…was actually a sneaky way of saying that I was off to France with Tan for the weekend. The parents knew she was going but not me.
Tan and I had an excellent Japanese dinner at Hare and Tortoise in Ealing on Wednesday night, then headed for Gatwick on Thursday morning. Volotea, a Spanish carrier, has started flying twice weekly to Brest.
The cabin staff were extremely efficient and – this is important – did not spend the entire flight trying to sell us scratch cards/lottery tickets/duty free/food. There was a menu accessed by a QR code, so you could eat if you wanted, but no hard sell.
You can’t check in online, so there was a bit of a queue, but the team were smiling and friendly and efficient.
These mice were the outcome of the flight and a slight delay…
When we arrived at the parents’ house Tan sent me up the drive while she reversed the hire car up the tricky drive, so I wandered into the house… mum spotted me first and then dad appeared to say ‘that’s not the daughter I was expecting!’
In the evening we went to the pizza place in the local town – the thinnest base and hugest pizza, followed by an excellent coupe tatin ice cream – vanilla and caramel ice creams, cooked apple slices and cream.
Friday was spent admiring French bakery and vegetables, napping and then going for a walk along the canal where there were hordes of swallows and noisy coypu in the lagoon.
On Saturday – before the predicted heatwave – we headed off to Port-Louis where the sun was starting to break through. We had a mooch around the market where we were beguiled by the smells of the strawberries and fresh produce, and then headed to the beach where I hopped into the sea for a quick dip.
Lunch was at the restaurant on the beach, where we had very fresh fish and chips (tuna for Tan, mackerel for me, something battered for the parents) followed by café gourmand all round – Far Breton, crême brulée, and salted caramel glace.
I’m writing this sitting in the garden shelter in my bathers late Saturday morning. I am writing it now so I can schedule it for tomorrow morning as I may have melted in the 33 degree heat predicted for this afternoon. It’s been getting steadily hotter all week, and the garden shelter has become my office on my WFH days which has been a blessing as the house has been baking. Bailey’s chosen sleeping spot this week has been plastered against the north east corner wall where it’s cool as the sun never gets into it. Lulu, on the other hand, keeps lying in the sweltering conservatory and looking at me accusingly although there is a perfectly good hard floor in the kitchen she’d be cooler on. She’s not allowed out unsupervised as she swears at Ziggy and last week made it into the neighbour’s garden. Ted is making his displeasure known through the medium of loud miaows.
The shelter was formerly known as ‘under the treehouse’, before the kids stopped using the treehouse because of the spiders and my Beloved cut down the tree because it (a planted Christmas tree from his childhood which had grown enormous) was blocking the solar panels. It’s been one of those projects that, in the words of designerly types, just kept iterating.
The original plan was a small crows nest that the kids could climb up to, but then they got involved and it was big enough to have a small picnic table, some shelves, a crows nest rigged from an old Ercol chair, rigging and a roof. It was bigger than my kitchen. Then Thing 1 and her dad designed a seat underneath made from an old wooden bed frame, and gradually one of the sides got enclosed. The deck underneath it was extended to the edge of where the strawberries and fruit trees live in the winter and the pool in the summer.
The original treehouse with Thing 2 in the crows nest
When the original tree and treehouse came down the platform stayed, although he raised it a foot or so. A green roof was installed with succulents to attract wildlife. Then last year one of our neighbours, who knows of my Beloved’s penchant for recycling, brought over a conservatory which was being removed from a posh house refurb. The doors and windows have been fitted to the shelter so we can sit surrounded by greenery but sheltered from the weather. It’s got quite a nice half-timbered effect at the back and cladding on the corner now too.
The view from my ‘home office’Inside viewThe garden shelter
This year, he’s added a slanting roof to the front to replace the sailcloth canopies we’ve had in previous summers as they’re never square and always collect rain in a dip in the middle. My role was to remove the plastic protection from the powder coated panels before they went up, and occasionally to have an opinion (something I am quite good at, unlike DIY). Last weekend we rigged a sailcloth along the front for shade for the babies during the Father’s Day BBQ and this has now become a cunningly rolled curtain. I confidently expect to come back one day and find out that it’s been extended to meet the house so the furry thugs can access it via a Great Escape style tunnel from their catio. (He’s just informed me that he’s bought some coolpads for the cats, so this isn’t too much of a stretch.)
I came home from work yesterday and it was full of teenagers celebrating the of their GCSEs with a sleepover (9 of them!) and today it’ll be full of family which is always lovely. I love having a houseful, especially if I am not required to feed them.
Evidence that the fox is still on site at New River Head, having a good explore of the new concrete floors
Calippos
Getting all the schools booked in for piloting the new school sessions – and remembering just why I used to appreciate Brian and the box office at times like this. Eight days of delivery, eight different schools, three facilitators and one me….
Surviving Thing 2’s GCSEs. Two down, one to go…
Tom Hiddleston dancing. I am shallow.
The day I came home from work and the ice cream van arrived at the same time, followed by a dip in the pool
Air con in the office
Finishing Thing 2’s prom skirt – and she loves it, luckily. She’s going to look beautiful (of course) but also unique as she’s brave enough to make her own fashion choices.
A Solstice swim on Saturday evening – the lake was 27.4 degrees this week
Picnic food. I’m on catering strike.
Making a sensible decision not to train this weekend
On Friday it was soooo muggy that I gave up on indoors and spent the afternoon working in the garden shelter, watched occasionally by next door but one’s cat Ziggy and some pigeons. Not at the same time though, as Zig has a well-founded reputation as a mighty hunter and has been plotting to poach our roof-pigeons for quite some time. He sits on our conservatory roof and watches them, and they peer down at him from the guttering. One day he’ll make the leap…
He’s a very beautiful ginger tom who – like all animals – is a sucker for my Beloved and also for the nepeta planted near our pond. The pictures above are a before and after set for his plant love-in. The Chinese rhubarb on the other side of the pond is considerably less battered as Ziggy and the occasional other cat visitor doesn’t luxuriate in it. The nepeta was almost completely demolished but is making a comeback. As long as they leave the newt who has recently taken up residence in the pond alone they can keep the plants!
The pigeons, on the other hand, were mostly side-eyeing me as they stripped the blackcurrant bush of pretty much every last currant. I don’t mind this as we never really do anything with them other than make blackcurrant vodka if there’s enough, and also if they’re nicking the currants they’re not eating the strawberries. I am mostly eating the strawberries and the raspberries: there is nothing like a perfectly ripe strawberry picked in the sunshine and eaten still warm.
The promised thunderstorms scheduled for Friday afternoon and evening failed to appear, though it is at least a bit fresher with some breezes. Today we have the family round for a Father’s Day barbecue, which is causing me to wonder why I am supposed to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of what was put in the freezer after the last barbecue in April.
A full moon swim at Redricks Lake on Wednesday night – the water was hovering about 20 degrees, and I was feeling lazy so I mostly dipped and enjoyed the atmosphere. It’s always so pretty with the fairy lights.
And that’s it from me for the week – I’m off for a swim this morning to set me up for the day, then a bit of sewing to finish the prom dress before the hordes descend!
A happy Father’s Day to my excellent dad, too! He may need to re-register his Kindle as apparently we can no longer buy Amazon.com e-gift cards to be sent outside the US.
Kirsty x
What I’ve been reading:
Anna Again/My Favourite Mistake – Marian Keyes
Shadowlands – Matthew Green
The Gilded Nest – Sarah Painter
Earl Crush/Ne’er Duke Well – Alexandra Vasti
The Secret Service of Tea and Treason – India Holton
A Demon’s Guide to Wooing a Witch – Sarah Hawley
Hex Appeal/Hex and the City/Hex and Hexability – Kate Johnson
On Wednesday I attended – from the comfort of my living room – a session of the What Next? culture group. This is a wide-ranging, first-thing-in-the-morning, ‘free-to-access movement that brings together small and large organisations and freelancers to debate and shape arts & culture in the UK’. I don’t get to attend them very often as Wednesdays are usually my later-into-the-office days due to teenager wrangling responsibilities.
Anyway, this week’s was about the power and importance of reading to small children from a very early age. One of the speakers was the Children’s Laureate Frank Cottrell-Boyce who pledged at the start of his Laureateness (Laureacy?) to campaign to reduce reading inequality through the Reading Rights campaign. The first report has recently been published, calling on national and local leaders in early years, health, education and culture to come together and make reading a part of daily life for every child in the first seven years of life.
Mr C-B spoke about visiting the Babylab at Queen Mary’s in East London, where he watched in real time as a mother and baby were wired up to a brainwave thingy and the mother read a story to the baby on her knee. The act of being read to by a loved one visibly calmed the baby’s chaotic brain waves, their heart rate, and their breathing came into sync. He called it ‘love at a synaptic level’. From this mum’s point of view, too, there is nothing quite like the feeling of a warm, sleepy baby or toddler snuggling in for a story at the end of the day. I recognise, too, that the act of reading is also a privilege.
“If you’ve been read to, as a child, by someone who cares about you, you have been given an enormous invisible privilege. If you haven’t been given that privilege, then you’ve been left with an enormous mountain to climb.”
Frank Cottrell-Boyce
According to BookTrust’s research, 95% of families know that reading is really important but only 42% of children in lower-income families get a regular bedtime story. There are a whole lot of reasons for that – aside from parents possibly not having that experience themselves as a child, or lacking the confidence in their own reading skills to read a story ‘properly’ – but a key reason is that living in poverty or need is really, really hard. You spend time in meetings with benefits people. You spend time getting to places on public transport getting to meetings or the supermarket with the cheapest food, or on hold to government organisations, or sorting out housing, or working one or more minimum wage jobs, or worrying about your electric or gas or other bills. All this as well as caring for your small person…. the mental bandwidth this all takes up is enormous and things like bedtime stories aren’t always top of the list. Survival is.
Those of us who grew up with being read to nightly – and, with the benefit of younger siblings to listen in on later – for many years are lucky. I did the same with my own children – I was certainly still reading chapter books to my reluctant reader Thing 2 when she was eight or nine and Things 1 and 3 were listening in. M.M.Kaye’s The Ordinary Princess was a favourite, as was Jill Tomlinson’s The Owl Who Was Afraid Of The Dark which we took on holiday and I read a chapter a night to my three and my niece. Bedtime story time was one of the joys of being a parent, honestly, even when I was in the depths of PND and could barely function. It was a moment of peace and routine in what were some very hard days, but then books are my own go-to moment of sanity as an adult so this makes sense for me. Admittedly there were days when the fifth or sixth reading of the same book got a little wearing, but there we are.
Cottrell-Boyce also made the excellent point that children who aren’t read to at home then encounter books for the first time when they get to school and they’re suddenly being asked to sit down and decode things they have no experience of. Books become difficult and scary, and not something to be experienced as a joy: these children aren’t making the connection between the words in front of them and the pictures on the page because they don’t have the literacy capital to do so. He likened this experience of reading as being presented with a recipe to cook before you have ever experienced food – the pain without the pleasure, as it were. Illustrations are the first encounters with visual art that children have. Illustration – as I say a lot to people in my day job – is art with a job to do, it’s art that communicates.
The wonderful BookTrust are working with Cottrell-Boyce on this campaign. The BookStart scheme, which provides families with free books via health visitors and libraries, is the last man standing from the brilliant SureStart scheme that was one of the great successes of the New Labour government. Early Years provision has been steadily eroded over the last 14 years which has removed an enormous and incredibly important level of support from the people who desperately needed it. Increasing free childcare is all very well, (before someone says ‘but they’re doing this for parents’) but – in reality – that’s aimed at getting adults back into work and isn’t a benefit for the family. The other problem with increasing free childcare provision, of course, is that it’s not properly funded so early years settings are closing as they can’t actually afford to pay the staff to provide the care. That’s a rant for another day, however – another conversation this week was about the cost of childcare.
In our local Tesco’s they have a ‘free children’s books’ stand by the checkouts, which is brilliant – adult books are offered for a donation but for small people they are free. There are Little Free Libraries popping up in disused phone boxes and bus shelters and train stations. Libraries – thank the lord – are still free and anyone can use them, even if (like my local one) they’re only open two days a week. Librarians – a big shout out to this amazing bunch of people – still do free RhymeTime or Storytime sessions. But if people haven’t grown up with libraries as part of their lives they may not have the confidence to go in – like museums and galleries, there’s an ‘is this for me?’ barrier to get through. I’m not sure what the answer is, but this campaign might be a good start. I’m in a position to be part of the change as I start to plan what our Early Years and Families programme will look like when we open in 2026: there has always been a plan for regular storytime, sharing books and illustrations with our visitors, but now I can back it up with science and stuff. Hurray!
A catch up with Emma T on Friday, covering cats, small people, and what’s going on in the world of museum research. She’d been to Cardiff the weekend before to visit a mutual friend, and she also got to meet one of my force-of-nature cousins. Honestly, we are EVERYWHERE.
An afternoon at Copped Hall last Sunday, chasing around the GT2. I am out of practice at the toddler thing!
Salad. I like salad. A lot.
This Pangolin amigurumi – I love pangolins! They always look like they need to tell you something very important.
A happy commuter moment on Friday when I was crocheting on the tube, finishing off a little apple amigurumi. A family opposite me were off on a day trip and the little girl was very excited watching me give the apple a leaf and a mouth. When I’d finished it I gave her the apple and I think it made my day. They were off to Paddington Station to see the bear statue and then to see the Natural History Museum, so I extracted a solemn promise that she’d say hello to Paddington and give him a marmalade sandwich. ‘We’ve GOT marmalade sandwiches!’ she said in very serious tones. I hope they had a good day – I know I did after this joyful exchange.
The strawberries coming ripe in the garden in large quantities.
Meeting Oliver Jeffers, who wrote one of our all-time favourite bedtime stories. I probably should be a bit more chilled about these things by now but I’m not. I was very well behaved though.
Things I am withholding judgement on this week include Thing 2’s prom skirt which she had a very clear plan for and which I am making from duchesse satin with an embroidered tulle overskirt, and (of course) pockets. I may try and negotiate on the pockets and provide a matching wrist bag instead. She also wants a ‘train’ so no one can see her feet, despite the invention of shoes. I’m glad I fitted a tissue paper toile on her yesterday morning as the size we’d printed going on her measurements wasn’t big enough, so I could reprint at the next size up and do another fit check before cutting the fabric. I’ve bought from this designer before and have always had to contact her about missing instructions, or fabric quantities, and the instructions always assume a lot of prior knowledge so I wouldn’t buy from her as a beginner. The one moment of joy (for me, at least) is that she was hoping a pair of my glam and presumably now vintage heels would fit her but NO, they’re all too small. Actually – I’m also quite joyful that she bought the corset top and didn’t ask me to make that. She had a very clear idea about what she wanted to wear, and what colour, and of course she couldn’t find the perfect thing in the shops… this summer I will be teaching her to use a sewing pattern. It would have been more helpful if she’d stayed home with me so I could start sewing, but nooooooo…..that’s my day gone today then!
Things not making me happy this week include the doctor’s surgery. By Wednesday evening I had spent more than two hours on hold to the surgery just waiting to speak to the reception team. Phone call one had been in mid-May, where I’d asked for a prescription to be updated to reflect an increase in my medication prescribed by their out of hours doc. The surgery just reissued the existing prescription. Phone call two – Monday – repeated request. They texted me and said the prescription had been issued. Chemist says yes but it’s two separate prescriptions so you need to pay twice, phone the surgery again and ask for them to be issued as a single script. Phone call three – explain again that I don’t actually want to pay £20 for what’s basically one prescription, could they issue this as one script with the full dose on it. This apparently made sense to me and the receptionist, but not to the doctor whose response – not to me, of course – was that they don’t make 30mg pills. I discovered this in phone call four, which was where I channelled my inner Dad and explained that I was FINE taking a 20mg and a 10mg tablet at the same time but I’d rather not be charged twice. Yes, said the receptionist, I understand and it shouldn’t have taken this many phone calls. Phone call five after waiting for eight hours wasn’t answered after 1 hr 40 minutes even though surgery was open. Phone call six, the following morning, was with YET ANOTHER receptionist (how many do they have?) who was adamant that what I was asking couldn’t be done even though I’d been assured that it could by our amazing village pharmacist – who presumably knows what can and can’t be done with a prescription and who I’d phoned in sheer desperation. He offered to send a note to the surgery explaining the problem in case it helped. I asked to speak to a doctor, who phoned me back two hours later, and three minutes and three seconds later (including pleasantries) I had the prescription, it was sent to the chemist and was ready for me when I tumbled through their door four minutes before closing. It should not have been so hard….
So, I am fully medicated, and today I will be finishing the prom skirt (I hope!). Watch this space…
Kirsty x
What I’ve been reading:
Shadowlands – Matthew Green
Woodston – John Lewis-Stempel
Between the Stops – Sandi Toksvig
Ring the Hill – Tom Cox (Audible)
Greetings from Bury Park – Sarfraz Manzoor (Audible)
Over the last few weeks I have been immersing myself in the Herefordshire countryside courtesy of the writings of John Lewis-Stempel who farms in the border hills (Merrily country, for fans of the late Phil Rickman) and who writes beautiful prose about the most prosaic of things. Who would have thought – speaking as someone bored rigid by the few Young Farmers Club meetings I attended – that the life of a wood or a year in a field would be so interesting? I admit my original interest was piqued by the fact that he’d written a book with a picture of a hare on the front, but that’s me…
His books are pragmatic but interspersed with poetry by people like Edward Thomas and Robert Frost, both of whom spent a lot of time in the area before the First World War. He delves into local language and folklore and in Woodston he traces the history of the land from the earliest hunter-gatherers onwards.. He’s realistic about what it takes to conserve a wood or a field; he shoots grey squirrels (non-native) to allow native birds to thrive as the squirrels steal whole clutches of eggs. There are no ‘oh no, my sheep broke its legs in a ditch, the vet must work miracles!’ moments – the sheep gets shot too.
There’s no woolly ‘rewilding’ although there is an experimental love of traditional methods which bring back wildlife to the area – not by adding beavers but by farming without pesticides for a year, for example, or by managing woods through coppicing, and allowing sheep, pigs and cows to forage and in doing so fertilise and turn over the land, bringing back insects and the larger animals that feed on them. It reminded me very much of the old lady that swallowed the fly, in fact. There is no anthropomorphization of trees and animals – Tolkien’s Ents don’t come into his equation. Trees are trees are trees. Animals do what animals do, and this is right. I get the feeling that Lewis-Stempel genuinely loves the land and cares for it in much the same way as his ancestors – who also farmed in the area – have done for the past seven centuries. He describes himself as a countryside writer rather than a nature writer as he’s writing about the land and the life it supports.
Eyes down, a shadow giantess
traverses faultlines
mapped into Essex clay.
Hooves have printed fossils in the tilth.
She looms over bean trees,
scattering spiders as she goes
while plough-shattered flints
heliograph the sun.
I’ve been doing a lot of field trails in the last couple of months as I’ve been training for various walks – at least once they dried out a bit – and I’ve found myself more interested in the hedges and edges as a result of this reading. A local site on the north of Epping Forest has been bought by Nattergal to be restored as wildlands, and at some point I’ll get round to visiting and hopefully learning a bit more. I may even try to walk there. I have one of those custom OS maps which is proving very useful indeed – where we live is inconveniently placed on the official maps so putting North Weald at the centre allows me to plot walks in advance so I know roughly where I want to go. Last week I traced a footpath I’d spotted when we were on our way to collect Thing 3.
I’ve also been listening to Tom Cox on Audible. I first encountered Cox via his Twitter account which featured his sad cat, The Bear, and then I found one of his extremely funny books in our local Oxfam. I’ve since read all his cat (and golf and music) books. He began to write about walking and the countryside about ten years ago – still with added cats and his VERY LOUD DAD – but in a psychogeography mode as he wasn’t attempting to farm the land; only to live in it. His 21st Century Yokel, Ring the Hill and Notebook are non-fiction, and Help the Witch is sometimes a weird blur of short story and semi-autobiography. He’s graduated into strangely psychedelic novels which I also enjoy, but I do prefer his walking books.
I think my love of reading about nature probably stemmed from Cicely Mary Barker’s Flower Fairies books, which were botanically extremely realistic – well, probably not the fairies, but definitely the flowers. These allowed me to identify flowers confidently, if not accurately as my mother insists on saying 40+ years later. This, by the way, is a very useful skill for both teachers and parents, and has even been known to work on my Beloved who is now very suspicious of all my pronouncements.
To be fair – and almost certainly as a result of spending way too much time on trains, the top of buses and roaming the streets of the city – I’m also equally likely to be reading books about the history or psychogeography of London (Iain Sinclair is a favourite). Right now my work reading at lunchtime is Sandi Toksvig’s Between the Stops, which is as much about the history of Dulwich and wider London as it is about herself. People are interesting, and so are places. The stories of people in places are even better.
Delivering the last of the sea creatures to the British Library – now making mini jellies and looking forward to making some new stock for summer stalls
A gorgeous swim with the ladies last Sunday
A ten-mile trek exploring a new footpath on Monday
Our first Access Panel on Friday morning
Dinner out with quite a lot of the family on Friday
The library reserves and loans system
This morning I may get out for a walk but GT2 is staying over while his Mama TT2 and Thing 1 are off at a festival. I have not missed being woken up by a small foot in my face, I can tell you. He is a very mobile sleeper, this one, but at least we have a new airbed and I’m not trying to share the sofa with him this time. I may be forced to wake up Thing 2 and hand the little octopus over for the morning…
See you next week!
Kirsty x
What I’ve been reading:
The Wood/Woodston – John Lewis-Stempel
Vianne – Joanne Harris
21st Century Yokel/Ring the Hill – Tom Cox (Audible)
What Kirsty did next 