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

115: lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

Ok, I might be exaggerating a bit here, but one of the wonders of living out here in sunny Essex is the variety of wildlife we get in the garden. The majority of it is welcome but some – like the odd rat – is less so. Living near farmland and with a watercourse near the house it’s inevitable, of course, but I still don’t want them snacking on the bird seed.

My favourites at this time of year are the blue tits who colonise the nest box and produce a brood of noisy chicks demanding feeding. The first sight of the babies as they peek out of the hole and glare at us is always an ‘aaahhh!’ moment, and one of the very bedraggled and exhausted parents paid us a visit one evening this week too. Rather foolishly, it had stopped for a rest on the fence outside the back door which surrounds the cats’ outdoor space – Lulu thought it was her birthday but Thing 2 came to the rescue. The bird was remarkably tame (or possibly just knackered) as we were able to get very close. It flew from Thing 2’s hand to my head before we were able to put it safely out of reach of the cat.

The local shrew population has less luck when it comes to Lulu. The occasional one ventures in to the cat space (probably after the strawberries) and doesn’t live to tell the tale, instead becoming a love gift for my (and her) beloved. She’s always most annoyed when we take them away from her. She did bring a mouse in just before Christmas which we didn’t realise until it peeked out from behind my sewing machines, leading to a frenzied twenty minutes with a wooden spoon, an empty cheese sauce pot and finally a rehoming in the compost bin.

Today I have been joined in the garden by a baby sparrow, and every year we have robins, blackbirds, dunnocks, goldcrests, woodpigeons and collared doves. There’s a raucous family of magpies too, whose antics make me laugh. They are scrappy and behave like human siblings, arguing amongst themselves and rough and tumbling in the garden. The poor mother (I assume!) takes refuge on our neighbour’s roof, and as soon as the juveniles spot her they all go and join her. On one occasion there was a panicked squawking as one landed on the telephone wire and ended up upside down without enough sense to let go….

Other garden birds are woodpeckers, the odd sparrow hawk, starlings (nesting in next door’s roof), red kites soaring overhead, moorhens in wet springs and for the first time this year parakeets have flashed past. For several years we had a very tame pheasant who our builders named Colin after one of their colleagues who also strutted about. This year Richmond the Rook is a regular, stalking about in his fluffy rook trousers and hanging about with a couple of jackdaws.

The less feathered friends turn up too: we’re privileged to have badgers visiting from the Common as well as foxes, rabbits and the occasional muntjac. We can usually track their progress by the nibbled plants, much to my Beloved’s disgust. A slow worm can often be found in the greenhouse enjoying the warmth, while toads lurk under stones and tarpaulins and newts haunt the flowerpots. Most years we have a bumble bee nest somewhere, as well as squirrels and tiny mice.

One of my friends described coming through the back gate once as like walking into Narnia – sometimes I think she’s not far wrong!

Other things this week have included cheering on the RideLondon cyclists as they zoomed through the village, binging Stranger Things seasons 1-3 in preparation for season 4, seeing this year’s museum fox cubs playing in the sunshine, Thing 3 going off on his first solo sleepover at London Aunty’s house (it’s fancy, apparently), much crocheting of a shawl which is taking forever, a glorious swim, a mooch about the market, an early walk, and making some tiny things.

This week it’s half term and there’s only three days in work thanks to some Queen or other having a jubilee. The village has broken out in bunting already. I have promised my beloved that I’ll sort out my shed next weekend….

See you next week!

Kirsty x

The Betrayal of Trust/The Various Haunts of Men – Susan Hill

Villager – Tom Cox

Week twelve: Ready? Run!

Those of you who have poured yourselves into inappropriate lycra and staggered through the Couch to 5k programme will recognise ‘Ready? Run!’ as that moment when your ‘brisk warm-up walk’ turns into the thrice-weekly torture of discovering just how long three minutes can be. I did the programme way back in 2011, after Thing 3 arrived, and by 2015 I had run a half marathon. And then my knees went on strike so I focused on walking, but (here my secondary school PE mistresses and my long-suffering Brown Owl will probably die laughing) I actually missed running. This, from the person whose youngest sister’s name in the register was met by the comment ‘oh god, not another one’ from the aforementioned PE mistresses. Yes, I missed it. I missed hurling myself out of bed at ludicrous hours of the morning: in the week running along the Thames or the Regents Canal, and on weekends through the forests and fields here. I missed the half hour or more of solitude, listening to music and living in my own little world. I even missed running in the rain.

So, way back at the start of lockdown I decided I’d strap my knees up and start the C25K programme again – weeks 1 – 3 went well, and at the start of week 4 my knees were fine but my ankle was not. Stupidly, instead of stopping and walking I decided to try and run through it, and then spent the next month hobbling.

This week, I felt confident enough to try running again. I dropped back to week 2 to start with, but on my first day out I caught up (literally!) with a friend and his daughter and joined in with their week 3. I found it quite easy so skipped back up to week 3 for the rest of the week, and will pick up week 4 tomorrow. My 5-minute cool down walk takes me back through the flood meadow, which has really felt the benefit of the rain in recent weeks. and the grasses have shot up.

Trees are starting to fruit as well, and evidence of conkers and helicopters to come are peeking through the leaves.

Beautiful red ‘helicopters’ and tiny conkers

On alternate days I’ve been out walking with a friend, with 6am starts as she’s still working. We have been taking some different routes this week and today we discovered an almost buried ‘mushroom’ pillbox – North Weald Airfield, one of the key Battle of Britain airfields, is over the road so there’s a few about the village, but I hadn’t seen this one before. It looks in pretty good condition apart from being very overgrown, possibly as it can’t be accessed by the local kids. My beloved – who grew up here – tells me they used to play in it as children, as well as in old underground buildings on the airfield itself. There are rumours of tunnels that extend towards the old officers’ mess, now an emergency housing site.

The result of all this early morning exercise has been a lot of afternoon naps – I’m now referring to them as ‘siestas’ as that seems to legitimise them!

All this exercise has to do something towards burning off all the calories from home baking! This week has been a week for old favourites – oat and raisin cookies, which have to be made in double batches as they disappear so quickly; American-style pancakes to be eaten with garden strawberries and ice cream; and banana bread.

Pancakes and banana bread always get made on the same day, as once you’ve used 200ml of buttermilk in your pancakes there’s just enough left for this recipe. The pancakes are usually a Sunday treat, so I make two loaves of banana bread – one for home and one for work, as our traditional Monday morning all-staff meetings are always improved by cake.

I use this recipe by John Barrowman – but add either a bag of bashed-up Maltesers, or chocolate buttons/chips. The BEST thing is a bag of mini Rolos. A colleague once said, ‘what sort of deviant adds Maltesers to banana bread?’…. and then he tasted it. Trust me on this, dear readers. I felt quite sad that we had to eat both loaves ourselves this week, but we managed.

This week’s makes…

I mentioned last week that I had cut out the pieces for a Beachcomber dress and a Hot Coffee hoodie, both by MBJM, so they were my first makes.

I wanted to add the front pockets to the Beachcomber dress but didn’t want to do the colour blocked option as I couldn’t face matching stripes, so had to play around with the pattern pieces to see how they’d work and if the pockets would pull the dress out of shape. Luckily they didn’t. After the fact I realised I could have made the colour blocked style and just turned the side panels through 90 degrees as well as the pockets, which would have been easier!

The jersey-blend fabric was quite lightweight and my feed dogs kept trying to eat it unless I babied it through the start of seams, and the twin-needle topstitching would have Patrick and Esme in tears. I ended up overlocking the cuffs, hem and neckline as I just couldn’t face hemming them – but it’s wearable, super comfortable and it has pockets!

The Hot Coffee hoodie was much easier. I used loopback sweatshirting fabric which I picked up quite cheaply on EBay, with a black kangaroo pocket and a black bottom cuff. I chose the self-lined hood option, and added the ‘Thumbs Up’ cuff hack. I sized up as I like my hoodies loose, and I’m really pleased with how it’s turned out. There’s a dress-length option, patch pocket option, and you can either make a cowl neck, a hoodie or a plain round neck – and the pattern is unisex. The kids’ version is called the ‘Hot Chocolate’ so you can kit out the family.

There was even enough fabric left to make a pair of Four Seasons capri-length joggers as well (I won’t be wearing them together!).

Once these were out of the way I decided it was time to start on the Butterick B6318 dress. The pattern is part of their Retro range, from 1961, and I’ve had it in the stash forever. I bought a Julian Charles puffin bedset in their sale, and it’s quite thin fabric so I knew I’d have to line it. I chose to use the striped fabric for the bodice and contrast on the sash and the puffin fabric for the shirt and main sash pieces.

It’s a while since I have made anything that needed a full lining, and I wasn’t sure if I remembered how – but luckily my cousin was having trouble with a facing and sent me photos of her instructions so I used those! I forgot to put the sash pieces on before sewing up the sides, so they aren’t as tidy as they could be, but it’s looking good. The skirt pieces need a lot of gathering, so I will have to pleat the lining to avoid adding bulk, but this has been a good exercise in taking things slowly and making a piece in stages. My task for this week will be constructing the skirt, and I am going to add a bound hem as they look so neat. I have ordered a cerise bias binding, as there wasn’t quite enough fabric left to make my own (though the striped would have looked awesome!) so there will be more flashes of colour.

The cross stitch is also coming on well. I love seeing the shapes of the people emerge like ghosts as I fill in the background!

Garden wildlife

Last week’s baby blue tits and great tits have been joined by a baby blackbird who potters round the lawn for ages. The neighbours have sparrows’ nests in their eaves, so the feeders are pretty busy. And last night the cats were getting quite aerated about something they could see through the bars of the babygate, and it turned out to be a tiny mouse tempted by leftover garlic bread.

And that’s it from me for week twelve! I am off now to nurse my mosquito bites, gained yesterday through my leggings while on a bike ride with Thing 2, her best friend and her mum. Coffee in the park in Epping – it was almost like being normal again! Usually I don’t react badly to mozzy bites, but this year I have had the most horrendous reactions – right now my left wrist and right leg are swollen and painful, and not even Piriton is helping. Ouch!

See you on the flip side of Week 13!

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

I finished Jilly Cooper!

Carlotta Carlyle novels – Linda Barnes (I blame early exposure to Nancy Drew for my fondness for girl detectives)

Lanterns and Lances – James Thurber

Audible: Shadows in Bronze/Venus in Copper – Lindsey Davis