Well, the world is pretty much terrible. It’s not that everything is terrible, it’s that even the good stuff, is fixing something that’s broken. Here are this week’s links….
Shouldn’t someone in football also care about the war in Yemen just a little? I do have a dog in this fight and for what it’s worth I think the sanctions are the right thing to do but this isn’t just a Chelsea problem. It’s a football problem. It’s the ‘fit and proper person’ test not being fit or proper in any of the football leagues, (go and ask Derby about that). It’s the World Cup hosted by Russia and Qatar. Football has been following the money with no regard for morality for years. Chelsea is a symptom, it’s not the disease. Stopping Chelsea from selling tickets and shirts won’t fix what’s wrong with football, that’s going to take much more work.
It’s mid March and the light is improving but the weather is variable. The news is still terrible and it’s difficult. In the midst of a crisis we all want to think that it’ll be over and it’ll go back to normal but that’s not what happens, the crisis just moves. We are living in difficult times, however bad it gets, I’m not fleeing for my life so I’ll call it good.
This week, I had a migraine, ran a team event and put my back out. It’s been quite eventful. This week I’m in the office tomorrow and Wednesday and sowing seeds.
Now events require a policy of European engagement that can only be achieved by ignoring everything the prime minister has said on the subject. It requires a style of grown-up leadership that Johnson can affect because he is a thespian and rhetorician of some talent, but not sustain because he is also a dilettante and a fraud. He embodies a trait in Westminster culture that treats politics as pantomime, where a prime minister can play at being Churchill without Churchillian gravitas and without being accountable for words delivered with a wink, in a stage voice tinged with perpetual jest.
March marks the real start of the allotment year for me. You can tell this because yesterday, 1000 litres of compost (Wickes peat free) got delivered to the flat yesterday and I’ve started to wheelbarrow it around to the plot 100 litres at a time! My plan to make my own compost is coming up against an animal that is kicking it out of the compost bays and onto the paths, I need to sort that out this month so it’s a job I’ll add to the list.
I also bought a small, cheap set of grow lights to see if that will help prevent my seedling from getting leggy this year. I really need to start sowing soonish. Peppers, chillis, aubergines, tomatoes, leeks, kale, brussels sprouts, celeriac and a first wave of cabbages and cauliflowers (so more than a little bit of sowing). I know it’s too much but I don’t want a repeat of last year, when everything was too late, so I’m just going to go with it. I also found a use for an old National Trust Handbook and have made loads of little paper pots to hold all these seedlings. I’m really trying to keep to my ‘no disposable plastic’ on the plot promise. I do have a lot of pots from plants I have bought and I will use those, this feels like a good way to start these seedlings.
I made a list (which I’m not going to enjoy doing but I’m going to feel great if I can get it all done in March)
Paint shed
Strim grass edges
Weed, top up and cover the beds
Sort out the weedy area by the boysenberry
Weed and mulch the flower beds
Weed and reup the cardboard and woodchip on the paths that haven’t been done already (the ones at the back of the plot)
Sow radishes and salad in the polytunnel
Sow peas, late March
There’s probably more that I’ve forgotten but I can always add to the list!
We’re already into the third month of the year! Congratulations on getting through two of the worst months of the year. I say this like March and April are walks in the park when in fact they are not, especially if you observe Lent, which starts tomorrow. (I had some thoughts on how the hungry gap and Lent go together a couple of years ago and you can read them here!)
However, the days are getting lighter, and the clocks go forward at the end of the month and I’ll spend some of March and early April acting like I’m on E because of how much happier I feel due to the additional daylight and I’ll start to enjoy caring for the flat and the plot because I’ll be more awake.
So I want to set some more realistic aims for March, all of my January plans went pear-shaped when I caught a cold, so although I didn’t fail totally, I didn’t do as well as I might, March is my time to re-group.
I’m back on my low spend kick, because in April, I pay more tax and all my bills seem to be going up, and I’ll be paying to go into the office more, so I need to use March to get into good habits. Therefore, I have £200 to spend on food and anything else. The bulk of that will be on food because it’s not getting any cheaper, I’m budgeting £12 a week and £44 for the two oddbox deliveries, which leaves me with £100 for any other spending, and there is already £48 committed to Laithwaites for wine. That should break me of buying lunch when I’m in the office and get me back to pre-pandemic food prep. I’m not going to give anything up for Lent but I am going to go back to my no treats that I haven’t made myself. In the Catholic Church you have Sundays off this obligation, and I’m not going to do that but I am going to give myself some exceptions, 11th March which is our team meeting, every Saturday Ma brings pain au raisin (which will probably shake out to every other week), Mother’s Day and the weekend that Ma and I are having the nephews overnight, because it’s also Lu’s birthday and we’re having a belated Mother’s Day for Ma and Lu the day after.
All of this taps into the other food related aim I have in March, which is get back to menu planning and food prep. I still cook for myself but I need to get back into food planning. The joy of being at home so much is that can wing cooking. That’s fine but my lack of planning is having an impact on the days I’m in the office, so ‘more planning, less sushi’ is my motto for the month.
Another thing that need to be improved, is my ‘exercise’ regime. My fitbit records my activity and I pleased and surprised that I generally get the required 22 minutes a day gentle exercise, what I don’t get is the cardio, so I’m going to change that and make sure that three days a week my 22 minutes is cardio, given my general lack of fitness, it shouldn’t be too hard to get my heart to beat faster!
That’s it, gentle things that will reset me from winter survival to spring joy!
During the various lockdowns, over the last two years, I learned to live with the disconnect of personally being ok (missing people, learning to WFH and all the other strains) but knowing that others were suffering more than me.
It’s something that as a person from the First World, I should be pretty used to. There’s an endless list of places in the world where there is actual suffering that doesn’t compare to any issues I have, Iran, Iraq, Afganistan, Syria, Palestine, Mali, Rwanda, Burrundi, India, Nepal. The list is long and the issues are painful, none of it interferes with my day to day life. And so it is with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, feeling terrible and worried because Putin is escalating and threatening nuclear war, but also knowing that this is not anything like the suffering of the Ukrainians being asked to make molotov cocktails, or the Russians arrested for protesting the actions of their government this week. I’m not sure I would be up to the bravery that either of those actions requires.
I have written to my MP, (but I know she agrees with me already!), prayers and donations to the people on the ground trying to help is the best I can do. Lent starts on Wednesday, to remind me that the world is broken but I also know that it doesn’t have to be.
So other than a reaction to the terrible state of the world, life has been as normal, I’ve gone to work, I’ve had friends come for dinner, I’ve spoken to my brother, everyone in my little world is ok, except that Chelsea lost a football match yesterday, which I can live with.
This week is more of the same with extra sleep added in (I’m feeling slow and tired!)
It’s not very happy for the Ukrainians, I don’t have answers to how we stop Putin without a world war, but one thing we should do is bring the hammer down on Russia, which is also going to hurt us. No buying oil or gas, no visas for Russians, revoke visas for people with links to the Russian state (which means Putin). If we don’t Russian takes Ukraine, we’ll be going to war to defend the NATO countries that border Ukraine, he won’t stop.
Oh and for all the people who wanted the UK out of the EU, this is why the EU is important, it’s why it was formed…
Last year, when I was in Newcastle, I bought a book. This is no surprise to anyone who knows me, I actually bought a lot of books on that holiday, we did a morning in Barter Books and a day in Newcastle, where I had a book token to spend! Anyway, for the purposes of this story, the book that I picked up was ‘Guns in the North’ which is the first three of the nine Carey mysteries by P. F. Chisholm. I’m not mad keen on mysteries but the main character in these ones was Robert Carey and they were sent on Borders in 1592. I’m keen on Elizabethan history and I was near the Borders, so there was another book added to my unruly TBR pile (I don’t have a book problem, I just don’t have enough time to read!)
I finally got around to starting this one in November, and I was captivated. For those of you that don’t know, Sir Robert Carey was a courtier and son of Lord Hunson, who may have been Henry VIII’s illegitimate son by Mary Boleyn but the book takes this as fact. Carey is the man, who without the permission of the Privy Council, took the news of Elizabeth I’s death up to Scotland to tell James VI of Scotland that he was now King of England. He’s interesting because in 1592, he abandoned being a courtier and went to Carlisle to be the Deputy Warden of the West March, under his brother in law. But enough of the actual person, let’s talk about the books.
They are so good, Chisholm does that great thing, of putting you right in the time and place, so while I adore her fictionalised Carey and love the totally made up character, Henry Dodd, they are Elizabethans, not modern people in the 1500’s. They frequently discount woman as having brains (despite being ruled by one!), they drink all the time, they aren’t very clean (although Carey has been a courtier and is cleaner than most), they are cavalier about death (and murder and because it’s the Borders), theft and have a flexible attitude to morality in general.
Without being boring or preachy, Chisholm manages to convey a completely different way of viewing the world that’s really easy to understand. One of the ways she does that is with language, so it’s not just that characters speak with accents but that they use words that we wouldn’t and just think differently, Carey is in love with a married woman and it’s not until book eight we discover that he has no idea what colour her hair is as it’s always been under a married woman’s cap and that doesn’t stop him having dalliances either.
They also run on from one another delightfully, in nine books we only cover about seven months, I loved the first three books so much that I immediately bought all the others and bought the first three for Jo as a Christmas present, I’m hopeful that there will be a 10 book because I want to know what happens next.
I don’t much like February as a month, if November is the worst month of the year, then for me February comes in as a close contender. I think it’s because I’m over winter and want it to be spring and it just isn’t yet. It’s not light enough, it’s not warm enough and I’ve endured January so I want a reward for all my endurance and February is not a reward it’s just ever so slightly less of the same. Which means that doing anything in February is difficult for me, because all I want to do is sleep and not leave the house. I’m also trying to use the heating less, so there have been days wearing my cozy blanket.
This photo was taken before the haircut!
So over the last two weeks, I feel I’ve been busy and done loads. The week before last was miserable because February and a period, followed by a Friday night migraine. That’s pretty unusual because usually they happen before the period, we’re going to chalk it up to peri menopause. The only two remotely useful things I did were got a grip on my workload (namely the four diaries I manage) AND got rid of all the mould in the shower in the bathroom. I looks so clean, and makes me happy. Other than that the week was a bit of a wash and I didn’t get to Grace because of migraine recovery. On the Sunday, Ma and I finally got to the Elizabeth and Mary exhibit at the British Library, I enjoyed it but as is often the case with displays like this there wasn’t enough room and there were too many people who don’t understand the concept of sharing. So many people just standing right in front of things, so no one else could read the displays, let alone look at the objects and taking photos of everything. I did take one photo to prove I’d been there. I’m still Team Elizabeth I (Mary wasn’t very bright!).
This is the one photo that I took
I stayed at Ma’s on Sunday night, I feel like we could have set the record for the longest journey from Kings Cross to Surbiton, the trains and buses were not co-operating and on Monday we saw Jane for haircuts, we both look so much better, got to catch up on the gossip and stroke the dog (she just comes and sits next to you, until you pet her!).
I was in the office on Tuesday, it’s half term so the trains were reasonable and the office was quiet and I got sushi for lunch because yes, I do have to bribe myself to do things I don’t want to do. The weather had other ideas, it was really wet and the bag containing my sushi disintegrated, and my sushi hit the pavement. Sigh. It also destroyed my umbrella and my fringe. I also had another nose bleed which I’m pretty sure was a direct result of the LFT I did on Tuesday morning. So overall, not a great day for me. I did at one point need to apply the first of my three rules ‘if no one died it’s not a disaster’ to calm myself down!
Wednesday’s highlight was a walk with Sue, which I didn’t get the week before because she was away and I missed it so it was good to see her. I know Sue finds the same walk pretty boring but I like that for a year now, we’ve see the parks (and the kitchen garden in Walpole Park) change with the seasons.
Blossom
On Thursday, the lady from Wickes came to talk about and measure for a new kitchen plan. I’m trying really hard not to get too excited because it’ll be a faff while it’s being fitted and I may not get everything I want. I’m not too fussy about how it looks – I don’t crave expensive marble countertops or integrated appliances but I do need it to be more functional, so a bigger sink, an oven preferably higher up, a bigger fridge and freezer (which I’m willing to help pay for), lino on the floor and more cupboards would be delightful. I’ve seen the plan and got the quote, so now it’s a case of this against what the landlord wants to spend so I don’t want to get my hopes up. We’ll see.
The cupboard stays but maybe with less on it!
On Friday, Ma was supposed to come over so that we could do the Hayman’s Gin Virtual Tasting but it was a bit windy so she stayed home, we saw the tasting and we’ll catch up on the gin at a later point. The flat survived Storm Eunice and Ma came over early on Saturday so we could check the plot, ours was all good, however on other plots we’re so lucky!
My plans for this week are less exciting, (in fact I have almost no plans!) I’m in the office two days this week, and Sue and Richard are coming for dinner on Friday night. I’m also starting to get my head around sowing for the Spring, I need to buy some grow lights and then I need to start making lists. Also as Ma isn’t coming to me next weekend, I’m going to hers.
Nic Dempsey 