As it gets colder and darker, I can’t deny the inevitable fact that it’ll be winter soon and I’m going to be spending more time indoors. Which means I start to think more about the state of the flat, in the summer, it’s fine if it gets a bit messy, that’s not a problem but in winter, those things niggle at my brain and I need more order and less mess. It’s why every autumn, I implement Golden Hour, because when it’s 6am on a cold, dark morning, and my bed is comfy and the duvet extra heavy, the best thing I can do for myself, is an easy path to coffee and the tiny dopamine kick of ‘the kitchen is tidy, I CAN do hard things’. It helps.
Things I can ignore in summer, cannot be ignored in autumn and so I have started to get around to the little things in the flat that have been annoying or irritating me, in the spirit of Michael Mosley, I’m trying to do ‘just one thing’ them as they start to really annoy me, here are the things I have done in August and September so far:
A new system of the leaning tower of Pisa that was my TBR pile
A riser for my work at home desk, instead of the pile of work notebooks that I was using before AND sorting and getting rid of the used notebooks!
Framing and putting my allotment awards on the wall. Because I need reminding that I have worked hard to create that plot.
Framing and hanging the ‘30 ways to poster’ in the kitchen
Off the top of my head, here is a list of things that I could do/need to do in the flat, there is probably more….
three bags of books that have been hanging around since April 2023 need to go to the charity shop
the freezers need defrosting
the oven needs cleaning
the cupboard of doom needs sorting and I need to sort out the council picking up some broken furniture (because I have no way to get to the tip!)
there’s a pile of allotment things in the hall that need sorting.
The box of pictures hanging out in the bedroom
I need to wash and sort out plastic pots.
I need to sort out the box of pictures that have been sitting in my bedroom since the work on the flat (April 2023!)
My bedroom needs a declutter.
My kitchen cupboards also need a clean and declutter.
The white cupboard in the living room needs a tidy.
The tiles in the bathroom need a ‘mould and mildew’ clean.
The bokashi bins need emptying.
Not all of them require money, most just require time and effort but I would like to see how many I can do because I think they would make my happier in my space this winter.
It feels like September is nearly over; autumn is relentless and I am tired. Other than that, it’s all good.
The liturgical year is currently in ‘ordinary time’. It’s not called ordinary because it’s dull, but because it’s counted. (The name comes from the Latin ordinalis, which refers to numbers in a series, its where we get the word order from too). So Ordinary time is the ordered life of the Church outside of feast (Christmas or Easter) and expectation and reflection (Advent and Lent). I’m in ‘ordinary time’ at the moment. I’m adjusting to Autumn and ‘caring’ for Ma but there are no major highs or lows, it’s ordinary and routine and that pretty much sums up last week. Ok, there was Tuesday, when I tried to recycle my keys but my being scatty and a bit brainless before 10am is ordinary.
Ma and I visited the Farmer’s Market in Surbiton on Saturday and I bought all the cheese! I got the number of ripening tomatoes down to one tray but I do need to go and do another pick today (after the rain) and there are about 5 kg of tomatoes in the freezer that I’ll process later in the year.
This week is much the same, I’m in the office tomorrow and Wednesday, there’s the EDAS AGM on Thursday. (After some consultation with plotholders, the Pumpkin Walk will go ahead on 26th October, I will be serving mulled wine to the masses and ticket sales will start soon, please do come along if you’re local, the tickets fee is nominal so we can keep the numbers containable.)
Because we’re nearly done with September (only 7 more days) my thoughts are slowly turning to October, which while not frantic is busier than September has been. There is stuff happening in three of the four weekends and sometimes a couple of things happening. So it’s going to be busy. But this week is still ‘ordinary time’, and I’m really grateful for it…
Last year, the lid on the travel mug I’d been using died and while technically it still worked it was becoming awkward to use. As soon as I’d bought it, I realised my mistake because it didn’t fit under coffee machines and while it was leak proof it was always tricky to open and use on the train.
In use at the office
Enter this Circular and Co cup, it’s leakproof, the size of a paper coffee cup, has a lid that you just pop up and down. I also appreciate the symmetry of some of it being made from old paper cups.
Finally, if you break the lid or the cup you can just replace the lid or the cup and not have to throw the whole thing away and there are instructions on how to take the lid apart and deep clean it.
These links are the culmination of at least a month of me collecting them and then forgetting to hit publish so some may be a little out of date!
Israeli forces kill at least nine Palestinians in West Bank raids. Israel won’t stop until someone (the US) stops them. They are gunning for genocide and calling criticism anti-semitic. It’s not anti-semitic to point out when people are wrong, the reasons for it are complex but it needs to stop. Take away their arms, sanction them, do to them what the West does to other states like Iran. No more playing favourites, the Israeli state is not moral it is refusing to compromise and blaming Palestinians for it. Enough.
East German culture has been ignored for too long. Until we embrace it, our country will remain dangerously divided. I grew up with the idea that West Germany spent a great deal of the post war years, addressing Nazism and that East Germany had not. And I suspect that assumption meant that when AfD started to rise that this was why. The old ‘those who don’t learn from the past are doomed to repeat it’ cliché. Given all things that are happening here, I think that’s too simple an assumption but somehow I’m not surprised to discover that the people behind AfD are not from where their supports are..
More than a million unpaid UK carers living in poverty, research finds. This is something that I’ve been thinking about recently. Fortunately, I won’t need give up work to care for my Mum, she’s doesn’t need full time care, just some help. So, I’ll juggle work a bit if there’s an emergency, I’ll use up leave to go to appointments with her, everything else will fit around the evenings and weekends. I know so many people who have done or are doing that. I don’t expect to be paid for looking after my mum, I recognise the privilege of having a parent that has been alive long enough to require help as she ages.
However, there is financial cost for caring, for me that the cost of travel and having to give up a day every weekend, this year I bought extra holiday and as I’ve used most of it on mum’s appointments that will continue next year. I’m lucky, I’m relatively well paid (for London) and I work in a company and have a manager who understand and give me time. Also Ma isn’t struggling for money, we can afford it (although if anyone would like to argue for a free bus pass for carers, I’m here for that!). If you can’t, there’s carer’s allowance.
Well, that’s the theory, but to qualify for the £4,258.80 pounds a year carer’s allowance, you need to earn less than £151.00 per week. Which is £7,852 a year. How many people do you know that can live on that? If you must give up work to care for someone and have a spouse who supports you, carer’s allowance will help to offset the cost of caring, if you don’t need to work for money, carer’s allowance is great. If you are single or if you and your partner both work, then you can’t claim carers allowance. 35 hours a week at minimum wage is £20,820.80. If you’re earning that, money is probably already tight, you need all the help you can get but you can’t get any help. Which means probably one of you giving up work and then everyone struggling. People who have full time jobs can’t claim carers allowance as they juggle the emotional and financial cost of caring for others and save the country a massive amount of money in care fees and NHS costs. It’s a ‘benefit’ designed for the 1950’s not for the 2000’s. We need to massively rethink how we view caring for sick, disabled, or elderly people. As part of the re-think we need to think give carers the same rights as parents to vary hours or take time out when required and we should increase the threshold of what you can earn before you can claim carer’s allowance. I think that if you are the primary support for someone who is claiming disability living allowance then you should get carers allowance regardless of how much you earn and we should perhaps define the role a bit better, looking after a disabled child, an elderly parent or a elderly parent with dementia are all very difference experiences with different tasks and we really need to look at how we choose to support people.
Ministers launch pension credit campaign after restricting winter fuel payments. I get why they did away with universal winter fuel payments but I really dislike taking a universal benefit and restricting it. The state pension is about £11k a year and the pension tax credit only takes it to the state pension, also that cliff edge of people who are about £500 a year over the pension tax credit threshold worries me too. I want to see this government raise capital gains tax (unearned wealth) instead of playing about with tax and benefits of working and/or poor people.
Stop press: it’s the very last Evening Standard in London today. And that tells us a lot about Britain in 2024. We used to get the Evening Standard every day, Dad used it for jobs and I’ve done that too. I learned to cook in part from the Nigel Slater and Lindsey Bareham columns, for years Ma had the ‘Thatcher Resigns’ front page framed. I still pick one up for Mum when I go into the offie, so she can do the crossword. It’ll be strange not to have it around…
Why stop at breakfast? We paediatricians think all of England’s primary pupils should have lunch for free. I do think that universal free school meals are the way to go. However, as a child of the 1970’s and 80’s who went to schools that were full of working-class kids (ILEA so we still got the free school milk in primary), there weren’t that many of us that couldn’t afford school dinner or packed lunch. There were a couple, and it was a smallish school, we all knew why. There was a disabled parent, a single parent, there were a couple of kids who probably should have been or were under social services. But for most of us, food wasn’t something we thought about, I can’t remember school dinners, I had a packed lunch which was a sandwich, a yoghurt, fruit and veg (I really liked to take a carrot instead of an apple!), maybe some crisps and some form of biscuit bar all through my school life (Grandad was the provider of fruit and biscuits because he was a feeder, a trait I definitely inherited). Most of my class did the same and there were variations, I came from a not much added sugar household, my cousins didn’t. Some of the kids ate more exciting food than the standard white working-class diet of the 70’s and 80’s but there was always food, enough of it and healthy enough. So, I have to ask what kind of society have we created where people can’t adequately feed their children? Where they don’t have the money or time or knowledge or equipment to make enough decent food for themselves or their kids? So much so that our children are getting shorter and less healthy, that they have tooth decay so bad they must have all their teeth removed? That the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health is supportive of the idea of free school breakfasts and lunches? Am I living in the upside down because this is mental.
Sunscreen is taxed as a ‘cosmetic’ in the UK. As a skin cancer survivor, I’m appalled. I didn’t realise and it’s really stupid. I also use factor 50 religiously on my face and arms (generally the only bits of me I actively expose to the sun) and recommend the Altruist range because it’s inexpensive for sunscreen and designed by a NHS dermatologist. I use the sun cream (for body and face) and the primer. I’m fond of the whole range and use the moisturisers too!
This weekend, I did actually get to the plot, and worked on the plot.
First up was collection, I picked tomatoes and discovered blight on the tumbling toms, so up they came. Without Ma there to keep me on task, I get distracted and so pulling up the tomatoes turned to weeding the paths and trimming back the mint and the blackcurrant sage and removing some of the tomato plants that were done. I have ADHD on the plot but it is productive!
Then I got that tricky middle section of the plot, I weeded the paths and trimmed the tree spinach. You can now get from the main path to the asparagus and sweet potatoes without needing a machete! It’s not perfect and there is more to do, but it’s clearer from the blueberries to the blackcurrants.
BeforeAfter
The plot is clearly good for blackcurrants while I was clearing, I noticed that a branch I’d trimmed and stuck in a pot in the spring has taken root and the biggest of my blackcurrant bushes had made a baby! No I don’t know where I’d put them either!
Baby blackcurrant bush, surrounded by self seeded pansies
I topped up the old potato bed and my plan for that had been kale but I had garlic and it didn’t require me to go and find nets, so most of the garlic went in. You know when I harvested garlic in May, I said that I would plant less garlic for next season. Yeah, that’s not happening. I bought four bulbs each of extra early wight and rhapsody wight. Which broke down into 61 cloves and I had 19 cloves of elephant garlic! Right now I have a bed of elephant garlic (nine cloves) and another with 45 of the other types. The rest of the elephant garlic is going in the bed I’ve just cleared of tumbling toms but it needs a bit more of a tidy up.
New garlic bed complete with anti fox digging chicken wire
The other cloves of the rhapsody wight and extra early wight are going into the sweet potato bed when that’s finished in October. That bed as a bind weed issue so having the garlic in there will give me a reason to keep on top of it in winter and spring.
What else, I trimmed back the chamomile and alpine strawberries and topped that bed up with compost and planted some salad burnet in the corner.
Alpine strawberry bed
I also finally got round to planting out my echinacea, I want things next to the beds because I think it’s pretty and just paths would be boring, this is sunseekers rainbow. On the next bed over, I planted some santolina ‘lemon fizz’, if I’m honest, I don’t hold out much hope for them, they were delivered by Parcelforce and all of them were out of their pots when they arrived, we’ll see if they survive the winter.
Echinacea sunseekers rainbow
Finally, I potted up the heath pearlwort. I was going to plant it in the ground but was reading about making it bigger by potting up so it’ll cover more area when it goes in. Fingers crossed.
Heath pearlwort
That was it for work, I did collect purple sprouting broccoli and some summer squash and I watered the poly.
Next week, I want to move the compost to the back, finish weeding under the plum tree, sort out what I’m doing with my bucket of bulbs and start on sorting out the strawberry towers. If I have time and the weather is good I need to paint the shed too. It’s gonna need a couple of coats and clear out before winter!
September is a struggle month, it’s the same month every year and every year I have to relearn how to be in September. Yesterday, I was talking to Sarah about how I’m coming to terms with life at the moment, Ma and I are working out the new dynamic to our relationship and I’m working out how to re-arrange my life with the circumstances. I’m doing that and coping with the autumn of it all!
At work, I’m booking things for Christmas already and we’re deep into planning for next year, it’s true time speeds up as you get older!
Right now, I’m not winning but I am holding life to a draw, which is pretty good for September. I very un-excitingly had to re-arrange my days in the office to Weds/Thurs for for the auditors. It’s weird but good for an audit team to be auditing, no one enjoys it but it gives us an understanding of what it’s like when the shoe is on the other foot, but I hope our guys are more organised..
I had a migraine on Friday, which is never a good time and on Saturday Ma and I had haircuts. We were both quite nervous about it but the only way to get over something is to do what makes you nervous and not being able to see past my fringe and getting to see Jane are good motivators! No mothers were harmed this time!
I found a spider in my bath!
Post haircuts, we did Ma’s shopping and sorted out her new mattress. All good things. Not so good was the three hours it took me to get home! I spent the rest of the weekend sorting out the flat and the plot and as a consequence, threw my back out! I’m in my fifties, this is apparently what happens.
This week just as interesting.
Work, exercise and stretching are top of my list for back related reasons. The only plans I have are to get the ironing done, attend the allotment AGM on Thursday night and take Ma to the Farmers Market on Saturday.
I don’t know what these flowers are and they won’t last into winter but they are so pretty!
I didn’t do much on the plot this week. I did collect produce and get the green bit emptied. so I’m ready for the weekend.
2.6kgs of tomatoes, psb, crookneck squash, pardon peppers, not bad for 20 minutes work!
I also got news that the garlic is arriving this week. Which I’d forgotten about because I ordered it the day Ma knocked herself out and trauma wiped it from my brain! Also I’ve gone rogue for my garlic this year and ordered it from the Isle of Wight Garlic Farm because the garlic last year wasn’t great so new suppliers for this year.
What I can’t do is tell you what I bought but I think it was 4 bulbs of early wight because in the plot the earlier I can harvest the better. So this weekend I need to plant garlic and elephant garlic and I feel like the 2025 season starts, even though I haven’t finished 2024 and I’m not even close to being ready!
Nic Dempsey 