70 years or more and in times of peace not war. But, as ever, there is endless cud-chewing and weeping and wailing and question posing and interrupting of answers – no-one is giving the situation a moment to settle. The only key thing to take on board and appreciate at the moment, as far as I can see, is that a decision has been made by three people: Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg. Gordon Brown has done the only viable thing and resigned; David Cameron, as the winner of the election (albeit without a majority) is therefore now Prime Minister, however suddenly and unexpectedly; Nick Clegg has done the only sensible thing and signed up with the ruling party. You can argue forever about which party has most sold itself down the river. That’s not really the point. Cameron and Clegg are actually just being quite level-headed and mature about it all (which is refreshing in itself when it comes to politics) and have accepted their slightly compromised situation and are now trying to make the best of it in the most positive and forward thinking way that they can. As it stands with the current electoral system, the people of this country effectively gave Labour a vote of no-confidence. Whether the LibDems sided with them or not, they were in a weak and untenable position.

As a country, we have not been in a situation like this in an age of such media scrutiny. We are sailing new political waters. We are, ironically, suddenly a little more like some of our European counterparts. Personally, I think it is quite exciting – and it will certainly be interesting. My God we needed a shake up and By God, we got it. And if it fails, I suspect it will be the media who will be significantly to blame.

The Great Election 2010 and Other Stuff

2010-05-11T15:13:00.013Z

Monday 10th May

Well, it's all a bit of a shambles, isn't it?

The Great Election 2010 was a fiasco with hundreds of people failing to vote due to poor organisation, unexpectedly high turn out (doh!), not enough polling stations and every other excuse under the electoral sun.

We now have a Hung Parliament with much political posturing and no sign yet of a resolution, let alone the much promised 'strong and stable Government' (still, this never bothered the Italians so why should it bother us? They seem to muddle along ok without.)

Greece (Portugal, Spain?) are in meltdown as is the whole Euro concept. Which will be the next dominoes to fall? Did anyone ever think this one through? I doubt it. Meanwhile the tax payer digs ever deeper into his pocket...

The Icelandic volcano is still spewing out sporadic ash clouds causing chaos to the airlines. But don't worry, it will all be recovered in soaring ticket prices. Good old Joe Public bails them all out again.

There's an oil slick the size of Luxembourg threatening to destroy the coast of New Mexico and various wildlife reserves. BP are making a total horlicks of trying to right their wrongs. Will anyone ever learn? It only happened because they were too mean to carry out the proper tests on the concrete used on the well. Oh, and guess what? The Tax Payer is going to pick up the costs of their greed...again.

I was going to change the header picture on my blog today. But I don't think I'll bother. Snow is forecast. And yes, there was sleet here this afternoon.

But you know what? The birds are singing, the lambs are springing and new shoots are trying to push through against all odds. While there's life, there's hope, after all.

----------------------------------

PS: for anyone who might be interested (unlikely I know), the High Peak was returned to the Conservatives and our UKIP mate got 3% of the vote in Derbyshire Dales - not enough to save his deposit. But, hey, at least he tried to do something he believed in, and that alone is worth celebrating in an increasingly self-centred and superficial world.

PPS: update as of 9.30pm, Tuesday 11th May: have just seen that David Cameron becomes our new Prime Minister. Suddenly feel a little sorry for Gordon Brown. I'm such a softie. Will be interesting to see if anything much changes. Doubt it.

'I might be 80 but I'm not daft.'

2010-05-05T22:12:00.010Z

On the eve of The Great Election 2010, I thought I would give just one quick nod to it all. The following is a letter which was published in our local newspaper, The Buxton Advertiser, a couple of weeks ago. I have only just read it, but I thought it a particularly well-constructed one, and worthy of an airing here.

Over the last few weeks there have been quite a number of letters from a handful of Labour supporters in the Advertiser.

May I, through your kind auspices, try to correct the balance?

We have seen the effects of thirteen or more years of Labour policies and can anyone honestly say they like what they see?

They ruined direct grant and grammar schools, they took us to war in Iraq on false pretences and the effects of that are the almost weekly parades of coffins through Wooton Bassett and the appalling suffering of those who return injured and jobless.

Our economy is in a mess with companies closing, ending their pension funds and struggling with increased red tape whilst industrial activity has virtually ended in this country and moved to China etc.

Crime, drugs, the expenses scandal, the treatment of the desperately sick by NICE who will not authorise the drugs that will help the sufferers because the governement will not pay the price, and the appallingly mean increase in the state pension, are all the result of Labour policies.

They now accuse Conservatives of being 'toffs', yet government seems to be run by an 'elite' who award each other peerages.

It is reported that John Prescott's wife wants to be known as Lady Prescott. You only have to ask, love. Yet is was Prescott who punched a constituent in the face, played croquet whilst Rome burned, and had false Tudor beams put on his home at taxpayers' expenses. All things worthy of a peerage.

We thought all the spin, hype and the secrecy that evolved under Blair (who courted millionaires and is now paid thousands to open his mouth) would change with Brown, who promised transparency and open government. What a hope.

Even Alistair Campbell is still around spinning his way behind the scenes.

Our trust and faith in New Labour has been destroyed.

They are no longer the party of the people. Can we bear to think of another five years of this?

I might be 80 but I'm not daft.

Edith Bennett, Broad Walk, Buxton

The High Peak is a marginal constituency - and Derbyshire a key vote for the country. Conservatives lost to Labour by a narrow margin last time round. Tom Levitt, our retiring Labour MP and former teacher, has not covered himself in glory, particularly with regard to rural education (not to mention personal expenses...ahem). One of our friends is standing for UKIP in another Derbyshire constituency. He's had an interesting few weeks. Tomorrow night his wife will be offering him moral support on the political stage and I am looking after their children for them. It will be a long and interesting night.

After the Rain

2010-05-03T20:09:00.019Z

It was one of those Sundays where we'd drifted a bit. Jaded from two late nights on the trot of celebration and partying, we did not exactly get off to a flying start. Bed was finally relinquished about 11am and a desultory sort of breakfast had - over which we attempted to make plans for what was left of the day.

I wanted to make the most of my newly renewed, after some years absence, National Trust membership by going to Biddulph Grange - at its best at this time of year with a mass of rhododendrons and azaleas; N was less than enthusiastic and quoted as saying 'you're far more interested in gardens than me'; and the girls still had homework to do. The weather was as uncertain as we were - sunny one moment, heavy showers the next. N needed to go for a run as part of his somewhat lackadaisical preparation for the Manchester 10km run in a few weeks time, and we also had to recover a car abandoned after the Ball in Buxton the night before. By 3pm I'd given up on Biddulph - it would be shutting by the time we got there. So we came to a compromise. We would go to Lyme Park - a National Trust property effectively on our doorstep - and have a walk there and then have an early supper at the Rams Head which serves up a good meal in pleasing surrounds. Decided then.

It was after five by the time we got there and I was concerned the park might be shut (as the handbook suggested it would be). However a large notice greeted us as we turned into the grounds informing us that they were open till 8.00pm. No need to worry then. There was a strong sense of being tale-end Charlies - such cars as there were were all going in the opposite direction to us, and when we got to the car park it was practically empty. We put our boots on under the shelter of the raised boot of the car as yet another heavy shower passed overhead. Was this a good idea? We persevered and as it eased set off for the little wooden gate which led into the park right behind this magnificent house. (Lyme Park was where they filmed the TV series of Pride and Prejudice - you know, the one with Colin Firth as Mr Darcy where he strides out of the lake in wet trews and all the women faint. The part that has dogged his career ever since by setting him in cliched stone.)

I have often wandered in the gardens and admired the vistas of the park beyond. There is a long avenue of trees that leads through it where once carriages would arrive from the south; there are marshy bogs and tufted grass and birch copses through which deer munch and meander. We passed an incongruous lady in smart trousers and unsuitable heels walking her dog at a swift click-clacky pace as we trudged by in our noiseless wellies. The grass was damp and spongy beneath our feet, the air heavy with wet scents of earth and plant. There wasn't a breath of air and, after the high-heeled lady, not another person about. We were alone with the birds, the bees, the trees and the deer. It was magical.

As we walked up the avenue, some deer with black and white striped 'targets' on their bottoms, drifted across our path. The ground rose gently at first, and then a little more steeply as we reached the outer stone walls of the park. Here an elegant gate with a simple design of gothic arches marked the 'arrival' at the big house for those weary travellers of old. We passed through a wooded gate in the wall to its side where now a magnificent beech wood stretched up to the right while to the left pines predominated. We turned to the left, stepping over a small stream, and followed the walled perimeter of the pine wood. Climbing gently uphill we passed through another wooden gate and were now on the moorland which stretched as far as the eye could see beyond the beech and pine wood. The contrast in atmosphere was remarkable and very beautiful.

I decided we should follow the wall south, rather than north and we were greatly rewarded. Another gate in the wall appeared in due course and we stepped back into the forest and followed a pathway through the high beech trees. Some saplings grew at a lower level and I pointed out the unfurling leaves from their thin brown cocoon. They were the most perfect delicate concertinas of translucent lime green - so delicate that if you tried to stretch out the concertina to see the shape of the leaves they would become, they tore immediately. The juxtaposition of bare golden moorland to our left from where the sound of a stream babbled up, with the stillness of the wood and the birdsong which echoed throughout it, was quite exquisite. I looked back and saw E had sat down on the edge of the path where it rose steeply and took a twist and was simply looking out at the moor beyond, drinking in the atmosphere. She'd chosen the exact same spot I would have chosen and, if alone, I would have sat there in quiet contemplation for hours.

We left the path and took a short cut through the trees which, like most beech woods, were beautifully spaced and open. The canopy above us was not yet dense as this was just the start of new growth. Light filtered easily through and, looking up, you saw a delicate tracery of branches with intermittent bright green clouds of new life and the sky beyond. Underfoot the rain had left the thick carpet of brown leaves and pine needles soft, silent and fragrant. More bursts of lime green from moss and lichen enlivened the earthy canvas and every now and then thin gnarled fingers of fern were starting to reach out of the ground towards warmth and light after the dormancy of winter.

And so we came to another gate in the perimeter wall which led us out onto a pasture at the edge of the moor. Here sheep were grazing and as we walked down the track with a small copse of pine trees to the right, lambs gamboled out following their mother, to the safety of the rest of the flock. In front of us now, looking westward, a perfect water-colour sky full of different hues and shades of grey with breaks of palest blue, lay above a view of Manchester and the Pennines beyond. The light was of a clarity which allowed the gaze to reach as far as the industrial shapes of Ellesmere Port and the Welsh hills beyond and all that lies between. It was remarkable to step out of the intimate peace and beauty of this deciduous haven and have such an intense and sudden exposure to grand horizons, to light and space, to a world beyond.

Having absorbed all this for a moment or two, we continued on down the hill and back to the car park, our Sunday afternoon walk having come full circle. We dipped into the adventure playground and swung on the monkey bars in perfect solitude. No other screaming kids, no other peoples conversations, no other energies. Just us and the birds and the bees and the great outdoors, washed clean by April showers and spring sunshine. A moment in time where the rhythms of our family and those of nature had, for once, perfectly convened; a walk after the rain which left our own spirits cleansed and contentment restored. We climbed into the car, now on its own in the park, and pointed its nose towards the pub and the thirst-quenching beer that N had been longing for ever since he'd come back from his run...

Things that Go Croak in the Cellar

2010-04-27T22:37:00.009Z

I went down to the cellar yesterday morning to find these three little poppets waiting for me when I opened the door. They stood stock still. A minute sibling was crushed and dessicated nearby. I scooped them up and took them outside, one by one, and put them on the edge of the stone trough by the spring.

Hard to spot, aren't they?

I tried another angle:

And another to let the boys at the back be seen:

The toad watch signs are currently out on the lane out of our village as it passes the reservoir. This is a popular crossing point for toads on their way from breeding ground to water's edge. For more information on the migration of toads, you may want to have a look at this site:-
http://www.countrysideinfo.co.uk/toads2.htm

I'm now just trying to figure out what they are doing in my cellar. And that's not even where I keep the wine...

The Beauty of Peace

2010-04-16T15:11:00.011Z

What a sublime afternoon it has turned into today. Still, slightly cool air but warm sunshine and a hint, hopefully, of good things to come. But I go back to the word 'still'. For it is truly still today. No wind. All is calm. And the only winged creatures in the sky are the ones that were made to be there - our sweet chirruping feathered friends. What a joy it is to be outside today where, here in the hills, a sense of true peace reigns. I am so grateful for that.

We do not get disturbed by many planes up here - when they pass over on their way to and from Manchester airport, they are still relatively high. Sometimes they are noisier than others. I guess it depends on the plane and the wind direction. They do not bother me, though, as it is nothing compared to what we used to have to endure in our house in London. Our road may as well have been the runway as they were so low by then you could see the whites of the pilot's eyes. We would go for weeks at a time with huge Rolls Royce engines droning overhead every two minutes, often pausing only for a coule of hours between 1am and 3am before the Jumbos rolled in again from the East with the inevitability of a Pacific breaker. In summer you had to go inside to make a phone call - and even then, if the windows were open, it was a real strain to hear. I had a radio in the shower which consistently failed to pick up the BBC but was adept at tuning in to the communications between cockpit and control tower. It was quite revealing in fact.

No such excitement here. The fat buzz of a bumble bee, the extended crow of a cockerel, the exciteable bleating of mother and new born lambs, the hard bark of dog or cow, the whinny of a horse, the poetic call of the curlew. I have heard all these in the last five minutes. This is the musical backdrop to my days. I wonder gently about the world before engines and come over all Cider with Rosie. White sheets hang on the line to dry for the first time in about a year. My neighbour's chickens are pecking around my garden in the evening sun. I am sitting on a wooden bench, warm sun on my face and a cup of tea by my side. It doesn't get much better than this. As far as I am concerned right now, let that volcano roll. I am here, I am happy and I have no need to go anywhere.

Real Spring Lamb

2010-03-25T13:54:00.013Z

Now, lambs are a prerequisite of Spring I would say, but I must admit I haven't spied one yet. I know they are out there - the girls said they saw their first one out of the school bus window back in late February. But nothing round here so far.

The other day, while I was in the mountain shop in Buxton (in the old Woolworths premises) deliberating over what shade of beanie to get the girls for their forthcoming school ski trip, I heard a couple of oh-so-busy assistants leaning over the pink snow boots on the discount stand and chatting about the virtues (or otherwise) of reality TV's latest brainchild, 'Lambing Live'. Broadly, they seemed hooked. Well, one of them was at least. I have to admit to not being as smitten myself. There is something hugely irritating about having Kate Humble gush over it all as if lamb birth was some new phenomenon. But I mustn't be too unfair as I am aware that there are many who do not have the chance to see such things for themselves. Around here we have a wonderful farm called 'Blaze Farm' - aka The Ice Cream Farm. They took the business decision to diversify and, beyond the dairy farm where you can see live milking and the cafe where you can buy freshly made icecream produced from the cows' milk, there is also a really informative nature trail (it is here I learned how to build a dry stone wall), a selection of goats, donkeys and poultry to view as well as kittens (their numerous cats are highly productive, it seems) and, of course, at this time of year, lambing.

A couple of years ago, when I had children at schools in two different counties and the Easter holiday dates did not overlap, I had six weeks to fill with engaging activities. I spent a lot of time at Blaze Farm. So much, in fact, that I am not sure I have been back since. I kind of had my fill. Yet it was here that I saw my first ever lamb actuallly being born. I had arrived with L and a friend of hers from school - both of them just six years old and full of the joys of spring ('scuse the pun). They shot out of the car like escaping gas and whizzed into the lambing shed. Straw bales are set up where the children are allowed to hold new born lambs; there are the lambing pens themselves and then the pens where mother and child bond (just like Lambing Live, you see). I had a small camera in my pocket, just in case, and, as luck would have it, I wandered in after the children just as a ewe was giving birth. It was jolly exciting - bit like the robin in my feeder (previous post, for the confused). The girls made yuck noises while l took photos...

Anyway, I was at the Cheshire Schools Music Festival in Macclesfield on Monday night, for my sins, and I happened to find myself sitting next to the farmer's wife (who is hugely creative and also runs a Pottery Cafe at the farm). I asked her how they felt about 'Lambing Live' and she rolled her eyes saying how her husband had groaned and said 'Now I'll just have a load of people coming in telling me how to do my job!' Poor man, I feel for him.

In the meantime I'm looking forward to seeing my first Spring Lamb and will just have to close my eyes and think of England when one of them ends up on my plate in a year's time covered in mint sauce...

PS: have just found this rather amusing article on 'Lambing Live' and the relative merits of Reality TV.

The First Day of Spring

2010-03-16T16:14:00.013Z

Tuesday, 16th March 2010

I'm officially calling this the first day of Spring up here, although technically it's not till Saturday. The sun is out and the temperature guage in the car went (briefly) into double figures (11.5 degrees) for the first time in months as I drove out of Buxton. I glanced at the vistas around me and there are still, unbelievably, pockets of snow to be seen in shady high spots and in front of dry stone walls where it had been blown into drifts. Yet the general flat dead browness of the landscape, the colours of vegetation which has been covered by snow, is lifting slightly. There is a hint of green to come, of new growth. The daffodils by the roadsides and in the gardens are just pushing through now and the drifts of white snowdrops are finally looking robust and abundant rather than stunted and cold.

In fact I have just been out in the garden to pick some snowdrops for our guest room and my parents' imminent arrival. I noticed that the tulips are poking their way up through the soil in the borders and tubs together with the daffodils and the crocuses. There are even some primulas finding a new lease of life and showing off diminutive heads of palest yellow. The hellebores have taken a pasting from the frost - just one has white flowers right now - as have other plants around the garden. I have lost many pots, burst apart by the consistently freezing temperatures - all of which have endured previous winters without trouble. Another sad demise is the tall yuccas we brought back from Milan in 1999. Against all odds they have battled their way through life in the frozen north, but I fear the ice that coated them while we were away at Christmas was their downfall. I was a little upset when I went out one day recently to find the green crowns scattered about the terrace - they had completely rotted off the stem. I was very proud of how these plants had resisted, to date, all that the Peak District could throw at them - and I am sad because they are a happy memory of our time in Milan and the birth of our first daughter (who loved them dearly because they made her feel 'exotic' and dream of white sand beaches, turquoise waters and palm trees - her idea of Paradise).

Meanwhile, I have turned, alarmingly quickly, from laughing at my mother with her (relatively) new found obsession with feeding the birds in her garden, to becoming exactly the same. It all started at Christmas when they were staying. She braved sub-zero temperatures to leave the warmth of the hearth and trip out into the snow in unsuitable shoes clutching plates of old crusts. She'd throw them on the snow and we'd watch the robin come to feed. It was all rather lovely.

I've always fed the birds but not with the dedication with which I have now taken on this duty. I used to collect crusts and stale bread and put them out on the old stone bird table; and a few years ago I bought a seed feeder which I hung on a tree near the terrace. Sadly, neither of these birdly banqueting venues are easily visible from the kitchen window so it was rather a thankless task. Then, a few weeks ago, I was round at a friend's who had a bird feeder stuck to her glass patio doors with suction cups. At first I inwardly winced and could barely suppress slightly unkind thoughts concerning style and ageing, but soon I was entranced by the numbers and varieties of birds which were literally flocking to feed. To see them up close and personal was actually rather wonderful. So wonderful that I went straight out to the pet shop and bought one for myself. I filled it with seed, stuck it on the kitchen window and waited. And waited. And waited.

In fact it seemed an eternity before the first bird felt brave enough to try it. Then one day my phone went while I had popped to the post office. It was Elena. I imagined she was going to tell me the friends we'd been expecting had arrived. But no, instead she said excitedly: 'Mummy, Mummy! A bird's just come to your feeder!' 'What was it?' I asked all a-twitter with excitement myself. 'A robin. But Louisa pointed at it and shouted 'LOOK!!' and it flew off again!'

We saw no more for another week or two. Then I put out some bacon and croissant and I noticed a few days later that these tasty morsels had gone. So, slowly slowly, they are becoming aware of this new source of food - but they seemingly keep sneaking up when I'm not looking. I hope that, bit by bit, they will gain confidence that all is safe and I will actually be able to see who comes to feed.

I have also moved some seed feeders which you stick in the ground. They were in the border by the stone bird bath but, again, out of sight. I have now moved them to the border in front of the kitchen window and it brings me much joy to see the little bluetits perching and pecking on the small cups of food.

So, you see? I have turned into a little mad old woman overnight. It is really quite frightening.

A Growing Girl

2010-03-07T11:00:00.015Z

E was 11 on 6th January, while we were away skiing. She had a lovely day on the mountains and a fuss was made of her at supper with Happy Birthday banners and a cake and everyone sang. We opened a few presents in the morning before breakfast and the rest of them before supper. She put all her cards up in her room. This is the second year running we have been skiing on her birthday - and it sure beats a first-day-back-at-school birthday which is what it would have been this year. After all, it's not really a great time of year to have a birthday, is it?

I look at her closely as we celebrate the passing of each 12 months. The photos are usually taken in the dark, after school. There are pictures of her, chubby faced, in her green infant school uniform. There are pictures of her looking a little sharper of feature in pale blue ballet uniform. She is always smiling, a little shyly. There is always a cake with candles in front of her. I have always tried to make the birthday memorable, but it is often hard on a working day in the middle of winter - which is why the skiing thing is great for her for now. She is having fun, out in the open air, in beautiful surroundings, with her sisters, friends and both parents. I think it makes up a little for that Bad Time of Year curse.

You can never forget the birth of your children, the day they came into the world. I was lucky enough to have E, my first born, while we were living in Milan. Many of my friends asked if I would be coming home to have the baby. Why would I do that, I used to ask, quizically. I was in the land of baby worshipping, where motherhood was something to be celebrated, not scorned; where as a mother you felt a first class, not a second class, citizen. It was one of the happiest times of my life. I was being looked after by a Professor of Gynaecology (thanks to an earlier set of miscarriages) and his English wife and once I got over all the scary unknown bits, it was a breeze. I was going to give birth in a state maternity hospital, all geared up for any eventualities, and then be moved into a room on my own in its private wing. A perfect compromise.

E was due on 7th January. My brother and all the parents had been over for a memorable Christmas (our last one all together as it turned out as my father-in-law very sadly passed away shorty after E's christening in May). My mother-in-law still talks of how I came to meet them on my bicycle, 9 months pregnant, looming out of the Milan mist on a dark December night. I had been out and about again on the 5th, doing my jobs, going about my business, not quite sure of the exact moment when my life was going to change for ever. That's the worst thing about childbirth - will you be in the middle of the High Street when it suddenly all starts to happen? You can't exactly stop your life. Stay indoors. No, you have to carry on and hope and pray that when the moment comes it will be an acceptable one - but it remains an extraordinary thing to have to live with in those last days of carrying your unborn.

I have never been one for taking down the Christmas decorations early. I leave them till the last minute on the 6th. I hate having to admit that the fun is over, it's back to reality and the rest of the year - all those resolutions you know you'll never keep. So that night of the 5th, the tree was still up, the apartment still festive. It was quite late at night and suddenly the snow began to fall. I opened the door from the living room which led straight out onto a fabulous terrrace with 360 degree views of the city, the mountains and the street life below. I loved that place. But here, just now, for a moment, all was still as the soft white flakes fell from the blackened sky. It was a moment of peace, of solitude, of quiet contemplation.

At 7 o'clock the following morning I was in a hot bath, bent double and rendered speechless with increasing frequency from excruciating contractions. It had all happened so suddenly. I had not woken N, just quiety went to run a bath. But now I was calling out for him as best I could, saying I thought it was imminent. For reasons best known to himself that morning, he decided to shave. As he smoothed himself down, showered and pommaded, I struggled to make him understand that It Was Coming. He (not hastily enough) finished packing my bag for me and we went down from our sixth floor eerie to the ground floor in the tiny wrought iron lift. We hailed a taxi which, when told I was having a baby, proceeded at an unprecedented snail's pace (for an Italian driver) to the hospital. There was not a car on the road because it was a public holiday, yet still we stopped diligently at every traffic light. By now I was in the sort of agonies that cannot be described. Already I was losing my sense of dignity. It just didn't matter any more. And by the time we reached the hospital I had plumbed new depths of animal imitation. While N was engaged in the lengthy Italian red tape, I rolled helplessly around the empty reception, clutching my stomach and howling. With a hint of disdain on his face, I was finally called in to a small room by the registrar and asked to sit down and spread my legs. He peered in. His head shot out again fairly quickly, with a different expression now. I heard him say 'she's fully dilated' and suddenly I was being rushed along a corridor in a wheelchair to somewhere unknown where all I could hear was primaeval screaming (they don't do pain control in Italy - against their religion - a mother should suffer in childbirth). While I was joining in the cacophany in my delivery room, N was trapped filling in page after page of stupid questions like 'when was your wife's last period?' - you can imagine he knew the answer to that one! I really thought, that after all this, he was going to miss the birth of his first child trying to remember the date I last menstruated. The whole thing becomes a surreal memory at this point. There was a pretty auburn-haired young midwife called Francesca who suddenly appeared in the doorway like an angel and tried to help me push (I had no idea as I had barely had an anti-natal class). It was a disaster and, despite her being like a tiny little doll at just 2.5kg (5.5 pounds), it was a mess getting her out. My throat was scorching and I thought I'd never speak again (relief to some). I needed stitches, I needed a catheter to empty my bladder (probably almost worse than childbirth). I needed a drip but hey missed the vein so it swelled with liquid like a farmer's forearm. I stayed on a trolley in a corridor for hours, waiting to be transferred to my room. But you know what? None of this mattered. From the moment this tiny creature from an unknown world was placed, bloodily, on my belly, I felt complete. Nothing else mattered. We rang parents joyously. We were proud, We were parents.

And so here I am, eleven years on, watching that tiny baby grow into a beautiful young girl. She has poise, she has charm, she has a wisdom and sensitivity which was there from her earliest moments. My brother calls her Falling Leaf. She is that kind of a spirit. Kind, gentle, head in the clouds, blowing with the winds. She's my little hippy girl, the one with the pale blue eyes, the softest blond hair and the voice of an angel. She's Elena Carah Francesca, my first born, my beautiful growing girl.

New Fridge Food Post

2010-02-25T13:08:00.005Z

Just to let you know that I have written a new Fridge Food post over the way. It's veal with a Marsala and mushroom sauce, asparagus and saute potatoes. Veal with Marsala is an Italian classic and brings back so many happy memories of long atmospheric lunches overlooking Lake Como in the sunshine.

I would love to sit here and write just now, but I'm afraid I can't. This evening I am expecting my third set of house guests in two weeks and I have the place to clean, food to buy, meals to consider and prepare, laundry to do...and a thousand other jobs.

The snowfall of recent days has disappeared as the thermometer has crept above zero, but now we are back to damp, dank, chill and grey - my most hated weather. The snowdrops are battling nobly on, only just getting going thanks to this long cold winter. Which reminds me that I must go out and pick some for my guests' room. They are travelling over from France and I have just heard that their flight was cancelled (French striking again I believe, though I was blissfully unaware of this) and they are on a train to Calais. I think they will be needing a roaring fire, good wine and a warm bed when they finally get here, so I'd better get going.

Till the next time.

Have a good weekend.

My Wednesday

2010-02-11T14:19:00.014Z

Things I Have Seen Today

The sun rising on a frosty field.

Tears running down a small child's face.

A dusting of snow on old slate rooves.

Swirling snowflakes showing the shapes of the wind.

Yellow headlights on a foggy grey road.

Black tarmac turned unexpectedly white.

A distant blue sky and sunlit plains shining beyond the heavy spotted veil of snowflakes which shrouded the misty heights and sheep-clad hills around me.

A sleek silver express train.

Laughing children on a big school bus.

Two white-haired old ladies in a small red car.

Crows circling above the bare black branches of a winter tree etched against the clear sharp blue of an evening sky.

A golden hill and a shadowy valley.

Calm reflections on a glassy reservoir.

Long-horned cattle with shaggy coats and muted hues grazing in the mist.

A pale evening sun polishing the white dusted bluff of Combs Moss in the distance.

A girl on a pony, a man with a dog.

A smile lighting up a small child's face.

The light going down on a still frozen field.

Things I Have Felt Today

A small child's hand in mine.

The strong hug of spindly young arms.

The energy of yoga.

The warmth of friendship.

Good food in my tummy.

The peace of solitude.

A mother's love.

Gratitude.

10th February 2010

Fridge Food - New Post

2010-02-05T00:36:00.004Z

I've just posted a recipe for sea bass fillets with fennel, leeks and grapes. Go take a look if you're feeling peckish.