Being very bad at Christmas shopping

I have never been a great shopper.  I am always puzzled by the idea of retail "therapy" and am mildly astonished that many perfectly lovely and intelligent people seem to enjoy spending time in huge shopping centres like Bluewater, Westfield or, my personal bete noire, the Trafford Centre.  Too much choice makes me shut down and too much pressure to spend turns me into a one woman awkward squad and makes me hang onto to my purse.

There is not a lot of shopping you can do up here anyway.  We are not totally in the middle of nowhere.  In twenty minutes or so you can be in any one of three nice small towns, Mold, Denbigh or Ruthin, where you can do a supermarket shop if you want to, find some good small shops and buy a decent cup of coffee.  There are some lovely independent retailers too like Homewood Bound and the Craft Centre just down the road at Afonwen but you have to travel forty five minutes or so to get to Chester to find a proper city.  In fact Chester is a very fine small city and has lots of individual shops, the antithesis of the out of town retail park, but even so I only get there a couple of times a year.

If you don't shop, oddly, if you are me, you don't want to shop. The less you do, the less you want to do.   I don't miss it or ever begin to feel like I need a fix.  That sounds both virtuous and puritanical which is misleading.  I am not a great consumer but I do love some particular beautiful things.  I buy some stuff online and most of my normal purchases are to do with the garden: plants by mail order, seeds and bulbs, especially bulbs and books of course.  It takes something like getting ready for Christmas to drive me out to the shops.  I would love to be able to tell you that, like Silverpebble and Thrifty Household I have been making winter.  I admire it hugely.  I aspire to do it.  I look at the beautiful things which are made by truly talented people and wonder if I could do it too if I just keep trying.

But all my winter projects take so long that they are very unlikely to produce any delightfully handmade Christmas presents.  There are the socks which are now entering their second winter under construction.

They are not going to be a present any time soon, and besides I labour over them so long I think I will have to keep them as no one else will appreciate them as I will.

There is the huge superkingsize blanket which is about a third of the way there.

It's too huge for a present.  It is for the house really.  The idea of giving it to any of my children is simply a joke.

There are things I have finished of course: the Christmas puddings are done and waiting in the pantry; the damson gin is mostly bottled, just waiting for a fourth bottle which suits the purpose to emerge from the recycling.

But somehow nothing that I have done can count as a present for anyone.  I am intrigued by the idea of giving only presents that I have made although I can't guarantee that some of the likely recipients wouldn't be appalled.   I think to do it properly I would have to plan for most the year.  There are things I am confident with: foodbased presents I could do and know that the results would be worth eating.  I might be able to sew or knit but I am not confident that the results would merit the time and effort it would take and how do you know that your taste would be the taste of the person you made it for?  How awful to have spent weeks labouring over something and to know in your bones that the receiver of the present was wondering how long it would be before they could give it away or hide it.  I think it is a confidence thing.  Perhaps it should be my project for 2012, or I could spend 2012 thinking about it and have a go in 2013, or 2014.

So in the meantime, there are no presents and there is shopping.  

I think shopping may be something that you need to train for and then practise to keep your hand in, a bit like tabletennis or ballroom dancing.  I stopped in Chester on the way back from work the other day, sure that I could do most of what I needed to buy.   It is not a huge amount: presents for twelve people since some will be done by gifts of money and with some we have mutually agreed not to buy presents in this straitened, recessionary year.  I didn't get past the first shop I went into.  It was a truly beautiful kitchen equipment shop.  I expect I was drawn in because my lovely new kitchen has been filling my head with kitchens.  It took me forty five minutes to stop looking at things for me, entirely theoretically as most of them cost an arm and a leg, and another forty to choose two presents which may or not be things my nearest and dearest want.  These were heavy to carry and my head was swimming so I came home.

Back to the internet for me I think.  At least the distraction level is lower and things don't make your arms ache.  Or I do make a very good cake and have a very quick and easy pattern for fingerless gloves. 

Scenes from my kitchen - nearly the end of the series!

The tiling is just about done, only the grouting to go.  Then I can use the kitchen properly!  Then it might not look quite as empty and lovely as it does just now, so now could be the time to show it off.

Here is where we started.

And this is probably about as bad as it got with the cupboards out and the ceiling down.

Here we have come a long way but there is still a lot to do.  The electrics are in, the new plastering is done and the slate floor is underway.

The slate floor is down and grouted and Ian starts work on the framework which will make new shelving down one side of the kitchen.

And in the blink of an eye (he may throw something at me when he reads this) here are the shelves, ready and raring to go.

Then there was a small hiatus while we waited for the Ikea delivery.  When it came it was an exciting day.  The delivery lorry was huge and was reversed down our drive excrutiatingly slowly by the skilful driver.  When he got to the big sycamore he had to stop and the boxes, what seemed like hundreds of them, had to be carried over the gravel, over the cobbles and in through the front kitchen.

Here we go, worktop on, wall cupboards going up.  Notice the black outside the window?  Night and day, he worked, night and day.

And now it really starts to look like a kitchen and not a work in progress.

The tiles just need grouting now.

And the custom-made shelves are a delight - shelves for my jugs, and even special places for trays which previously lived in the pantry and fell on to my feet pretty much every day when I opened the door.

There is even a little shelf for my egg cups!

Tulips, autumn, mess and tangle

This week I went to see Karen at Artists Garden and drove the high and lovely road West across Wales to the sea.  I love this road.  I have driven it in sun and in rain and in winter, summer and autumn and whenever I drive it the high emptiness of the Denbigh moors followed by the slow and beautiful descent to the sea makes my heart sing.

Karen had also arranged for me to meet Kate at Beangenie guessing rightly that we would have a lot in common so it was day for wandering around their gardens, sitting outside a lot, drinking lots of tea and relishing good company.

Karen's garden is very different from  my own both in size and in the style of planting.  Her garden is a late summer and autumn garden and sure enough there was still colour from a whole bed of salvias shimmering in the still sunlight.  And there was movement too, even on a windless day, from the grasses firing upwards like fireworks or fountaining gently in flowing curves down by the studio.  My garden has been ignored for a while and, battered by wind but somehow still growing, it has become a tangled mass of flop and decay.

Kate's I thought might be more like mine because I knew she too has a spring garden and loves bulbs and has a wildflower meadow.  But Kate's garden, while nothing like Karen's was nothing like mine either.  It is mainly green at this time of year but with strong clear structure from hedges and paths, cool and calm with each of its three distinct areas catching a different feeling even without their colour and flower.

So no tangled mess there then.

And today was full of sunlight when I woke up.  Time to stop pretending the garden has gone to sleep when it so clearly has not and give it some time and love.

When you garden in a wild sort of way it is amazingly easy for things to slip from sweet disorder into bedraggled chaos.  Some things are showing their structure simply by virtue of losing their leaves.

The old hedges are lovely at all times of the year.  I love the new growth in spring but I love it too when the shapes of the branches emerge, twisted and interwoven.

But mostly there is simply a sense that everything is falling over and into everything else, still growing somehow in this impossibly long warm autumn but growing in a messy, desperate way that almost makes me long for cold and a stop and some winter silence.  There was so much to do that I had to fall back on the trick of making myself focus just on one place, the side garden today, as too much wandering about and looking at the garden was making me feel like living in a small flat on the Cote d'Azur with a pot of African violets.  I cut back and moved things and took six enormous wheelbarrows of plant material to the big compost heap in the field.

And then I planted out some of my huge tulip order. 

These are Tulipa Acuminata.  This is a Peter Nyssen image as are the ones below and all my tulip order is from them.  The range is great and the quality very high.  I have planted tulips out in December lots of times and they don't seem to mind at all, in fact it is better to plant them out late than too early, so it is not too late to get an order in.  I am not sure about Acuminata as I have never grown them before.  It may be that when they flower the etiolated blooms will be just too spidery and odd but I do love the colours and they may have a delicacy which will be rather fine.  I also planted more Ballerina.

I might put some Hermitage in tomorrow as well.  The Hermitage are quite small, the Acuminata a littletaller  and the Ballerina taller still.

 

I have barely scratched the surface of what is to be done, in fact I might not have found the surface yet.

It was odd working in the garden again and finding things flowering in the confusion of a warm November.

There were primroses out on the bank and as I cut back the alchemilla there was new growth appearing at the base.  I am torn between unease at the muddying of the seasons and the pleasure of the sun on my back.

In the wooden greenhouse the scented leaf geraniuns are still flowering away.  I need to cut them down and put them somewhere frost free for the winter but I can't bring myself to stop the profusion of flower just yet.

Apples hang on some of the trees like Christmas baubles.  We have had such a huge crop this year there is nowhere to store them any more, fifteen bags or so are hanging in the workshop and we have given away almost as many.

The large number of windfalls pleases the hens though.

And amongst the dead and dying beans and tomatoes in the kitchen garden, my pineapple sage is having a last mad fling.  I do hope the sun shines tomorrow.

How is it where you are? Has your garden closed down for winter yet or is it as confused as mine?

Sorting out the pantry

The kitchen is so very nearly ready.  Slowly we are bringing things in from the utility room and colonising the cupboards.  The worktops are in, smooth and pale hardwood, satisfyingly honey coloured against white cupboards and the dark slate floor.  We have bought the wall tiles now, also grey, a beautiful pale pearly grey.  They are just waiting for Ian to have time to do the tiling. Grey might sound a bit dreary but they are beautiful, trust me.   The dishwasher is working, alleluia.  It is all very nearly ready.

And sorting out the kitchen brings all sorts of other sorting out in its wake.  This weekend was the turn of the pantry.  I love having a pantry.  I have always wanted one.  It's hard to say exactly why, in this age of fridges and freezers, but I love a pantry.   My grandmother had one and I used to love the ingredients all lined up and the pies and cakes, covered on their big plates on the slab.  This is the first house to have a pantry that I have ever owned, a proper one with a huge slate slab like my grandmother's.  It used to have a lino floor but now it has a slate floor like the kitchen so it is even more beautiful!

The pantry was full to bursting.  We brought across some of my father in law's supplies when he came to live with us: lentils, pearl barley, bags and bags of sugar (is there a war on?), tins of this and tins of that and everything has been accommodated.  We have loads of stuff of our own too.  I never used to run much of a store cupboard when I lived in cities, but here I do.  You don't want to find you have no flour half way through a recipe if the only answer is to get in the car and drive to the nearest town so nowadays we run a store cupboard to rival Delia, which makes for some very full shelves.  So we did some pantry sorting and reorganising, doing it together so we both knew what was happening.

What a lot of stuff we have which I had totally forgotten about, or never even knew I had.  We have tinned potato salad (why?) and tins and tins of mushy peas  These, for non UK readers, are either a Northern delicacy or a strange green slush, depending on your taste.  I think we can be pretty sure that my father in law has a connection with the mushy peas.  We have bottles and bottles of differently flavoured vinegars and oils and soy sauce and anchovy essence and tabasco.  These have definitely been brought in by me.  We have six different kinds of rice: short grain pudding rice, risotto rice, basmati, long grain, wild rice and, to our sudden delight, we rediscover a packet of Riz de Camargue, a present from our friends in Provence.  We haven't been eating much rice since my father in law came.  He is a meat and two veg man of the old school.  But he is also very accommodating and would happily eat one thing while we ate another, or even have a go to please us, which is not bad for ninety three.  So, time to find a recipe which will do justice to  the fabulous rice from the Camargue.

You know how, when you walk around the garden, there are plants which remind you of your favourite people?  Cuttings from a friend's garden which remind you of her generosity?  The shrub rose which was a present from your mother?  The cosmos grown from some seed which came in a little packet along with a birthday card from a friend far away?  Sorting out the pantry is rather similar.  Here is a jar of pickled fish which came back with our son and daughter from a holiday in Scandinavia.  Let us draw a veil over when.  Elizabeth II was on the throne I believe.  Who will eat it?  Not me, I suspect.  Here is some homemade mincemeat, made by son and daughter in law a year or so ago but still good.  That is the wonder of good mincemeat: the alcohol keeps working, the dried fruit keeps steeping.  The spices don't overpower.  Put in on the "keep" shelf.

Here is jar of Marmite.  I didn't even know we had any.  Marmite is not my cup of tea.  To my palate it tastes of nothing but preservatives but I know plenty of people who love it, including Ian.  Here is a jar of japonica jelly from another friend, sweetly scented, slightly exotic.  Here are some Kilner jars which originally contained preserved fruit made by a daughter for a Christmas when there was little money for presents.  Here, remarkably enough, is a packet of Linseed.  Neither of us can remember buying it or what it was for but it looks interesting and should surely be combined with natural yoghurt and blueberries for a healthy breakfast one day when I can bear to give up my usual breakfast egg.

And gradually things order.  Some things are thrown away.  Things go back on the shelves in a considered, friendly way.  Generally our daughters, especially the younger one, operate a fridge police service and leave the pantry alone but they are all home for Christmas.  You never know, someone might find the pasta with the 1998 date on it.  Quick, put it in the bin.  Other things go back on the shelves,  for the time being  accessible.

It is all satisfyingly ordered and tidy.  The eggs from the Light Sussex (who are still busily laying every day when all the others have stopped for the winter) are in their tray on the slate slab.  Rice and pasta and pulses are all in storage jars lined up in their place. Aprons are hung behind the door.

It all looks lovely.  Maybe this weekend I will make some Christmas puddings.  I think I have everything!

Too much stuff

Once upon a time I used to travel light.  I could be ready and off and out the door in about ten minutes with a little rucksack on my back and my purse in my pocket.  That was before the days of mobile phones and digital cameras.  I think life was simpler then but it might simply be that I was - simpler, younger, lighter.

I began to acquire stuff when I acquired my own house.  Prior to that I had lived in a series of furnished, rented places where moving from one flat to another could be done on foot in an afternoon with a couple of cardboard boxes and the aforementioned rucksack.  Buying a house was part of getting married and that was followed very swiftly by having a baby.  We didn't have much money but nevertheless stuff poured in remorselessly through the door like floodwater: furniture and pans and crockery and cushions, a cot and a pram and toys and a steriliser and a car seat.  When we separated while the children were still small my then husband didn't want any of the things which had been in the house.  I think it was partly that we had created a home for the children and he didn't want to leave it with gaping holes in it and partly that he didn't want to divide things into piles, to talk about it, to be either too nice or too grasping.  He would rather start again.

I minded a little bit although I understood and honoured his motives.  I would have liked the chance to get rid of the cast offs and hand me downs with which our house was furnished but that wasn't going to happen.  There was no money so there was no choice.

And here we are a lot of years on and the hand me downs are long gone.  I don't think I am a materialistic person yet if you asked me what I would save from a burning house I would say nothing.  The important bits of my life are people or they are in my head.  Would I miss things?  Yes I would - the picture of my parents on their wedding day, my children's school reports, the piece of driftwood brought back from the side of a Scottish loch.  I like my best china, my sewing machine, books by the lorry load, the beautiful 17th Century Welsh cupboard which is the only valuable (and we are talking relative here) piece of furniture I have ever owned.  But would I save one thing over another?  No I don't think so.  If the people were safe, only the cat.

So how is it then that we have so many things?  I have books I never read and clothes I never wear.  We have CDs we never listen to and DVDs we never watch.  We have outbuildings bursting at the seams with stuff.  We have all our own stuff and now we have my father in law's stuff, although edited quite cheerfully and ruthlessly by him in a practical, laughing way which was a model of its kind. 

I think this has been brought on by moving into our new kitchen, which is another materialism I suppose.  I have never had a new kitchen before and I love it.  It is beautiful and has not cost a lot because of a combination of an unease with spending which on a grand day might be called ethical, plain and simple meanness and Ian's ability to do so much himself.  I shall show you some pictures next time.  But in moving back into the kitchen after nearly five months of squeezing around the end of the table and carrying the dishes outside, I have been amazed that we can still can find things to send to the charity shop.  We had the biggest clear out in the world, well in my world, six years ago when we came here.  I don't think we buy much.  The pans I am using were mostly bought nearly twenty years ago.  In 2008 I bought a single Furi knife which I refer to mentally as my new knife as I still use every day a couple of knives which I have had for thirty years.  So how come there is all this stuff?

Does it breed?  Do other people smuggle their stuff into my house when I think they are coming for coffee?  Do delivery men bring a case of wine which I sign for and a couple of cases of not very useful and slightly grubby things which they sneak into a dark corner of the kitchen while I am wielding the electronic pen?

Coed Nant Gain - Ancient Woodland

I am sitting here feeling a bit sorry for myself with a sore throat and a muzzy head that has kept sending me back to bed for the last couple of days.  This evening I have manged to get up and sit by the woodburner but I am still feeling dopey and dozy and lethargic.  So I thought I would distract  myself by telling you about a visit last weekend to a rare and beautiful place.

Coed Nant Gain is a piece of ancient woodland near the village of Cilcain in Flintshire.  Its owner, Iliff Symey, has devoted the last twenty five years of his life to caring for this place which he calls "old growth ancient woodland".  Ancient woodland in England and Wales is defined as woodland which has been in existence since 1600 or before.  This woodland is much more than four hundred years old, possibly thousands of years and certainly stretches back into prehistory.  This wood was in existence when the iron age hillforts such as Penycloddiau and Moel Arthur which sit above my farmhouse were occupied way before the Romans came.  It sits on the side of steep valley  (nant is a brook or small valley in Welsh) so it has not been a wood which is easy to work and this perhaps accounts in part for the way it has been left undisturbed for so long.  Read Iliff's article and look at his website which explains the origins of the wood and his approach to its care far better than I could.

The North Wales Wildlife Trust had been looking for volunteers to help with the planting of an ash dome in a natural amphitheatre within the wood.  Iliff is concerned to protect the genetic stock which forms his woodland so all the saplings to be used would be lifted from the wood itself and moved to the dome site.

Tree trunks have been laid in a circle to produce natural seating and in the centre of the open circle is an area of  flat ground which contains a fire basket.  The plan was to add to the ash saplings which were already forming part of an arc around the centre of the amphitheatre to create most a of circle.  As they grow the ashes will be woven together to make a dome.  The only other dome like this  that I know about was created by the artist David Nash  If ours looks anything like his in thirty years time that would be wonderful, whether or not I am here to see it.

Working in a wood of this age and planting trees which will be here long after you have gone is oddly calming. 

Here is one of my trees.  Behind it you can see the stones which came out of the hole.  It is good to know that I am not the only one whose land is full of stones.

In front of the amphitheatre the ground falls away steeply to the stream in the bottom of the valley.  The wood is full of ash, beech, oak and holly.  At this time of year the beech in particular is glorious.

It was a strange day, snatched from ordinary working and followed by too much driving across the country and a rush of work and feeling unwell.  I am not sure I have processed it yet.  The sight and smell of the wood, the colours, the faint scent of decay, the sound of the leaves underfoot remain with me though.

I am glad there are places like Coed Nant Gain  in this country still and people like Iliff obsessive enough to give their lives to their care. 

End of month view for October

Slightly late (and confessing that somehow I managed to miss last month entirely) here is the end of month view for October, hosted by Helen at patientgardener

I have lost it a bit with the garden as the winds blow.  The winds here in our bit of North Wales have been from the South and East for more than a week.  The good thing about that is that the temperatures are higher than usual for the beginning of November.  The bad thing is that our house is perfectly protected from the westerly and north westerly winds which prevail around here. We are tucked down and barely feel a ripple as the winds go by.   A south easterly though comes roaring across the valley and shakes the yew trees and drives me inside.  Today the wind had gone and it was a still, blue and gold day.  I planted some of the ludicrous numbers of tulip bulbs bought from Peter Nyssen out into the cutting garden - two of the big squares, both in triangles of Abu Hassan and Ballerina.

I love them both.  I have been growing Ballerina for so long now that there is a part of me that feels it is becoming a cliche but its lovely form and singing colour still works so brilliantly that I shall not change for the sake of novelty.  There is plenty of other room in the garden for varieties I have not grown before.

The side garden is now almost entirely foliage.  The hellebores and sweet box (sarcococca humilis) in the foreground will become more and more important as we go into winter.  It's not very exciting but it's not dreadful either as the contrasting colours and forms of the foliage take over from colour.

Out in the field it is the changing leaf colour which is most striking.  All the wildflowers have gone and the grass has been cut.  The damson and cherry are losing their golden leaves while the wild cherry at the back is a fine red/gold.

The cutting garden has finished really.  Everything is battered and much is flattened and gone to seed.  Yet there is still beauty in the cosmos, flowering as ever right to the wire.   I had totally given up hope of the  acidanthera in the centre here when it suddenly burst into beautiful and delicate flower more reminiscent to my eye of spring.  The annual rudbeckia has also gone on and on pumping out yellow and mahogany flowers above its rather coarse and uninspiring foliage.

Down along the field boundary the new bed which I have filled with hellebores and hardy geraniums is also focussed on leaf colour.

The sunny bank looks a bit bare where we have lost some of the conifer and, as it fell into the old quince tree and snapped it, some of the quince too.  But get closer and there are still salvias and valerian flowering  away and it is full of bees and hoverflies when the moment is right.  Not this moment obviously.  They saw me coming.

This is a picture which should come with some sort of disclaimer.  The kitchen garden is a total mess of weeds and dying plants at the moment but somehow this picture makes it look ok.  Do not be fooled.  The camera does, after all, lie.

At the far end of the garden where the chickens are supposedly enclosed when they feel like it, the two new houses which hold the Scots Dumpies and the new Welsummers have created a feeling of chicken city.  Any minute now I expect them to be hanging out their washing on lines strung between the runs and setting up stalls selling street food.

There are some unexpected pleasures too.  The wall at the end of the drive, although of old stone, is normally just a wall.  At this time of year the cotoneaster which covers it is a red, geometric beauty.  I know cotoneaster can be invasive but here it is not and the shapes it creates are beautiful.  By Christmas if we get cold weather all these berries will have been taken by birds.

And these are not really garden pictures at all I suppose but I love the way the rosehips swell and the trees begin to reveal their shapes as the leaves fall.

Things that make me feel good

Sometimes it is the simplest things that make you feel good if only you can slow down enough to really notice them.

A still clear morning, trembling with dew.  That stillness and sun has all blown away now in a gusting cold wind, but it was there, for a day.

A visit on Monday from some blogging friends, mountainear, snailbeachshepherdess, bodran and bluestocking mum - tea, cake, more tea, even more cake and vast amounts of talk and laughter.  Things have not been easy for everyone over the last year or so and yet there seemed to be nothing we couldn't talk about or laugh at.  It doesn't happen more than twice a year but it's amazing how easy it is to catch up and how our lives intertwine.

The sight and size and gentle furriness of the quinces which Felicity brought for me.  Aren't they beautiful?

A full log basket and a fire in the woodburner.

A full glass.

Three perfect eggs from the Light Sussex hens.

A video of my two year grandson sitting in his cot by himself, singing (to the educated ear) "The Wheels on the Bus" while admiring the diggers on the quilt his mother made him.