Letters from Wetville

The Kings Seed catalogue is late!  As tomorrow marks five years since I began blogging, I've been looking back at those earliest posts (from my first blog ) and it turns out that at this time in July of 2007, I'd received my Kings Seed catalogue, salivated over every page and written and rewritten my shopping list a squillion times and sent the order off.  This year the catalogue is delayed, apparently, but nevertheless I did get into the garden yesterday.  I buried the hedgehog, who had been dead and smelly for some time, but the weather and the busyness meant I'd forgotten about it.  I weeded a bit, planted some polyanthus, some iceland poppies and sowed some broad beans.  I transplanted the naked ladies from Mary K's garden which have been patiently waiting in a bucket for weeks.  Frankly, it wasn't nearly as much gardening as I longed to do, but small pleasures are still pleasures. FH is sick, which means I have to turn into super-person.  Like...

Bluemilk (Andie Fox) has just written another fabulous article, published at Daily Life, on The Great Lies of Childhood .  The title alone is excellent, but I loved the article.  If you are procrastinating enough from whatever else you know or imagine you should be doing now to be reading my blog, then I recommend you upgrade the nuanced analysis aspect and read her entire article. This is my favourite quote: "Longing for the simplicity of the past leads some of us to pursue a more traditional parenting approach, but even then you can fall prey to hyper-parenting. Throw away the flash cards and turn off the educational iPad games and find yourself just buying a different brand of unattainable idealism. Because now the kids can climb trees, but only while wearing the organic cotton clothing you sewed yourself. Grow vegetables, make your own bread and try to summon the energy to teach the children knitting. This revisioned domesticity can be just as reliant on an...

It was truly utterly fantastic weekend.  I'll not be tarnishing this post with any links to non-holiday reality.

Over at A Bee of A Certain Age, Deborah has posted a review of the reports looking into the absence of women in the top police jobs.  It's a good post and the issues are worth reading about and I really hope the culture changes in the police force. It's just that I can feel a rant of my own coming on.  Why is it that I never see articles about the under-participation of men in caring sectors?  Yes I know many of us mention it in private discourse and it can be found on feminist websites etc., but why doesn't it look like: Grave concern over lack of men in kindergarten structure. or Report identifies that only 1% of cleaners in schools and hospitals are men.  X from the Advisory Board of Hygiene Careers is very concerned about the messages this sends to young boys.  "Boys, explained Mr X, are hugely shaped by the roles they see around them.  When they grow up surrounded by women cleaning at home and at school, they feel excluded from the skills ...

Prudent and sensible lost. The mechanic's bill arrived and it wasn't as bad as I'd feared and I went ahead and booked a weekend in a rainforest.  I like being married.  It means I get to organise birthday presents which involve great pleasure for myself. I still want to write like Deborah Challinor.  I lay awake at night plotting a West Coast historical drama, one with a strong and likeable female protagonist whose main aspect is not sexual gorgeousness.  I feel like I'm swimming upstream a bit on this, even just thinking about it.  Last time I wrote more than five pages, I was in Santa Marina de Valdeon, a tiny hamlet in the Picos de Europa in Spain.  My obsession at the time was the marriage of my Irish great great grandparents in Canterbury in 1880.  They lived in two quite separate parts of Canterbury, one in Lincoln and the other in Chertsey (which is near Ashburton).  I was sure that the travelling Catholic priest had arranged their meet...

My strongest response to the end of a holiday is to plan another one.  Prudent and sensible persons might not do anything of the sort.  P & S persons would observe the imminent need to replace the 21-year old car, the looming mechanic's bill to repair the aforementioned 21-year old car, and probably other tiresomely viurtuous aspects and stay at home and wash the kitchen floor and repair the toilet cistern. But there is a birthday in the house soon and I don't think 'prudent' and 'sensible' were words in the marriage vows we wrote and exchanged. So today, the last day before term time madness begins, I stayed in my jammies all day, napped for part of the afternoon and researched options for a weekend in a rainforest.  I looked at what other people have been sewing on their sewing blogs as well.  I watch sewing about ten times more often than I actually sew.

Turmeric.  It relieves inflammation and it chelates iron and there are plenty of high quality scientific studies showing this.  As a magical substance, it sure beats rain dancing, and is more useful.  This afternoon I was in whipping up a storm in the kitchen in preparation for term time (storms in my kitchen often look more like mess than completed food items).  I'd made some chocolate brownie and was contemplating pumpkin muffins.  Then it occurred to me that I could slip some turmeric in.  This, with approximate measures for the spices as I simply tipped them from the packet, is what I made: 2 C self raising flour 3/4 C sugar 75g butter, melted 3/4 C milk 1 egg 3 small-medium pieces of roast pumpkin (which I didn't think to weigh) 1 Tablespoon cream cheese 1 teaspoon each of powdered ginger, cumin, turmeric & cinnamon black pepper Mix flour, spices and sugar into a bowl.  Melt butter.  Beat egg.  Mix egg, butter and milk....