Books, Mud and Compost. And Horses.

I am about to give up, slope away and sleep on the sofa with the dog, for I have a cold. Usually I carry on regardless, my agricultural labourer genes usually up for slogging on, but today I have had enough. I am a bit goggled by the fact that we have NOWHERE TO LIVE. To be more accurate, we do, we're still living in the house, but the sale is hurtling towards a conclusion (good, because that's what we wanted, wasn't it?) but there is nothing for sale in the area we want to move to, and nothing to rent that has a garden, or that will allow dogs, if it has a garden.  Today I am feeling completely overwhelmed by our imminent homelessness, and the vast amounts of sorting out I still have to do to de-clutter, and now I have a cold. And it is right at that drippy, miserable, temperature-y stage where the world seems a place viewed best from underneath the duvet. Comfort reading is what I need. One useful side-effect of the decluttering I have done is that I do at least know...

The Times did a baking competition recently: make an iconic cake for the Jubilee, was the brief. I didn't enter, but the people who did produced some amazing stuff. The winning cake The Times billed as one that could become as much a legend as the Battenberg - having tried several times to make sense of the instructions, I'd disagree with them there. The Battenberg involves four bits of sponge, not hundreds. One of the runners up did a lovely Union Jack with crystallised flowers. I can do that, I thought. I have crystallised flowers before. Time consuming, but possible. So I did. Was slightly stymied by a lack of blue flowers - to be more accurate, have plenty but have no idea whether they're edible or not, and couldn't find out, but in the end, I got together a selection which would poison nobody. I wielded egg white, and caster sugar. I arranged everything neatly on greaseproof paper on a baking tray, and put it into the plate warming oven. And then went to fetch m...

Cast into transports of horror at the weekend when an email arrived from Books for Keeps, for whom I've written an article.  Can they have a photograph to illustrate the article, they say - of me. The only recent one involves a green, sparkly hat. Probably not quite the thing for a sensible author photo. There are no other photos, as I am generally behind the camera rather than in front of it and I loathe having my picture taken. When confronted with a camera my face seems to grow a thousand different muscles it didn't have before, and none of them want anything to do with the others. Discuss this with son, famed for years of having an ear or an elbow photographed as he fled the camera lens. "They take your soul, you know, photographs," he says. Agree, but reflect that going on his Facebook page, quite a lot of his soul must now be absent. Anyway, I have thought uneasily over the last few months that I would probably have to provide an author photo for my book, whe...

Happy Christmas!

For years I've adopted a distinctly Scrooge-ish attitude to elaborate displays of outdoor Christmas lights, but this year it's different. This year they seem to have taken on a sort of brave defiance. If we're all going to hell in a handcart, why not do it with lots of twinkly lights? Haven't actually gone as far as putting any out myself. We lurk behind great swathes of unclipped shrubbery and trees, the sort of thing that any new person moving in would lay waste to within seconds. Any lights we put up would be completely invisible. The house itself is dour and louring, and splashing it with Christmas lights would be a bit like swathing a black clad Victorian matron with tinsel. Or worse. We don't have a tree yet either. Well, we do, but it's stowed away in the barn, waiting for end of term when daughter and I (and her boyfriend this year) will decorate the tree. This will not take us long, the size of the tree reflecting the falling fortunes of the House of B...

When things go wrong, my first instinct is to come out fighting, generally in a loud and ranty way which I have had to learn to tone down over the years. A soft answer turneth away wrath, or at any rate is often more likely to get you what you want. That sort of thing. So why didn't I protest after my first miscarriage; when the care I received was variable, and certainly in the case of my GP, incredibly insensitive? Who decided it "not relevant" for me to be told the sex of my baby (which, after a baby is born whole at 16 weeks is completely obvious), nor "relevant" for me to be told the results of the post mortem. Why, when basically told to go away and shut up, did I do precisely that? When told by friends and relations to complain, shrivel up and say no? Because I quite simply couldn't, is the answer. I was wracked by guilt and grief. During my stay in hospital, I'd made several (unsuccessful) attempts to find out about the baby I'd had. When...

I don’t generally blog about me; well, I do, but in the I did this sense, rather than I felt this, or here are the deep, dark bits of my life sense.  This blog is going to be an exception. Once I was editor of the newsletter of my local NCT branch. The first issue I did was on miscarriage. I wrote about mine; a friend wrote about hers, and the Miscarriage Association wrote about what needed to be done by the NHS to improve how women and their partners were treated during and after miscarriage. We said things like: don’t put miscarrying women in wards with women having terminations, or worse still in ante natal wards. Treat women sensitively. That was 17 years ago. Mumsnet is starting a campaig n on how the medical service should treat miscarriage, and I’m sure you can work out what they’re asking for.  17 years later, not a lot has changed. What happened to me is still being repeated, and what we asked for then still has to be asked for now. Miscarriage is still not somethi...

I'm decorating the house for autumn.  Ha ha. Of course I'm not. It had never even occurred to me, I must admit, but I do every now and then read blogs where people do this.  I'm actually very glad that they do, as I like to look on at those wonderfully decorative lives that are completely, utterly and absolutely unlike mine, which is frankly rather pants at the moment, for one reason and another. Even if I had the time, I know I wouldn't fill it with craft projects and decorating stuff, as what I do when I have any spare time is take the dog out and charge around the fields, or dive into a slowly rotting pile of ancient horse literature, seeking what I might find. Because that is my idea of a good time.  But I like to look at other people's crafts and decorative lives and appreciate what they do. Just as well we're all different, as I'd hate it if there was more competition than there already is when it comes to acquiring ancient and slightly smelly horse ...

I can't show you, unfortunately, any of the Woolavington collection of sporting art , which lives at Cottesbrooke House. In common with most country houses, the camera is banned.  In addition, you are escorted round the house on a tour, and cannot therefore plonk yourself in front of the Marshalls/Edwards/Munnings and gawp for hours. The tour is frustrating when you are on a mission to cram as much equine art into your brain as you can manage, more so because it is actually very well done, and you are therefore trying not to get distracted by  fascinating FACTS but concentrate on the horses.  (Did you know one room in Cottesbrooke has had the same paint colour for over three centuries? Puts us repainting the kitchen the same colour over the last 12 years into perspective). Still, by dint of only looking very quickly at the porcelain and furniture, I did manage to enlarge my experience of sporting art, which has so far been concentrated on the 20th century, as that's w...

I've been near Lincoln many, many times, and hummed and hawed about whether I could manage a quick dash in before having to be elsewhere.  The call of duty has always won, which I am in retrospect glad about, as Lincoln wouldn't really repay a quick dash.  Other than being vaguely aware it had a cathedral I had no idea of what Lincoln was actually like at all.  It is beautiful. Enchanting. The centre has proved mostly immune to the hide bound brutalism of town planners and architects, unlike its relatively near neighbour Peterborough. Lincoln Cathedral has had numerous major changes in form over the centuries, but a thousand years of change have none of them resulted in concrete or brutalism.  Had the Church of England had control over the planning processes of England over the last century, I wonder what might have resulted.  As I know, obtaining a faculty (planning permission from the church to alter any of its buildings or grounds) is a teeth-grindingly slow...

Last week we had a bee swarm.  A few days ago my daughter came in and said that we had bees flying around the north wall of the house, which I took I must admit not a lot of notice of, as we always have a lot of bees about.   Those bees have now taken advantage of our complete failure to do anything about our dodgy pointing and made themselves at home in the wall. So far we have not much in the way of encounters with the bees, though when I went out to the bins, which are round that side of the house, a little cloud of bees flew down to have a look at me, and then swept back up again, which was momentarily disconcerting.  I was glad I was not Pooh Bear and holding honey. Alas they are far too high up for me to do anything about collecting the honey, which is a shame, as I am very partial to honey  If I am honest I have not the faintest clue of how to start collecting honey, though dismantling the house wall to get at it probably wouldn't be a good first step, a...

I've long had a book goblin who moves books around.  We're not visited by the sock elves much (due to my cunning plan of buying children's socks in only one colour and style, which seems to give the elves little to go on) but the cutlery elves have wrought havoc through the cutlery drawer over the years.  We've restocked with teaspoons twice, and forks and spoons go awol on a regular basis.  Not knives though. Although I still maintain there are beings which exist by eating metal, I suppose I now have to admit they're not completely responsible for the depredations.  We cleared one of the compost bins a week or so ago and found this: I have had a go at cleaning it, but alas some of the plating has completely gone. Sigh.  Do wonder just what else lurks in the other compost heaps, or is slowly mouldering in landfills.