Family Shenanigans

Can’t believe my lilac easter tree has thrown up all these shoots and flowerbuds in about 8 days. Cottage Smallholder reports that if we leave them in water, they’ll grow roots and we can plant new lilac trees! Nature. Literally blooming marvellous.

I’m liking this new website. Thought I’d spread the word.

It calls itself “pop culture content for women, covered sassily and intelligently, for everyone to enjoy. They’ve got some well-known writers on board, from legendary pop writers Sylvia Patterson and Miranda Sawyer, to The Guardian’s Laura Barton and Leonie Cooper, to the Erotic Review’s Susanna Forrest. They’re also encouraging young, budding writers to join their crusade.”

Yep blokees are welcome too of course, it’s just made with ladies in mind. Mind you, that never used to stop my brother from reading my Jackie magazines. (I’m really winging it here, hoping he’s not reading this, else he might sit on me til I say “surrender” or throw another dart in my foot. Ahh fond memories…)

I’ve not posted for a few days. I’d been doing it late evenings when I have my best “me time”. Last week I’d had a bit less “me time” as I was going to bed / getting up earlier for my new morning jogging regime (haha! Still can’t quite believe I can say me and jogging in the same sentence) .

Last night I found a new distraction. Ironing whilst watching iplayer. I tell you it’s all rock n roll round here. Ironing’s bad enough. Made slightly more bearable by watching telly. 9 times out of 10 you’re just watching whatever mindless drivel is on at the time. But NOW, wey hey. I know I’m probably slow on the uptake compared to you other cyberkooks but my new laptop lets me choose what I want to watch whilst doing the most boring job on the planet.

When I worked at the BBC a few centuries ago, I went to a seminar hosted by a man who had just met with a fella none of us had heard of at that time – Bill Gates. Apparently Bill had said that the media was going to change beyond all recognition in the future. We wouldn’t need to buy newspapers to read the news, we would call up whatever news or entertainment content we wanted to consume and watch it not on screens but on other convenient surfaces like our fridge doors or kitchen tables. Sounds like he knew what he was talking about that Mr Gates. I bet we’ll be hearing more from him soon

Who would have thought, when I was a fresh faced and eager media miss in those days, that I would be reaping the rewards of that technology in quite this humdrum way. Where’s Mrs Gates when you need her, to come up with some way of deleting the need for ironing?

A nice spring sunset from yesterday evening. Left the tea bubbling on the hob to run outside and take some snaps. Returned with my eyes blinking and fizzling with all the strange sun spot colours on the insides of my eyelids. Note to self: shouldn’t really look at the sun even through a lens. Reminds me of an interesting thing I read today. R asked me what worms eat and the handy Yahoo Answers website helped me out. I then got distracted by a link to another question which I’ve often pondered myself. What do blind people’s dreams look like?

After all the easter egg chocs I’ve decided I must get round to losing some weight so have started running /stumbling up and down the local hills every morning. My thighs are killing me but I’m pleased I’ve managed it 3 days on the trot. I feel so lucky to be out among the baa-ing, crowing, tweeting and cock-a-doodle-doing rather than inside a smelly gym with headphones on. Ok the dog barking, manure smells and rain-misted glasses are not so brill but at least not had to go out in the snow. Yet.

I loved making our easter tree. I hadn’t heard of them before but came across the idea at the cottage small holder blog. I gather it’s a Norweigan and German tradition. Find yourself some budding twigs, bring the little bit of spring into your house and decorate with easter fancies. Putting them in water makes the shoots open up. I remembered we had some ideal twigs hanging around after felling one of our lilacs so am pleased to be able to give these branches another lease of life. Didn’t get round to blowing and painting the eggs with natural food dyes (beetroot, onion skins, oh and bright blue food colouring from morrisons!) but there’s only so many hours in the day to be an earth mother.

Feels especially good to see the lilac leaves unfurling this morning as I’m still wracked with guilt about frying one of our fish to death in the tank last night. (Don’t worry I don’t have a dead fish picture – the dead pig was enough). We have a great tank but the in-built thermostat is rubbish and I’ve taken to setting the heating to go on and off via a timer plug. Normally works fine but I thought the fish looked a bit chilly so did a manual over-ride and then i THOUGHT I turned the heater off. Several hours later at the tea table and we’re wondering “why are all the fish being weird and looking funny and kind of erm, HOT, OHMYGOD!!”. Cue collecting every iceblock in the house and dangling them in the tank in plastic bags. Sadly too late for our one lovely orange male guppy. Sorry fella. RIP.

I’ve been a vegetarian for so long now (nearly 25 years!) that sometimes when people ask me why, I have to pause for a minute to remember what prompted me in the first place. It’s because I don’t like the idea of eating animals. I think animals are sentient beings and I literally can’t stomach (or chew and swallow) someone else’s flesh. (Sensitive types should probably not scroll down…)

I think it’s easy not to associate the whole living animal with the prepared cuts of meat you see in their little trays at the supermarket or in the butchers window. I’ve desensitised myself to an extent. I can cook meat for Mr P & R without too much thought. Granted, I don’t like handling the raw stuff much and hate the smell and drips of blood left in the wrapping etc but I’ve got quite adventurous about cooking bigger joints etc recently. I’ve even driven over the hill here a couple of times to buy a lamb’s leg direct from the organic farm and felt pleased that I’d sourced it pretty much fresh from the field in a consumer conscious Hugh Fearnley kind of way. This is the stuff you get at all the top London eateries don’t you know, and it’s from just over our hill (etc etc)

I have been pushing it to the back of my mind that these things are parts of animals. Last night I was thinking about our Easter weekend menu. We have a friend visiting so I’ll probably do a joint of meat. Oh yes, lamb is traditional at Easter. We’ve had lamb quite a lot recently so maybe not BUT HANG ON!!! I’m thinking about cooking and serving up one of those lambs that I’ve been coo-ing at all week from the kitchen window??

THAT’S when I remembered why I don’t eat meat. I started to think about the cuts of meat I’d bought and imagining them as the legs and shoulders of the lambs in our field.

No. That’s too hideous. How could I have cooked a lamb? How can anyone eat a lamb?

As if that wasn’t enough of a reminder, I walked passed a butcher’s van in town this afternoon. I didn’t know that it was a butcher’s van. That is until my face came within a few inches of a whole pig hanging upside down with it’s head cut off. It was just hanging on a rack out the back of the van, right there in the street. It had all it’s legs, trotters and it’s curly tail there. Just no head. It was a dead body.I’m so glad R was looking the other way. I could see several folk going green catching sight of it and then averting their eyes at the horror. When it’s all butchered and minced though, I bet we’ll all enjoy the smell of those lovely sizzling sausages.

The pig pic (right) is from an interesting article about a person’s experience butchering a whole pig and processing the various parts for sausages etc. Well if you can eat pork after all that, fair enough.

We found the Easter bunny in our garden! (Scuse the dirty window). Oh! And here comes the easter chick too! Busy round these parts.

I thought R and I could do with a proper walk today. I made it sound more interesting by saying we were going to “Strawberry Land”. She had just been watching a very schmaltzy programme about a girl called Strawberry Shortcake so I thought it would appeal. Mr. P made a good joke about her friend being called “Raspberry Flan” and so we set off to see if we could find where they lived. Down the lane, across the road and then down a steep hill to a magic place with a fast flowing steam, wild garlic and an old mill. R was getting irritated by me stopping to take pics every few mins as it was “boring”. Oh dear. What is she going to be calling me when she’s a teenager? At one point she lay face down in the mud in protest. I was getting into using the “sport” setting on the camera to snap the river flowing. I also managed a good one of R splashing in the puddles.After we’d struggled back up the big hill and narrowly missed getting run down by our friendly farmer in a ridiculous sized tractor carrying an old gate on it’s forklift (that gate has been cluttering up the farmyard for yonks though), what should I see en route to the back door? Yes! My little lambs boinging all over the place. Really chuffed that I managed to get my “mid-boing” shot. Wasn’t quite the country idyll shot I would have liked seeing as the lamb has silly placcy mac on and is slathered in indigo dye but you can’t have everything. And what better drink to refresh ourselves with on our return from Strawberry Land than Strawberry Milk? As R would say “the perfect end to the perfect day”. Yes probably some schmaltzy phrase repeated from the schmaltzy tv programme.

Was SO excited yesterday afternoon when the landrover & trailer ambled into the back field and several ewes and spring lambs wobbled out. I was alone in the kitchen but gasped out loud “Wow! Look! We’ve got lambs!! Ahhhhhhhh!” Bang went any thoughts of doing work or household chores. What is it about lambs? They are so captivating. So cute. So tiny. So white (more…)