I’ve had a pretty strange week, yesterday, I was at the allotment and someone or something stole my sandals. I think it was foxes, with that and the mystery cat, I feel like I’m being terrorised by small animals…
Here are this week’s links, you will notice that there is nothing here about Boris Johnson’s 6th or 7th child. He doesn’t need the attention..
I think I’ve said before that I’m not finding cooking during lockdown all that hard, I cook most of what I eat anyway and not having to pack it up to eat in the office is actually easier. I also have a full freezer but the hardest thing has been finding flour and yeast, which is a pain given that I buy plain flour and bread flour every other week
Just as this started, I ordered an instant pot and that’s been really handy, a top tip from Sustainable Cooks has been using the yoghurt setting to get bread dough to rise!
Most breakfasts have been yoghurt and fruit or pumpkin pancakes, yoghurt and fruit (although I will admit to rhubarb crumble and yoghurt for a couple of breakfasts!).
Lunches have been soup or toast or picky bits (hummus, eggs, cornichion).
There has been some baking, these are the cocoa brownies from Smitten Kitchen and they are amazing and very simple, you can make them plain but if you have some dark chocolate or choc chips, you really should add them!
The other thing I’m semi doing is preparing food parcels for Sarah because she’s currently working and hasn’t been home to Fred and Justin since the lockdowns so living in an airbnb. Food for her has just been a copy cat of what I’m eating, some risotto, soup, pasta, egg rolls, dahl. Not much different from how I cook for myself but better than a diet of kebabs or M&S ready meals, no shade on either of those options but not exactly sustaining for weeks on end!
This weekend, I used stale bread to make bread pudding. Most of which is in the freezer because otherwise I’ll just eat all of it!
Happy Friday! This is a bit late (sorry Mum!) because I have this thing called work instead of being on holiday in the North!
However, I am in London and alive and well and not mourning the death of a loved one, and I won the work zoom quiz. It’s the first time I’ve done it and I won, it’s a completely unjustified reputation I have mostly based on lucky guesses…
It’s that point in spring where the things that I’ve planted are slowly getting going but the weeds are going hell for leather!
At the back of the plot I’m pulling up weeds and volunteer potatoes out (6 on Sunday) and it’s getting ridiculous. I’m also realising how much I don’t have to do because Ma does it. Weekly watering of perennial fruit and weeding in the paths mostly.
The fruit is beginning to start. We have baby plums, gooseberries and blackcurrants. The summer raspberries are beginning to flower, the blueberries and the apple tree are still looking outrageously extra and we even have a couple of strawberry flowers that I completely didn’t manage to eradicate.
Much to my surprise, we may even get irises next month. I planted a bunch under the plum tree about three years ago and they’ve done nothing, this is the first year they actually look like irises.
My grandmother was named Iris because they were flowering in her father’s garden when she was born in May, I’ve been completely unsuccessful in growing them, so if they flower next month when my mum can’t see them, I’ll be both delighted and sad (such are the times right now).
I still have a huge amount of work to do and I’ve been very lax with an awful lot of it but there’s still a lot of time until autumn!
Happy Monday! I checked the calendar is it actually Monday…
This is the ‘there are no updates’ Monday Miscellany post. So I would like to tell you about my night of being terrorised by a cat…
Last Thursday night, I was tired and went to bed as usual at 10pm and was woken up at just past midnight by a cat.
I should explain my bedroom window overlooks downstairs flat roof and often wildlife visit, (my favourites are always the magpies*), but I also, unless it’s utterly frigid, sleep with the window open and on Thursday night it was wide open. I also have Radio 4 on all night. So at 15 minutes past midnight I’m awoken from my sleep by a baby…once I’m fully awake I realise it’s a cat and its outside my window. On the flat roof, paws on the windowsill, meowing it’s head off but not coming in. I worry a bit because it doesn’t have a collar so I don’t know if it’s a stray or belongs to someone and is just trying it’s luck but mostly because I hate to think of a domesticated creature that doesn’t get looked after properly. I grew up with stray/feral cats around and it makes me really bloody cross. Eventually, it stops meowing and sits down, so I close the window a bit and go back to sleep.
It’s gone midnight & I’ve been woken up by a cat sitting outside my window. I don’t know the cat, it looks ok & cared for but doesn’t have a collar. Cat owning people please make sure yours have collars. I feel like a monster for not letting a meowing cat in or calling the RSPCA
At 2.37am, I wake up to see that the cat is on the windowsill watching me. It doesn’t go away just watches me. So I go and sit in the living room for a bit. When I come back, it’s still there. My best guess is that this cat spends it’s nights sitting on my window sill for Radio 4 and was annoyed that my window was opened too wide for it to do that. Or it’s stalking me as it’s preparing to conquer the world..
So here is what I learned last week. Cat owners need to put collars on their cats and I really need curtains. Then yesterday, I was queuing to get into Wilko and there was a lady in front of me with a cat in a backpack. It’s been a weird cat week….
Other than that the week was fairly uneventful, I reached zero laundry in the basket and was so disgusted by the dirtiness of the laundry basket, I washed that too, I also hoovered, did all the ironing and cleaned the oven again. The intervention I thought I needed after this is over might not be the one anyone was expecting….
As you’ve read through all that, here is a Monday gift. Doncaster Council’s twitter feed. I know that doesn’t feel like a gift but when you see their lessons learnt from history, you’ll get it, you’re reading this, you’re my people and whoever is running this feed, needs a raise!
China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, was so obsessed with finding a way to live forever that he ended up accidentally killing himself.
We skipped a week because of Good Friday and we are now still in Easter. About the only thing John Paul II ever said that I found inspiring was that Christians ‘are an Easter people’. This is the time, which is why Easter and spring make so much sense, when nature concurs with our faith (I feel that the folks in the Southern Hemisphere must have a harder time because the liturgical year is very out of sync with their seasons!)
I am grateful. I wake up every morning both numbed and bolstered by how lucky our family has been so far. But our luck is only further to the point of how completely unfair, uneven and arbitrary survival feels in this present moment. I hope more of us realize that, for many people in this country, it has always been like that.
Despite the glorious weather, I’m still trying to summon my energy for the work, I’m feeling listless and uninspired. With the bank holiday and extra days off, in addition to being home all the time, I’ve completely lost track of what day it is too…
I was given some tiny lettuces which I planted up in a bed and also sowed some radishes and salad leaves, and some flowers for the pond area, they look pretty and are perennials so all good.
I’ve planted them quite close because I don’t expect all of them to make it and I’ve also bought a eryngium to go in that area too. My eventual plant is to move the bleeding hearts and the anemone and snake’s head fritillary bulbs to that area as well.
I’ve sowed some flowers to go in all the designated flower areas of the plot. Dahlia (piccolo mixed), pansies (clear crystal mixed), poppies (iceland mixed), sunflowers (russian giant), forget-me-nots (indigo), alyssum (carpet of snow), chrysanthemum (white breeze) and shasta daisies (alaska).
The sunflowers were free seeds and I’m really planting them for the birds but everything else was from Wilko in the half price seed sale, I’m hopeful that some of them will live and as the majority of them are perennial, I won’t have to think too much about flowers every year. I already have the verbenas and roses and rudbeckia, so if some of these take in either the pond area or the flower beds that will make me happy!
I’ve also ordered another 1,600 litres of compost for the new beds, there is a lead time of approximately eight weeks, so the squash may be going in later than planned but as I haven’t even got around to sowing them (it’s a task for today) I’m not so worried about that. I have managed to sow tomatoes, so that’s something. Squash and leeks are the only other thing that I will start indoors everything else I’ll sow direct!
My new blueberries arrived last week but I can’t get any ericaceous compost, so they are currently still in their pots at the plot. I need to think about how to acidify the compost I do have and get them planted. For those of you keeping count that’s eight in total, I’m going for double figures and remember these are little plants so they’ll take a while to produce loads of fruit (which is what I’m aiming for!)
The apple tree is in blossom and it’s looks amazing, we also know what type of apple it is, Beauty of Bath, which is an early dessert apple, it apparently usually fruits in early August but the apples don’t store all that well. The plum goes really early too so it’s obviously a theme for the fruit trees on my plot.
Over 10,000 people have died in hospital from COVID-19, goodness knows what the number will be when home and care home deaths are added in. We are getting to the hardest part of lockdown now, it’s not a novelty and we’re not fully adjusted to it, we will get more used to it.
However, we’re all at the stage where we’re bored and irritable, you can see it in how outraged everyone is by people who they think are flouting the rules, with how judgemental we’re all being.
There’s a quote I’m fond of about how privation can refine the soul but preferring to refine the soul when the the body has no other choice. But right now we have no other choice so we can choose to nurture the good in us or we can choose to give in to the destructive part of our natures.
I’m obviously going to try and choose the better parts of me. This time is really hard for everyone, I haven’t touched another human being since Mother’s Day, but I’m not cooped up in a too small flat with someone I don’t like (just trying to imagine what this would be like 30 years ago in a house with my dad gives me nightmares.) I’m alone but I’m an introvert, so goodness only knows how difficult extroverts are finding it. I’m in the flat a lot and I have no garden but I have the plot just around the corner. I miss my friends but on Friday, some allotment friends, gave me some lettuces and flowers to plant and I’ve been talking to friends a lot more than usual. I’m finding it hard to work from home but I still have a job and I have no new money worries. I’m irritated by the noise next door from the loud children but at the same time, I’m not trying to entertain and educate distressed children who don’t understand what the hell is going on and yes they are loud but they are also having fun and that’s a good thing – I went and had a nap in the living room where I couldn’t hear them! I’m going to carry on donating to the food bank, I’m going to try and use this time productively, I’m not going to pretend it’s not rubbish but it’s not the disaster it could be. I’m going to help if I can and if the only way I can help is to give a friend a food parcel, then I’m going to do that.
I’m not going to tell anyone to be grateful for this time, I’m not at grateful for it, it’s bloody awful. I’m not going to minimise anyone else’s pain or distress right now by telling them to be thankful. I really feel for people having a bad time during all of this and if you are finding this hard, I’m so sorry, I hope it gets better for you soon.
I’m just telling you about how I’m trying to get through this. When things are hard for me, I’ve always tried to be thankful for the good things in my life, to remember that however bad it is, it could be worse and that it will get better. Nothing lasts forever. That has been the key to my resilience. Yesterday, I saw Sarah and she hasn’t been home or seen her husband, her dog, her son or (more importantly!) her grandson for three weeks. The B&B her husband runs is shut down and she’s working in the NHS in London not in her new job because that is a community job and she’s really needed here, she told me that she felt so lucky to have a routine of work to help manage.
That’s what I mean, about gratitude, I have trained myself to find it because it helps me manage. It doesn’t mean that I didn’t burst into tears on Saturday because I miss my people or that the best part of my weekend was, Sarah, the allotment and face timing my mum and then my brother and actually seeing their faces (and watch the nephews show me their Easter Egg hauls!). There’s always light if we look for it, but sometimes we really have to look for it.
So this week, because I’m on leave until Wednesday, I really need to spend some time today and tomorrow cleaning. The flat is tidy but things (like the kitchen floor) need attending to. I need to clean the oven again (once last week wasn’t enough, it was that bad!). I’ll come out of this maybe with a drink problem but also with a very clean living space! I will come out of it though and I hope you all will too….
It’s Good Friday, no links today, but as I’ve been posting about my faith this Lent, I wanted to post this, I’ve posted it before but it’s worth watching again.
Nic Dempsey 