Allotment Adventures: Things are looking up

Posted on January 17, 2018 by nicdempsey

I did a very quick trip the the plot at the weekend to collect some food, I took leeks, chard, kale, black radishes and parlsey, sage and rosemary.Which is not bad for January and much better than last year but the plot is looking very January-ish and sad. There is so much work to do before the end of February and then I’ll be thinking about sowing and everything!There are signs of life though….rhubarb is starting to pop up along with the weeds.The rosemary is flowering which makes me happy but reminds me that the herb patch needs a haircut and generally things need attending to.Ma reckons she’ll be back to full strength next weekend, assuming she is, this is the list of work for next week.

  • paint the shed (me)
  • weed (ma)
  • dig up raspberries (me)
  • cut back remaining raspberries (me)
  • move gooseberry bush (both but mostly me!)
  • tidy up the area next to the shed (both)
  • plant sweet peas and put in a cold frame (both)
  • buy a cold frame, which will probably be a little plastic thing we can weigh down (both)
  • sort out seeds and get the ones we need (both)
  • burn plant waste (both but mostly me!)

The last weekend of January, we probably won’t get to the plot so there is another list for February.

  • buy and assemble new raised beds
  • buy compost and fill new and old beds
  • sow leeks
  • sort out the herb patch, things need cutting back and tidying
  • clear the brassica bed
  • clear the leek bed
  • buy and assemble a new greenhouse
  • sow tomatoes (end of the month)
  • sow beetroot and carrots (end of the month)

That is enough to be thinking about, there is a trip to Wilko in my future and lots of manual labour!

 

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New Year, New Skin Care Routine

Posted on January 16, 2018 by nicdempsey

I’ve talked about what I use on my face in this space for a while and January always seems like a good time to talk about it. Forty-something skin is no joke, winter always shows on my face and I need to slightly adjust my routine to accommodate, it’ll change again in the summer…

As I’ve settled into my forties, I’m find I’m less concerned about the lines and wrinkles, I still feel that I look like me. I am deeply offended by the chin hairs, no one tells you that the difference between old ladies with chin hair and those without, is the application of tweezers, Ma did warn me but I just thought it wouldn’t happen to me! Far worse are the spots, I wasn’t spotty teenager so to have them now seems like a punishment for something….

(oh and all of these photos were taken with my iphone after 9pm on a rough Monday night , they are not great I know it. I know I should do better but it may never happen…)

They seem to be hormonal as they mostly pop up two weeks before my period, on my chin and mostly on the right side of my face, Like all spots, they are better when I drink lot of water and worse if I’m not taking my make up off properly. I make sure I do both and thoroughly wash my face at night, with either Waitrose Baby Bottom Butter (still) or Waitrose Pure Hydration Hot Cloth Cleanser which is fantastic. I use a flannel to take it off and I change them every day. My skin doesn’t feel tight afterwards and it really helps keep my skin in good health, in the morning I use Simple Regeneration Age Resisting Facial Wash.

The second thing I do is put freederm on the spots, it’s the best stuff for reducing the redness and inflammation of the little red blighters and lasts a long time.

Finally, one of the things that does help is using Superdrug Naturally Radiant Glycolic Acid Pads once a day and Superdrug Naturally Radiant Glycolic Overnight Peel once a week, I didn’t start using them to help reduce the spots, I just noticed that it helped, it also makes my skin feel great.Finally, this year, someone suggested that folic acid might help. I have never knowingly taken folic acid, I’m not pregnant and never planned to be, but I thought I’d give it a try I’ve been taking it since the end of December and so far, so good. I’ll report back in a couple of months to see if it sticks or survives PMT fortnight!

When three people with very different attitudes to skin care but all with good skin, recommend a face cream which has also been mentioned by Sali Hughes, I go and buy it. The face cream in question is Superdrug’s Optimum Phytodeluxe Day Cream. It is really lovely to use, moisturising but not greasy, and the packaging is lovely! I liked it so much that I bought the night cream too.Then when they was on offer, the serum and the eye cream, I thought it was time to commit to using eye cream but I’m still not sure that it’s helping, I still have dark circles but it’s only been three weeks so it might need more time and I to use them for a while to work out if they are working and if the serum is worth replacing my usual serum for.

The great thing about Superdrug’s ranges is how often they go on offer, currently the Optimum range is on buy one get one free, but when I bought them in December they were half price. I’d like to say that price doesn’t make a difference but it does and putting something on my face that feels good and doesn’t bankrupt me is important to me and probably to lots of other people too! The truth is though that the most important things  are the cheapest – drinking lots of water and washing your face throughly, so do that if all of this feels like too much money but a month in my skin seems to be in better condition. My make up goes on better and generally when it’s not working or I’m not looking after it, a sure sign is that my foundation won’t go on well and sits on my face. It looks less natural, more Elizabeth I!

Has the New Year inspired you to change your skin care routine at all or do you have the perfect face products and use them well?

 

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Monday Miscellany

Posted on January 15, 2018 by nicdempsey

Last week was hard, my first full five day working week in three months, tough. The 9 to 5 wasn’t too bad, it was all the other stuff – the commuting, getting up in the dark, the rush to be in bed by 10pm.

Schools went back this week too, which means that my commute (at least the home to Hammersmith part) is filled with Oratory schoolboys talking authoritatively on subjects which they do not know or understand. Generally I ignore it but the kid who I told off on Thursday had it coming, and if girls really put out to the extent he spent the week boasting about on the train, well there is no hope for the human race!

This is the sign on one of the toilets at the office.

Unisex fine, but only headless women?

But work has been productive, my work mail box gets somewhere from 50 to 100 emails a day, when I left the office on Friday, there were 2 mails in there that needed actioning, yes I’m feeling pretty good about that. There were 0ver 5,000 emails in that mailbox when I started that job!It’s been a good reading week, I love actual paper books but a kindle makes it much easier to be near the end of a book because you’re just carrying the kindle, not as I was on Tuesday carrying two book because I was going to finish one and being without a book anywhere is horrific!

I went to the allotment this weekend and was pleased to see that, in spite of my neglect of it in December, it’s still giving us some food!This week I also managed a walk with Sarah and Fred, all the laundry, mega food prep, a trip to the cinema (Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri), a trip to Ma’s (she’s still not feeling amazing but is much better) where  I teased her about being way ahead on her codeword a day book. On Sunday night, I was knackered but ready for this week!

Things to get done this week:

  • pick up my dry cleaning
  • make marmalade
  • pick up the prescription I still haven’t picked up
  • be in bed at 9:30pm and lights out at 10pm (I’ve been in bed at 10pm and awake because I need some time to chill!)

 

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Sunday Music

Posted on January 14, 2018 by nicdempsey

Sometimes music has meaning to you beyond anything the person who made the music intends or has a different meaning to the one the listener takes. (For example there is a Foo Fighters song that makes me think about Lent and Jesus in the desert and I’m pretty bloody sure that was not the intention when the song was written, there you have it the mystery of creativity…)

For me, and this is a huge part of my journey as a christian, I understand that I fail God most when I don’t love enough. As a human, I understand that judgement comes from fear and fear comes from lack. When I am whole and secure in who I am, I’m able to switch off love and when I can do that, I am the person that God made me to be and I am truly free. (Yes it is unbelievably cheesy, it’s really hard to be English and reserved and christian or sincerely express any emotion, which is why my Grandad bought us lots and lots of kitkats and fruit!)

However, I’m human and not God so I fail in that more times than I care to think able. To be human is to fail. This song somehow sums that feeling of when I get it right, which I do very, very occasionally.

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Friday Links

Posted on January 12, 2018 by nicdempsey

Happy Friday! I’m the more happy to see a Friday come around than I’ve been for a while. this is the first straight five days I’ve done at work since 30 September last year, it’s both easier and harder than I expected!

Here are this week’s links….

How I let drinking take over my life

Good for Macmillan. Fire and Fury Publisher Shuts Down Trump Lawyer’s Demands to Cease the Book’s Printing. I’m not sure if it is an important book in the greater scheme of things but Trump shouldn’t be allowed to be a bully.

Number of Britons applying for French citizenship rises tenfold in three years. You can understand that!

The growing problem of rural homelessness

 “We should judge ourselves on how we look after our weak members,” he says. “If we’re not doing that, we’re not doing a good job on anything.”

‘I live in fear I’ll miss a seriously ill patient and they will die’. It’s a crisis and it doesn’t stop being a crisis because you thought it might happen and decided that if it did, you’d cancel routine operations. Sometimes I know it’s going to rain and I take an umbrella, that doesn’t mean it’s not raining. Also how did Jeremy Hunt get to keep his job and add more responsibility to it, when this is happening?

Farage backs second Brexit referendum. Even an stopped clock is right twice a day, Farage is still an charlatan though.

Finally, backwards books. Has there ever been a more stupid trend? No, there has not…

 

 

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Allotment Adventures: 2018

Posted on January 10, 2018 by nicdempsey

It’s January and I’m desperate for time to hurry up and Spring to spring so I can get back to growing things. However, last year I started sowing too early, so this year I’m holding my nerve and not sowing anything until next month! Instead, I’m planning…

December  was a terrible time for allotment related things, I was sick for most of the month and then working and the weather was off when we could go. But as things stand we planted broad beans to over winter and there are leeks, cavolo nero, black winter radishes and chard to harvest (and my one spring cabbage). My aim is to have all of them (except the cabbage) out by the end of February, when we will start again with the new things.Ma and I decided not to grow garlic this year because it got rust really badly, the leeks got rust to although not quite as badly and although I know that there isn’t much you can do about it, I decided that it wasn’t worth having a bed taken up for a lackluster crop and decided the same for onions which got white rot last year.So time to plan for the new year, the things I loved last year were tomatoes, potatoes, the cucumbers, the squash and getting Ma to love pak choi and cavolo nero!

First plot structure. Things are pretty much staying the same and there are things that I didn’t get to last year, starting with painting the shed! I also need to attend to shortening the raspberries and digging up a gooseberry bush. After some talk we probably aren’t going for a polytunnel this year but will get another greenhouse, this year I’ll take the cover off it before it gets windy! New raised beds! one brand new bed at the bottom of the plot and two to enclose beds we already have. That leaves the largest bed on the plot not enclosed and we may get around to that, but probably not before the growing season starts! We still want to sort out the top of the plot but that might wait until next year because concrete slabs are heavy!

Lists of things we want to grow this season.

Tomatoes, the plan is three beds, one for cherry tomatoes (red cherry probably) and a bed of plum tomatoes (amish paste and san marzano) and another for eating (black russian). They are hard work but so worth it.

We will also grow cucumbers again because they were amazing. This year I want to try to have two waves of them, mine were great but not as strong as I’d like so I’ll sow some in March/April and some a month later. I know that we’ll grown boothbys blondes again but probably a green one this year too!We will grow potatoes in bags again but more potatoes, probably three or four lots and I want to be better and plant a set for Christmas too!

We will grow more beetroot, salad and spinach, we’ll probably grow radishes too but the radish and rocket get devoured by flea beetle so I probably won’t grow rocket although it may pop up by itself.

This year we are not going to grow cosmos or nasturtiums, but we will grow marigolds, stock, afgan poppies, sweet peas and some other flowers, and I hope that the irises, grape hyacinth, anemones freesias and my one day lily come up again. I failed at planting spring bulbs last year and I’d like to get to that this autumn. I know Ma is hoping that we the loves lies bleeding has self seeded and will come up again too!

Talking of self seeding, I will give the borage a hand if it doesn’t come up and will be growing my usual set of herbs, coriander, parsley, dill and basil, some as companions to my cucumbers and tomatoes. I also fancy planting some walking onions and will be hoping that the tarragon survived and that chives and lemon verbena I planted last year come back!We’ll grow carrots in buckets this year as the bath has strawberries in it, this will hopefully ensure that we get some this year! French beans and peas will be grown again because we love them and I want to grow more chard, cavo nero and pak choi because we loved those. I need to sow them earlier this year so we get more of them but we probably won’t bother with broccoli again.

We are, as ever, growing all the squash. Courgettes, patty pans and crookneck and for winter squash butternut, boston and baby blue if the seeds come up and some kind of acorn squash that might actually climb up the arch!We will grow leaks again and black winter radish.

Finally, I want to try my hand at sweetcorn this year, if we have space.

So nothing radical this year, I want to get better at producing what I love but don’t be surprised if somewhere along the year, I buy a blueberry bush or three!

 

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What I Read: December 2017

Posted on January 9, 2018 by nicdempsey

Yesterday,  I said that I knew Ma was ill because she didn’t want to read. That was pretty much me in December. I watched a lot of Grey’s Anatomy but read hardly anything at all. Two books.

Dark Eden – Chris Beckett

I’ve had this (and the next two books) on the TBR list on my Kindle for a while. And this is my second attempt at it, it took a while to understand what was going on and to picture it in my head. Part of that was the language which was clever and part of it was the impossibility for me of imagining being in the dark all of the time. The setting is a world far away from Earth were two people are left on a world with no sun. The flora and fauna are bio-luminescent and outside of the forests, the world is cold, snowy and dark. The story starts about 5 generations after the first two, and all human life is the produce of incestuous relationships. There is something quite horrifying about being so desperate for sex that you would sleep with your brother for a start. So with the world being in darkness and that, the world of Dark Eden is very dark. So we have an interbred population, some of them are ‘batfaces’ (harelip) or ‘clawfeet’ and there has been a huge amount of linguistic drift which the tellers of the story use. It was really interesting to see the adaption to the world in the use of language. Time starts to be measured in ‘wombtimes’ because without a sun to rise or set the concept of a day doesn’t make any sense. The story really charts the rise of patriarchy in this world were everyone appears childlike and the oddness of people who have never experienced things like electricity or buildings talking about them. From the outside the way that the people of Eden have discarded things they don’t need or don’t work or can’t use – reading, clothes, buildings and reduced life and language down to the basics is something to think about. I don’t know if I enjoyed this or not, I was vaguely repulsed by the characters all the way through but I wanted to find out how it was going to end. I’m looking forward to the next book, which is set 400 years after this one, to see how Chris Beckett thinks his society has developed.

Man Hands – Sarina Bowen and Tanya Eby

I was disappointed with this. It was all a bit easy and while I didn’t expect it to be the most intellectually challenging book, this was light even by those standards. I think there wasn’t enough, the heroine and hero had horrible things happen to them but I didn’t really feel that they needed to recover from them or grow in any way in order to move forward. It was all poof, sorted done.

And that’s what I read in 2017.

The full list is here.

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Monday Miscellany

Posted on January 8, 2018 by nicdempsey

Last year, I posted about what I did the week before and it got a bit boring. So this year, instead of sticking to a ‘this is what I did’ post, I’ll just write whatever is on my mind when I sit down to write it. It will probably talk about what I did in the previous week but it might not if the previous week was boring!

So today is when things get interesting, over the weekend I realised that I’m going to have to do this getting up in the dark thing for a while yet. I took down the tree, there are more changes to happen to this room but right now I’m happy to have it back to normal, with the tree down the room looks much bigger!Ma is still poorly, Ma is very rarely ill but she’s off coffee and booze and is having problems reading, which is the trifecta of really sick for her (and me for that matter). Meanwhile, I am feeling very clever because against her protests, I was right about solutions to two problems she was having which she didn’t think would work! They did. More people should listen to me, I am wise!

I went for a lovely long walk with Sarah and Fred. Which is getting to be a habit that I am really enjoying, Fred has become a teenage dog and very bossy with it. I am learning a lot about dog training with these walks and talking to Christelle about her new cute puppy…

I’m feeling pretty on top of home (I’ve been a domestic whirlwind, all the laundry is done, the house is tidy and and food prep. I spent two hours in the kitchen yesterday making breakfast and lunch for next week. This week is similar to last week because that worked. I hate the washing up but fitting in with the theme of my month, those two hours really are a gift to future me… If you were thinking about menu planning and how to go about it, I wrote a post in 2013 about how I menu plan and pretty much this is still how I do it.Breakfasts are egg cups and veg. Lunch is soup (make with squash I grew in the summer and yeah, I’m feeling pretty good about that!) and salad (salad not pictured). Snacks are an orange, an apple, pineapple, yoghurt, mini cheddars and a marzipan thing. That is 7 portions of fruit and vegetables. Dinners are not as strictly planned but I have a couple of options – more lentil soup, stir fry, roasted vegetables and sausages, fish and steamed vegetables, Friday Night I will eat pizza, so I’m not worried.

Things I want for this week, which mean I have to do them.:

  • to stay on top of my life admin
  • to go for a walk every lunch time
  • to pick up my prescription
  • to book a catch-up appointment with the therapist (I’m generally fine without but 2017 had some very unexpected bits to it and I just need a tune up for my emotional health)
  • get an allotment plan for January written, I was there yesterday and it’s looking alright there is lots to do and I’m happy to see that my broad beans have popped up

Have a good week people!

 

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Sunday Music: I’ve Changed My Mind A Thousand Times

Posted on January 7, 2018 by nicdempsey

One of things I miss terribly is Russell Davies on Radio 2 on a Sunday night. It’s been a while but it punctuated my weekend with music that I generally didn’t know and always liked.

I miss it, I still get my Russell fix on Brain of Britain on Radio 4 but it’s not quite the same. I don’t know much about Kay Starr or her music but I love this, I wouldn’t have heard it if not for Russell…

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Friday Links

Posted on January 5, 2018 by nicdempsey

Happy Friday!

I hope that re-entry week hasn’t been too terrible for you and if you’ll not back at work/school/whatever yet that you’re enjoying the rest!

Here are this week’s links…

I should have asked why people don’t vote. About time someone did!

New pet leave. First I need to be paid enough to be able to afford a place to live that will accommodate a dog and then the money to afford the pet. So I don’t know maybe we could start with paying better salaries?

Free speech works both ways – as Toby Young is finding out

Why free hospital parking isn’t as good as it sounds

Raw water: the unsterilised health craze that could give you diarrhoea What the hell is wrong with people?

I have a fridge full of cheese…this might help use some of it up. How to make the perfect broccoli and stilton soup

I loved the library when I was kid, I still love the library now but for reluctant readers or even keen ones, this run down of the reading merit badges that children can earn in the Maine library that Lelia runs is amazing. I want a badge…

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