The year closes

I can't be doing with all those big retrospectives for the New Year: the highlights of 2011, whether the big news stories of the year or the nation's favourite television.  And yet there is something about the closing year which makes one pause.  Partly it is the sheer swiftness of the passing of time.  How can I have just dated a letter 30th December 2011?  That is a whole year gone in a whirl and a blur, a year older, possibly a year ever so slightly wiser, a year closer to the grave.  Not that I feel remotely sad or morbid.  We have just had a lovely family Christmas full of all the things which I love (family, food, feasting) and entirely free from the angst and stress and consumerism which seem to colour so much of the journalism in the lead up to Christmas, when we aren't being sold a perfect, unachievable, sentimentalised dream.   Ours is a simple Christmas and maybe that is why it generally (not inevitably mind) works.  I can give you the recipe if you like:

1. Take one Welsh farmhouse (or any house or flat really, the venue is not crucial)
2. Add a bit of preparation so that there are some things in the freezer, the presents are bought and there is not too much last minute panicking to be done.
3. Don't spend too much.
4. Bring in your family.  If they are easy and lovely they can stay a while.  I think you have to have family even if they are cussed and awkward but in that case they should either be briefly visited or brought in and taken away by car, by you, for the shortest possible time.  Spend the most time with the people you love the most.
5. Be nice to each other.
6. Don't try to spend every waking minute of every day together, in fact everyone should have bits of every day with a little time to him or her self.  
7. Add a couple of dogs if possible which will produce a requirement for groups of people to go out walking and alter the pace of the days and blow the cobwebs away.
8. Add a small child or two to make you laugh.
9. Ideally have dishwashers of both the mechanical and the human kind.  I am lucky enough to have Ian for whom washing dishes in our new kitchen is practically a hobby.
10. Eat well.  Drink moderately but well.  Laugh a lot.
11. Be aware of how lucky you are.

So the year is ending much more happily than it began.  New Year's Day 2011 exploded in our faces with the bombshell of my brother's stroke.  It takes time to adjust and his life now is very different to his life before the stroke but things settle and change.  The terror and the fear and the sheer unknowability of what is to come settle and fade and a new life and a new pattern emerges.  There has been much bravery, even heroism, from him and his family, which is not mine to talk about here but which I can only admire.

My father in law was newly arrived here at this time last year, still needing quite a lot of help and uprooted from the town which had been his home all his life, except for a few years of war service in the Orkneys.  As the year ends he is happy and settled too, far more mobile about the house and enjoying the additional family company which comes his way as a result of living with us.  That has been a different sort of challenge, learning to share your time and space with someone else again, but the right thing to do, a good thing to do.

My parents are just about to downsize and start a new phase of their lives and my father is not as well now as he was at the beginning of the year which saddens and worries me but they seem to be going into 2012 with their customary determination and good cheer.

Life might not be easy all the time (when was it ever?) but it is good. 

And the wonderful thing about gardening is that there is a whole new year to plan and dream for and to get it right in, or parts of it!

Happy New Year to everyone who reads this blog.  I am very glad to know you all, in whatever way, large or small, real or virtual.  I wish you all the very best for 2012.

Nearly ready for Christmas

The family have started to arrive.  First came elder daughter, her husband and two year old son, arriving late on Tuesday night with J asleep in the car.  They are installed in the holiday cottage.  Then came younger daughter with her dog, a young and beautiful red fox labrador and then younger son and his wife and their dog, an equally beautiful black labrador and yesterday younger daughter's boyfriend.

So now we are all here until Christmas Day when we hope to see older son.  The house is full.  When we sit down to eat we are eight or nine at the table.  The tree has been dug up from the field and brought inside in a pot.  It looks way bigger inside than it did out there!

We don't go in for tasteful Christmas trees here.  Christmas is not Christmas without too many sets of lights, decorations of all colours and all the old favourites on the tree.

The slightly squiffy snowman has to have his place and a new favourite to add to the old ones is the Christmas sheep.

The Christmas cake, made by elder daughter and decorated by her, younger daughter and younger daughter's boyfriend, has a Frozen Planet theme this year.  Frozen Planet for non UK readers is a new series narrated by David Attenborough which has been shown on the TV this autumn.  Watch out for it, it is truly stunning.

I think they have surpassed themselves this year.  Note particularly the mother and baby seal joining in the fun and the horizontally sliding penguin on his way to collide with the mystery tree.

Mincepies have been made in quantity along with mulled wine by younger son.  Black dog and yellow dog have behaved pretty well and two year grandson has contributed by running around, laughing a lot and crying "Wassat?"  Daughter in law's contributions to the festive scene are hanging from the hooks in the beams where they used to cure the hams, and her Christmas dog is on the tree.

And now we have reached that bit of Christmas Eve when there is nothing more to be done.  Nothing else to be made or bought, only the big meal to come tomorrow. 

So I am off for a glass of wine and a look at how my baked ham is coming along and to enjoy the company of my family.  I wish you all a very happy Christmas, wherever you are and however you are celebrating.

Making winter in Wales

I love the idea of making things in winter so I joined the Making Winter bloghop over at Thrifty Household.  There are some seriously talented people doing some very exciting things.  I am not an artist or a real craftsperson but I have decided to be less apologetic about my own making and doing and just to enjoy it, in all its glorious amateurism!  I had a huge chunk of my life when working and family sucked up all my time and energy and the two constants which I somehow carved out time for were cooking and gardening.  Sewing and knitting and making things disappeared from view.  Now when I am rushing from pillar to post and wondering what happened to my wish for a simpler life, I need to remind myself that  I have got some time back.  In the last year or two I have returned to the skills I learnt in my childhood from my grandmothers and practised in adolescence in New Zealand where clothes were expensive to buy and everyone made things.  I rarely sit down in the evenings now without some knitting or crochet in my hands and I am starting, after a while of having to just enjoy the process,  to produce things that I love.

I do tend to get quite easily bored though and so I love learning to do something I have never done before.  Knitting in the round is a current favourite and this neckwarmer pleases me a lot.

It comes from a lovely book called "Weekend Knitting" by Melanie Falick which was also the source of an easy fingerless gloves pattern.  It is just full of things you want to have a go at.  This is made in brioche stitch which uses two different colours of wool.

So it is entirely reversible.  I must admit I had to start it, pull it back after a few rows and start again five times so you can tell I am not the most expert knitter around!  But when I had finally got the pattern,  the neckwarmer grew quite quickly and the magic of the stitch really pleased me.

Since I finished it I seem to have worn it pretty much every time I have been outside.  The double strand of wool makes it incredibly cosy and unlike scarves, my other big love in winter, it doesn't dangle into the chicken feed or get caught up in the greenhouse door.  Now I have found a pattern for a Moebius scarf and am itching to have a go at that but I need some new needles first!

There is something so rhythmic and almost meditational in knitting or crochet and the right pattern needs enough of your mind to be absorbing but leaves you with enough left over to be able to talk if you want to.  Unlike a really good book which I fall into like going down a hole and which makes me totally antisocial until I have finished it, or machine sewing which takes you away from people and away from the fire, knitting is companionable.  I know that when spring comes I will be up and away outside and all my knitting will be packed away until winter comes again but I rather like the seasonality of it.  It is all part of the rhythm of my life.

The last of the damson gin is bottled too and the damsons stoned ready to be made into a chocolate, apple and damson betty.  I am hoping that as the damsons have been sitting in sugar and gin for a couple of months they will help to produce a boozy sophisticated take on a family favourite pudding when our children start arriving for the Christmas holiday in a couple of days time.

And then there is the damson gin.  I am thinking that it would be OK to taste a small glass, just to make sure that it is up to scratch before offering it to others.  That's fair, do you think?

Food for Christmas

I love Christmas dinner.  I don't get tired of it.  I love turkey.  I love roast potatoes.  Most of all I love the extras: really good stuffing, pigs in blankets, red cabbage, roast parsnips, bread sauce and gravy.  I don't feel like experimenting with goose or rib of beef, much though I love both.  I don't want to do unusual things with salmon and prawns.  I am a traditionalist.  For Christmas, only a turkey dinner will do.

This year our turkey will come from friends who somehow find the time and energy to run their family, a business and a part time teaching career while keeping sheep and hens, sometimes pigs and, in the months coming up to Christmas, turkeys.  This is about as local as you can get without raising your own.  The turkeys will have scratched and strutted in their little orchard about a mile and half away.  They are fed organically, mature slowly, and will eventually be slaughtered locally too.

The potatoes are our own home grown ones.  I'd like to be able to tell you that the parsnips will be ours too but that would be a lie.  Parsnips stubbornly refused to germinate for us this year so they and the brussel sprouts (notice they are not in the litany of things I love!) will come from our local shop.  The sausagemeat and the bacon are from the local butcher.  Apples and onions in the stuffing are home grown and the bread in the bread sauce is home made.

I hope that the people sitting round the table - our children and their partners and our small grandchildren, gathered from Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Derbyshire and Manchester - will have travelled further than any of the food in their dinner.  Ah I had forgotten the dried fruit in the Christmas pudding!  The puddings were made in my kitchen on Stir Up Sunday in November but the raisins and currants have come from much further than Wales as have the nutmeg and spices.  That's OK though.  Spices from the East.  That's an honourable tradition!

What will be on your plates on Christmas Day?

Doors

Doors, gates: do they shut you out or invite you in?  I can never see a beautiful door or gate without wanting to open it and find out what is on the other side but doors in themselves can be lovely things.   I was so taken with some pictures of  doors from Rachel at slow lane life  that I wandered around looking again at our doors and I thought I would share them.  Some are pretty ordinary; some much less so.

Here is the front door.  Like most farmhouse front doors it is never used.  No one ever comes in through the front door but if you did and closed it behind you, you would find this.

At the top is the latch, possibly made in the forge that used to belong to the farm and which is now part of the holiday cottage.  Below that is the key, a good six inches long and nearly as big as my hand, and the lock into which it fits.  They still work.  Below them is a wooden bolt.  There is another similar one upstairs and I think this one has been fashioned to be like that.  It looks as if this bolt is a replacment for an older one.    This door won't be the oldest in the house as the porch was put on about two hundred and fifty years ago but it is a very lovely thing.

This is the door you would come through, straight into the kitchen.  It is a stable door so you can open up the top in the summer and let the light and air in, but keep the chickens out.  Look back through the glass and the angles are crazy.

Come through to the sitting room and these are the old doors with their strap hinges and boarded construction.  They all have iron latches like this on one side and this

on the other.

The great thing about a latch like this is that it is impossible to open the door quietly and every latch in the house has a slightly different sound to it.   When you live here and get your ear attuned,  the door from  my father in law's room makes a different sound to the sitting room door which is different again from the new door from the back kitchen into the corridor.  The house tells you what is happening and who is where!

The old doors are oak and presumably date from about 1600 when the house was built.  The new doors are in the extension that was put on about thirty years ago.  When we came here we tried to match the doors in the extension to the old doors so we had some made. These are pine not oak but they too are boarded doors of a similar construction to the oak ones and with metal latches.

Upstairs the doors are old too, with wooden handles and latches, some perhaps original and some repaired.  I wonder who scorched the door and with what? A careless candle?

I love the fact that someone took the trouble to make an elegant hinge for the bedroom door.

Looking along the corridor towards the bedroom door is one of my favourite lines of sight in the house.

But doors don't have to be wooden to be beautiful.

A year apart: the 5th December

I love the seasons. What would it be like to live in a constant temperature? A constant spring? An endless summer? An everlasting cold? No, I love the change.

And here in the UK the seasons themselves are mutable. Summer is often not hot and dry. Spring might not be an unfurling of life but icy, cold and wet. And this autumn has not been damp and blustery but long and warm and mellow as caramel. Winter has come now but how different this mild late born winter is from last year's lion's grip, the whole world stilled under his heavy paw.

This is the 5th of December last year, steely under snow, and then the same date this year, all sun and silhouetted trees.

This year there are marigolds still throwing out flowers. A year ago today the field was blanketed under snow.

Green and gold fennel this year and monochrome hedges last.

Rose hips and snow.

I love seasons.

I'm a celebrity - no, I don't think so!

I have been tagged by one of my most favourte people, Caroline at Village Fate.  I don't normally do memes, not because I am too posh but because I don't think I have much new to say, but who knows?


1. What is the one thing about being a parent that makes you scream, ‘GET ME OUT OF HERE!’
My kids are flown.  When they were younger the thing that drove me mad was daily cooking.  I love cooking.  I love food.  It was coming in through the door, knowing that the need for fuel was so overwhelming it didn't matter what is was, and then cooking in my coat.  That was the challenge.

2. What skills, if any, do you have that would be useful in the jungle?
I very rarely get cross.  When everyone else is in meltdown, I am probably in melt middle.

3. How are you likely to annoy people if you were stuck with them for three weeks?
It depends how much you mind that I am always right.
 
4. What is the worst thing you have ever eaten?
Something I have cooked on a very, very bad day.

5. What luxury item would you take into the jungle with you?
Mascara.  Well you have to be able to see my eyes which is helped by a frame.   I suppose Tilda Swinton manages so maybe I just need a  new way of looking at the whole question.
 
6. What is the most daring thing you have ever done? 
Daring? Can't remember.  Climbed mountains with vertigo, gave presentations to strangers, ate odd stuff? Got divorced?  Had kids? (not that way round).  Actually never knew having kids was brave until I did it.  Then, oh my god.

7. Who would you miss most if you went into the jungle with a bunch of strangers?
Ian.  Children are following very close on his heels
 
8. What celebrity, alive or dead, would you like to have with you in the jungle?
Ray Mears.  He could do his fabulous stuff.  I could admire it.
 
 9. What would scare you about being in the jungle?
Some sort of grub.
 
10. After leaving the jungle, you go to a luxury hotel. What’s the first thing you do?
Shower.  Eat.  How do you ever choose which to do first?