285: quit bugging me

There are many things I like about summer but mosquitoes are not one of them. No matter how much go-away spray you use before you go out for a walk the little beasts always manage to find the single square centimetre you missed – the bit where your bra strap moved, or (as has happened to me a lot recently) they fly up your trouser legs and savage the backs of your knees. I’m sporting five on my arms and one on my neck at the moment. I’m sure they play a vital role in the ecosystem or something but if they could do it without nibbling me I’d appreciate it.

They are the price you pay when you’re staying by a river and want to go out bat hunting at dusk, however. After London sister Tan spotted a Daubenton’s Bat on a walk along the Blavet earlier this year we were quite keen to find some more. Although the weather has changed from summer heat to muggy drizzle, we’ve made it out a couple of evenings this week for a wander along the tow path.

It’s been magical – there will be a glimpse of one bat skimming along the river near the bank or zooming over your head, and then suddenly they’ll be everywhere – chasing each other in circles, divebombing the river or flitting in and out of the trees. We’ve found that the bridges are popular bat haunts, and we’ve stood for ages on the towpath by the road bridge watching them zip around on eye level with us catching insects. They’re so batty they look like toy bats – the sort of bat shapes that Laszlo turns into in What We Do In The Shadows or Count Dracula in Hotel Transylvania. The battiest bats, in fact.

Bonus points have been scored for the kingfishers catching a last few snacks before heading off into their holes for the night, an indignant heron who took off from the path in front of us, a muntjac deer watching us from the other side of the river before disappearing into the crop growing behind it. There’s a coypu couple who swim among the waterlilies near the bridge, chuntering away to themselves as they potter around doing whatever it is coypu do. The owls start muttering to each other shortly after the bats come out.

No sign of the hen harrier or the short-toed snake eagle so far, but there’s a week to go. The two cockerels who live on the same lane have been much in evidence, shouting at random times throughout the day, and the cherry tree outside Dad’s office window has been alive with long-tailed tits while I’ve been shortlisting job applications over three days this week. It’s great that so many people want to work with us but by Thursday afternoon my eyes were crossed and I was thoroughly fed up with AI generated introductory paragraphs. Still, I’m looking forward to meeting the interviewees.

Things making me happy this week

Not having to think about what to feed people for dinner
French bread and patisserie, especially my favourite religieuses
Time to do some fiddly crochet in the sunshine – these peas in pods are crocheted with perle thread and a 1mm hook. I’ve made some bigger ones as well, with friendly looking peas that pop out of their pods.
French supermarkets and their fruit and veg sections

Various family members are arriving today and it’ll be lovely to see them, and hopefully over the next week we’ll see more exciting wildlife (that we aren’t related to). I’m assuming my Things and my Beloved a) have noticed I’ve gone and b) are missing me at least a bit. Two of them have texted me with demands for money, so business as usual there.

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading

The Book of Doors/The Society of Unknowable Objects – Gareth Brown

Lies Sleeping/The Hanging Tree – Ben Aaronovitch (Audible)

Miss Percy’s Definitive Guide to the Restoration of Dragons – Quenby Olson

284: getting the hang of Thursday

Thursday was GCSE results today for Thing 2 – we were at school for 8am and then went straight to her chosen college to enrol. Jill brought me coffee in the queue, as she works there, and when the doors opened we got her signed up on the Culinary Arts course and kitted out with chef’s whites, her very own apron and oven cloth, and a pair of extremely no-nonsense steel-toe-capped kitchen shoes. I can’t decide whether she looks grown up or dressed up, but I’m extremely relieved that she got the grades she needed and onto the course she wanted. Apparently there is a shortage of patisserie chefs, so I have heroically volunteered as a taste tester should she go down that route.

Thursday afternoon had more drama – I’ve been feeding Ziggy and the Piggies for the last ten days or so* (next door’s mighty hunter cat and guinea pigs, not a Bowie tribute band) and while chatting to the other neighbour she mentioned that she thought Ziggy had caught a magpie but not killed it, as it was sitting on their lawn. Off I went with Doctor Doolittle (aka my Beloved) in tow to see if the ‘pie could be saved. Its wings were working as it kept flapping away from us, but its legs were dragging. We couldn’t see any cat damage, and Ziggy wasn’t around, so after some manoeuvring Dr D managed to get it into a cardboard box and we covered it with a wire frame to prevent cat attack. In between adding bits to my learning strategy I tried contacting the local wildlife rescues in the hope they’d come and help but they said that if the legs were damaged it couldn’t be rehabbed. I phoned the vet and took Mr Magpie (no idea where his wife and/or children were, though obviously I asked as it’s only polite) round to them. I suspect they would have had to put him to sleep, as the new receptionist didn’t look very hopeful, but at least he was safe from cats.

He wasn’t a fledgeling as all his beautiful feathers were in. We have experience with fledgelings, as we once rescued a baby woodpigeon who’d fallen out of the nest and kept him in a box on the trampoline for a couple of weeks while his anxious parents flew down and fed him. I don’t know whether he was a single chick who was just too fat for them to get back off the ground or if he just went too early. Eventually the rest of his feathers grew in and he fledged properly over a couple of days and headed off. We also used to have a collared dove pair who nested in the Christmas tree where the treehouse was and we always enjoyed watching their nestlings hop around on the railings. We’re lucky enough to have a lot of mature trees around the garden, and usually have robins, blue tits (who treat the trampoline net as a climbing frame), blackbird, woodpigeon and magpie families raising chicks every year. There’s a fierce wren who chased Ziggy off, much to his surprise and embarrasment, and a poser of a bullfinch who sits on a tree stump and shows off. The odd sparrowhawk has been known to rest on the edge of the sunroom roof, and the roof pigeons like to sit on the glass roof and wind up the cats.

There’s a gang of teen corvids – a couple of jackdaws, a rook and a magpie – who terrorise the neighbourhood feeders and hang out on roofs cawing, and sometimes we get visits from the village peacocks on a wander. I think they have extended their territory into the woods behind the house as they were regularly waking me up at 4am earlier in the summer despite sleeping in Loop earplugs. Colin the pheasant – named by our builders, who reckoned he strutted about like one of their lads – used to be a regular visitor and was tame enough to hand feed monkey nuts to. We haven’t had a pheasant for a while but we have had badger cubs in the garden again this year, and a fox investigating the Blink camera. I like to sit out and work in the garden and listen to the different songs – the BirdNet app is great for identifying all the different species.

*Ziggy self-catered this morning, however, choosing to picnic on something in our garden. This is fine, as last time I was in charge of him he was leaving me decapitated meeces in the mornings.

Making me happy this week…

This week was vastly improved by the existence of Wednesday which was bracketed by early morning coffee with Amanda and after work (nonalcoholic)* cocktails with Rhiannon. Epping continues to disappoint, as did the High Court interim injunction this week which is bound to be seen as a precedent for all sorts of other councils to take umbrage at the Home Office’s flagrant disregard for change of use applications and so on. Of course this meant there was shouting and celebrating outside the Bell, where the residents are already too scared to leave the building. The ‘decorators’ have been active in our village again, which I hope doesn’t mean they’re going to start terrorising the families in the Phoenix. I am a cynic, so I suspect the lack of public transport and criminal opportunities other than the farm shop and soft play next door might put the hoi polloi off visiting, unless they fancy some expensive sausages and some cake.

Anyway, Rhiannon and I tried a new food hall type place near St Paul’s Station, where I had a ‘Light & Stormy‘ which was remarkably convincing. It had a herbal elixir (an excellent word) instead of dark rum apparently it contains trendy mushrooms. Whatever- I liked it and if it wasn’t just as expensive as rum I might get fonder of it. We didn’t eat although there was a good range of food options. We had agreed ahead of time that we’d spend exactly ten minutes having a rant, although we did add two minutes for AOB (well, expressing our disbelief at members of the local council). We had a timer and everything, and then we had a lovely couple of hours chatting about everything else.

*apart from the tequila slammer that the nice man gave us in exchange for leaving a review.

A solo trip to Harlow where I had a holiday mani/pedi so I have pretty nails – the colour is Thai Chilli Red which isn’t too red or too orange. It wasn’t my first choice but they’d run out of that – red with a burst of gold – and I like it a lot.
Not Amazon, who have annoyed me this week by failing to deliver a parcel three days this week as they were unable to find my front door. Suggesting they got out of the van and walked up the drive was not helpful.

This week I will be working from France, and appreciating not having to think about feeding people or public transport. I shall mostly be shortlisting…

Same time next week, people!

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

The Furthest Station/The Hanging Tree – Ben Aaronovitch (Audible)

The Postman’s Path – Alan Cleaver. meh. Took back to library without finishing as it was disappointing. If ever a book needed Illustration it was this one. He kept going on about sketching and doing walks but there were no sketches shon or even a map. Great premise, poorly executed despite good reviews.

Midnight & Blue – Ian Rankin

The Book of Doors – Gareth Brown

283: Choose kindness. Choose love. Choose human.

I’m putting my hands up here and confessing to struggling a bit right now, so this week’s post might be a lot shorter than usual. Essex – well, the small bit of it I live in and travel through several times a week – is still being used as a excuse for a barrage of racist rhetoric and as a showcase for a vast collection of flags on lamp-posts and random bits of street furniture.

I wrote a lengthy post last Sunday on my Instagram feed, showing some of the flags – that have since been taken down but replaced within hours by people driving slogan-ridden Land Rovers and sporting balaclavas. They presumably claim to be proud Englishmen but aren’t proud enough to show their faces as they clamber up the CCTV poles, belisha beacons and lampposts of Epping and North Weald. It also had images of the steel fences on Bell Common that are used to make sure the protests don’t block the road and to keep the two factions apart. It’s telling that since these measures were put in place the more violent elements of the protests have faded: perhaps being in a contained area and unable to run at police or throw smoke bombs is less appealing when you’re more easily identifiable. Who knows?

The Insta post was written mostly in my head as I stomped through the Forest in a loop from Copped Hall. I couldn’t work out why I was so upset by the flags – I mean, I used to go out with a rabid Cockney who believed the Queen Mother should have been sainted and that St George was a born Englishman (and that the Anglo-Saxons came from Anglesey, but that’s another story). I’ve lived in England since 1997 and from 1991-1994 when I was at uni. My first date was in England – Coleford was the closest cinema to us. My kids are English, apparently. The flags themselves are not the problem.

It came to me in the end that it was because for the first time in the 28 years I’ve lived here I felt unwelcome. The people putting these flags up – and those saying how lovely they look, and why don’t they leave them up till VJ Day, and shouting down anyone who disagrees and abusing anyone who takes them down, and taking scissors out with them to cut down any counters to the flags – are actively using these flags to intimidate. They don’t even care whether they’ve hung them the right way up. And, as I said, they’re too cowardly to show their faces while they do it. There’s also the usual whinges that you’re not allowed to fly the flags in this country, lefties, woke, no one makes the Welsh take their flags down, two-tier policing, blah blah blah. When someone points out that they are perfectly entitled to fly whatever flags they like on their own property they point out that they’re taxpayers and they pay council tax so they pay for the lampposts…. well, I bet they can’t produce the paperwork to prove it. The vitriol and badly-spelled abuse is ongoing – reasoned arguments and statistics fall on deaf ears.

The council continues to double down on their claims that it’s the asylum seekers who are to blame for community unrest, and not the people descending on the town to spew hatred. They went to the High Court for an injunction this week claiming this – never mind that in the seven years the hotel has been in use only three arrests have been shouted about, yet 18 arrests have been made among the protestors since they started a month ago.

I can’t seem to shake my disappointment in my local town and in some people I know, and it’s affecting me quite badly. I need a break.

(And I’m even more glad I chose Choose Love as the charity I’m fundraising for this year – https://donate.chooselove.org/supporters/raising-money-for-choose-love/1472/)

Things that weren’t so bad this week

A gorgeous cooling-off evening swim on Tuesday with Jill, Sue and Rachel

My clever Thing 1 getting a distinction in her T-levels this week. We’re so very proud of her, as it hasn’t been an easy couple of years. Her tutors from college have been very supportive, too.

My new t-shirt

Making rainbow toadstool tops for this year’s fairy houses

Next week I will be coming to you live from the Eurotunnel!

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

Midnight & Blue – Ian Rankin

Talk to the Tail – Tom Cox

Foxglove Summer/The Furthest Station- Ben Aaronovitch (Audible)

The Vanderbeekers of 141st St – Karina Yan Glaser

The Saturday Night Sauvignon Sisterhood – Gill Sims

282: smug as a bug in a rug

Press your back button now if part of your summer holiday planning still involves the annual childcare juggle. I’m about to be unbearably smug.

My Horde are now 14, 16 and 19 and while the teenage years come with their own set of challenges (their hormones coming in while mine are going out, romance dramas, friend group angst, the constant growing out of shoes and trousers, to name but a few) those challenges no longer include having to trade off annual leave, swapping childcare with friends or considering packing them off to boarding school and leaving the country till they’re 18. I read all the Chalet School books, I know it’s all kaffe und kuchen every day and midnight feasts and adventures up mountains. They’d have been FINE. Probably.

While we’ve always been amazingly lucky with the various childminders and big sisters who have looked after them over the years, it’s still flipping excellent not to have to worry about it every year.

The flipside is never knowing quite how many teens will be scattered about the house and garden when I get in or who will be around for dinner. If they’re here they get fed and I assume that works when they’re at other people’s houses too. We’ve always operated open door parenting, on the principle that if we’re there for the fun stuff they’ll know the door will still be open for the harder stuff too.

Several nights a week there’s at least two teenagers asleep in the living room, one in the cabin and right now there’s nine people ranging from the ages of two to 27 racing around the garden with water pistols. I’m sitting surrounded by chaos and the remains of an impromptu barbecue and – honestly – I love it. Especially the bit where they just get on with it with no input from me.

It also means I can go and work in France for a week and then have a week of peace before school chaos starts again; go for a drink with colleagues or friends after work; or be at my desk by 8am.

This is not to say parenting teens is a breeze: emotional crises arise, there are still dramas and we’ve got T-level results this week and GCSE results next week but, on balance, I think we’re doing OK.

I expect one day they’ll all leave home and I won’t know what to do with myself but till then I’ll keep embracing the chaos.

Other things making me happy this week:

A lovely day off on Friday with Miriam, with breakfast at the Mayfield Bakery and a very relaxing massage.
Finding Breton cidre at St John after work on Thursday, and remembering how nice it is to do these things.
A peaceful day at Shelley Church fête crocheting toadstools and chatting to nice people. The meerkat went home as a raffle prize with a very excited teenager.
Painting wooden toadstools with Things 1 & 2 in the garden

Finishing a new pig in a blanket as a test for this year’s Christmas offerings

Same time next week then!

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

Still Water/Nightwalking/The Sheep’s Tale – John Lewis-Stempel

Talk to the Tail – Tom Cox

Whispers Underground/Broken Home/Foxglove Summer – Ben Aaronovitch (Audible]

Midnight and Blue – Ian Rankin

281: all the little things

Epping continues to be overrun by racists twice a week and this is not making me happy. I have an evening out planned with a like-minded buddy in two weeks and we are going to allow ourselves a 10 minute rage before we have, as she put it, a delightful time. I am all for this. In the meantime, I am trying extremely hard to think about all the positive things that happen to me rather than the idiots who seem to be happening around me. So that’s what this week’s post is all about: do add the good things happening to you in the comments.

There are some people who you don’t see for several years – Covid, moving house, changing jobs, life getting in the way, those old chestnuts – but when you finally catch up with them it’s as if you’re picking up a conversation that you were having about five minutes ago. Yes, that’s a cliche but – like most of these things – it’s a cliche because it’s true. That was Thursday evening with my fierce Italian friend Sabrina. Dinner out and the world was put to rights (ah, if only – but I felt better for it!). Even better, it was back on my old West India Quay stomping ground which still looks wonderful in the sunshine.

Giving the rainbow hare/bunny to one of my colleagues – he loved it which made me very happy! Now his partner wants one too. I have let it be known that I am bribable with cake as he is an excellent baker.
Starting my Christmas (sorry) crochet in good time – with a new version of a pig in a blanket. There will be mice, pigs, robins, pingwings and more.
Signing up for the Autumn Welsh Market at the London Welsh Society
This crochet meerkat, just because…

Spending my birthday Amazon voucher (thank you to my Beloved) on some double gauze fabric, yarn and nice things
A gorgeous solo walk early on Friday morning (Jill was supposed to join me…)
Manic Street Preachers with Miriam at Audley End on Saturday along with Ash and The Charlatans

A long walk (nine miles) on Saturday, trying a new route out to Shelley Church where I have a stall next weekend. I won’t be walking there then though. I wandered through woods, farmyards and fields and met some excellent dogs.

The Central Line behaving
Getting the adverts out for the new roles in my team

See? It’s a nice world after all.

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading

Long Hot Summoning – Tanya Huff

Still Water/The Wild Life – John Lewis-Stempel

Between the Stops– Sandi Toksvig

The Baby Dragon Cafe – AT Qureshi

Moon Over Soho/Whispers Underground – Ben Aaronovitch (Audible)