Looking down
Since moving to Suffolk I have spent a great deal of time looking up. I find the landscape different and dare I say, less inspiring than North Wales, it can be so flat and vast and there seem to be less trees gennerally but it more than excuses itself with those big East Anglian skies which are a pleasure to gaze at. As I round the bend into the village there is a particular view that always catches my eye, one of these days I may even get around to photographing this view where sky meets and intersection of two fields with their different colours, the view is perfectly framed between two properties and I can see this same view from a different angle at the bottom of my garden. It is a good view and I love to look at this piece of sky each day and see how it is changed. Often through the summer it was wide and blue and sometimes strange clouds seem to pause just here as though waiting to be painted.


This last week the sky has been resolutely grey and ominous, doing little to make me smile.


But today I cast my eyes downwards as I finally faced up to the fact that the grass should most certainly be cut, it has grown more in these last weeks than it grew all summer and getting to the washing line was beginning to require wellies and a scythe, like some sort of laundry laiden grim reaper. I got out the mowing beast and turned me eyes downwards and before I knew I had forgotten the grey skies above. Each time I stopped to empty the beast I would be momentarily distracted by the leaves all around and my world felt full of colour once more.


I was rather missing the Welsh Autumn and my views of tree studded hillsides where great swarthes of crimson, orange, sienna and every tone in between could be viewed but how wrong I have been for now I see that there is colour everywhere here in Suffolk, the browns of newly ploughed fields meet the acid greens of the newly sown, there are trees of course, not so many but how good they are and under these big Suffolk skies they glow with colour, illuminated by those occasional breaks in the clouds. The berries are everywhere and similarly jewel like. I have much to appreciate I just needed to look down.

Tales of surf and sky


I expected to return from beautiful St Ives culturally fed, able to write about the exciting exhibitions at The Tate, the tactile experience of visiting The Hepworth Gardens and ceramic inspiration found at The Leach Museum.



But instead I return to this space lightly freckled, finding sand in the strangest of places, feeling renewed and windswept and full of my new found love of body boarding.


So we went to St Ives and we hit the waves, day after day.



It was amazing, exhilarating, addictive. Who knew it was legal to have that much fun!


I did not mind swallowing mouthful after mouthful of salty sea-water because that next wave, the one just coming now, building and gathering, a looming swell, ready to break. It might be a good one, I might catch it just right, I might skate across the top of the water, washed all the way to shore, a smile splitting my face.


Dylan quickly became the expert amongst us.



My brave and fearless boy. He was the one racing down to the beach first thing in the morning, before the amatueurs arrived to cramp his style. Honing his skills, learning to twist and turn.


I really didn't think that late October would find my non-water loving self happily walking into a British sea but the magic of a full wetsuit and the rush of adrenalin have me longing to do it all over again.

As I was going to


St Ives. Be back in a week, will I meet a man with seven wives?

Adapting

If whilst making fudge you happen to leave the room to fetch a book it is almost guaranteed that finding that book will take longer that you thought. It will almost never be on the shelf you expect it to be on and you will spend too many minutes scanning and gazing, perhaps suddenly noticing another book and pausing to take it down a flick through.


You will think you were only a moment gone but on return the sugar thermometer will tell you otherwise.

So keep a clear head and calmly turn off the heat. Continue as planned and pour into prepared tin.

Some time later bash the shiny, solid mass like crazy with the end of the rolling pin.........

and call it caramel.

Congratulate oneself on being so wonderfully domesticated as to have a jar of shiny cracked caramel on hand to scatter on a dish of ice-cream.


And make a private note to buy more fudge ingredients tomorrow.

Everyday cooking


The lovely Kristina of Jolly Hockey Sticks blog, may very well have a cook book fettish to rival my own and it was her eagle eyes which correctly identified the spine of my latest acquistion featured at the top of the previous post.


I love buying cookery books, sadly I have to seriously curtail my buying due to budget constraints but honnestly, my list of wishes at the moment is huge. With the approach of the festive season (there, I didn't actually say it, just alluded, but I'm sorry, it's true, it really is approaching fast), it seems that new cook books arrive on the market almost daily.


Several have caught my eye and at the moment my list includes Warm Bread and Honey Cake - the title alone seems promising but I do have rather a lot of bread books and several baking books too, do I need this one? Hmmm, I certainly want. I often pick up the beautiful Miss Dahl's Voluptuous Delights ... lovely images, intriguing, varied recipes. My biggest want of all at the moment, one that I do not need but nonetheless I want... Tender: v. 1: A Cook and His Vegetable Patch by Nigel Slater. Nigel Slater is by far my favourite cookery writer and indeed the books of his I already own are well thumbed and dog-eared from use. The pleasure of Nigel Slater is that he is the sort of food writer you want to keep by your bed, if you know what I mean!


There are older titles amongst my list of wants too, I have long desired Ballymaloe Cookery Course but then again, maybe actually owning such a weighty tome might mean I never looked at any or my other books. And I don't own anything by Simon Hopkins which seems a mistake.


But all that wanting aside, this latest acquisition, River Cottage Everyday book is a good and useful addition to my groaning shelves. Much as I love the beautiful lifestyle books with their exciting dinner party recipes, family cooking is what I do everyday and I am always looking for fresh ideas and indeed the odd miracle. I already own The River Cottage Family Cookbook and was a little worried that this might be too similar but there are enough new recipes to make it worthwhile and as is increasingly the case with cookery books it is beautifully photographed and thoughtfully laid out.

There is an excellent section on bread and some really good fish recipes (if only the TA would eat fish with us). The Lunchbox chapter is full of new ideas involving things like couscous and I feel inspired add several of them to my increasingly tired repertoire. The Thrifty Meat section is very interesting, a breast of lamb recipe which I shall certainly try and a friendly sounding rabbit stew which I may possibly try; I know that Dylan is very keen to eat rabbit (although I think he really wants to catch his own and cook it on a campfire, eeek) but it may be harder to convince Tilly to try it, she is very keen on owning a bunny at the moment...


So out of all these varied recipes what should I try first? Why a Ginger Cake of course (I already have at least 6 different ginger cake recipes, indeed my favourite is a Nigel Slater one but I like to keep an open mind on these matters). This one measures up well, dense and sticky, it did sink somewhat but Mr Fearnley-Whitingstall warns of this and says not to worry, so I didn't. Treacle, syrup, sticky lumps of ginger and darkest muscovado sugar, makes you want to light the fire and make a pot of tea don't you think? Excuse me now, I have a fire to stoke.....

Everyday
It is almost two years since I discovered the 365 projects on Flickr and made a conscious decision to take a photograph every day. It was an interesting challenge, some days I would think there was nothing to photograph, no interesting knitting or baking, no child pulling a funny face; so I would make myself look around for alternatives. The exercise was good for me, it made appreciate odd corners of my day, it made me notice so much more. Before I knew it I was spotting potential photograps everywhere, I had learned how to open my eyes a little wider.


I was mostly drawn to photographing things that I found attractive and sometimes these could be the most ordinary of objects or scenes, the exercise taught me to look for beauty in the ordinary and perhaps this practise went some way towards contributing to the general quality of my life. It became an exercise in appreciating all that I had to be grateful about.


I know it sounds rather a grand statement but sometimes, when we are bogged down in our daily routines, perhaps overwhelmed by daily grind it can be a very positive tonic to make yourself look around for the things that make you happy. Taking regular pictures has provided me with such a rich view of our day to day family life because in addtion to that one a day photograph the habit of keeping the camera to hand made me record so many details of our lives, little things that are good to look back on, memories to anchor us in time and place.


Lately I have lost my way with 365, when we moved and were without internet and then a slower connection than I was used to, I lost my habit of regular Flickr posting. Gradually, perhaps without the focus of posting my pictures in my 365 folder, I stopped taking so many photographs.


So yesterday I took up my camera and walked around the house, immediately I was noticing things that hadn't caught my attention before and it was a good feeling. The smallest things served to make me smile.

The light catching the corner of a picture frame in the downstairs loo.


The contents of a pocket emptied following a woodland walk; I have been annoyed by this little pile for two days, irritated that they had been just emptied out and abandoned but with camera in hand I looked at them afresh. A little work of art, beautiful, shiny colour.


A dog caught napping on the sofa.


Neglected, sometimes dusty, little corners of my day to day life, they feel spruced up and sparkle anew. I think we all need reminding to open our eyes a little wider from time to time, there is so much to be gained.

Knit one, repeat

There was one of these made once before, way back in September 07. Two years later, that sweater is no longer over-sized but small and well worn. It has seen a great deal of wear, been on several sleepovers and cub camps and became the essential bedtime sweater. A sort of substitute dressing gown, it has been thrown over pyjamas on chilly mornings and even worn to bed during some of those very cold winter nights.


Dylan liked to keep it handy at all times and its being indisposed in the washing basket was always unpopular.


When packing for the move Southwards I decided, in a fit of ruthlessness, that this old sweater needed to move on, be liberated. I feared recriminations but it was not mentioned once, all through the summer. Until late August that was. The night we decided to let the children stay up late, light the chiminea and gaze at starry skies. That sweater was exactly the sort of thing to wear, so much more comforting than a hoodie. I had to own up and I felt bad, very bad.


So yarn was hastily ordered and The Weasley Sweater, mark II was begun. This time I used a less luxurious, but somehow more Weasley like, yarn from New Lanark Mill. This is such a pleasing yarn, nice and heathery, ecconomical and very woolly (I know, you know what I mean by that!). During a mid-knit fitting the fabric was proclaimed a little scratchy but thankfully he seems happy to over look the scratchiness and indeed I think it may have softened after blocking.

Let me tell you a funny story about the knitting of this. As I sped my way up the front of the pattern I held the garment up for The Technical Advisor's admiration (which is all too often a "very nice dear" without actually looking), luckily on this occasion he did look and followed up his "very nice dear" with "how come your doing this one with an H". To which I responded with a shriek and a curse and promptly started ripping back.


So there it is, finally. A Weasley Sweater, with a D for Dylan, knitted according to the pattern found in the very useful Charmed Knits: Projects for Fans of Harry Potter.