I wish I’d known just how much more enjoyable my life would become when I started writing my first blog post some nine years ago.  At the time I was in a very low place, I had lost my hair that summer in the space of six weeks and was struggling to keep a toe hold on reality. My reality had been completely blown out the water and that combined with friends and strangers who constantly told me that my hair would grow back and then pronounce that it was all from stress  meant I was slowly backing myself into a suicidal state of mind that I could find no relief from.

Deciding I needed an occupation to fully engage with I taught myself to knit socks from surfing the internet.  It took three months to knit my first pair but while I was learning how to turn a heel, ripping my work back and trying again, I found a whole new world. There were knitting blogs and sewing blogs, utube and videos and Ravelry which is facebook for knitters, it was just incredible, I had no idea.  I started to engage and they were chatty and friendly and nice and unless I told them, no one knew, I was just a chatty girl in the UK.

Then I decided to start my own blog and talked about my allotment and knitting and it gave me pleasure to spend most of the weekend at the allotment with hubby and then to relax with a glass of wine and write on a Sunday evening.  As I started to focus, to really look at the changing seasons, week to week, even day to day I felt my mood begin to lift.  There were still the stupid people, the comments hadn’t gone away every time I stepped out of my front door but mostly I began to deal with them in a  better way, helped no end by a stint with a psychologist who gave me a few tools to use for the particularly bad moments and the love and support from my family.

The more I photographed and wrote, the more I wanted to and the more I wanted to the more observant I became, I had concocted the perfect pick me up, by accident.  During the years I’ve upgraded my camera, started a knitting group, gone to college as a mature student in her mid to late forties, then onto University in London leaving her family in the countryside. Created jackets and trousers and dresses and skirts, blankets and quilts,  jumpers and cardigans and socks, lots and lots of socks, taught myself computer packages and found my way around the underground. My blog has comforted me in my darkest of hours and made me laugh with the purest of joy, it has taken me to places I never would have gone and allows me to see just how far I have come.  It has protected me and grown with me and is to me a dear, dear friend.

If only I’d known all that was to come, when I made my first tentative post nine years ago.

 

This post is linked up with Finish the Sentence Friday, hosted by Kristi Campbell at Finding Ninee, the prompt this week is, I wish I’d known…

 

A pie is a thing of beauty to share with others, glorious, steaming and just what you need on a cold March evening. A pie’s hidden charms will always be in the quality of its ingredients but with clever shopping and cooking these need not be the most expensive, often the cheaper cuts of meat slow cooked, think steak and kidney, or the off cut from a Sunday roast, think shepherds or cottage, will be transformed into a delicous entity of their own.

It used to be said that fish pies could be made with off cuts of fish, but who can afford to buy fish with that much waste these days? But the supermarkets have solved the problem, either frozen or fresh they do a fish pie mix, which is a wondrous product as they normally contain a white fish, often haddock or cod, a smoked fish again either haddock or cod – which you need in a fish pie it adds a lovely depth of flavour and salmon.  Roughly coming in at 390 – 400 grams for about £3.00, with the addition of some cheap prawns or even cheaper boiled eggs its a jolly good start to a pie for four.

Fluffy mashed potato and the end of the cheese grated on top.

Add some squeaky savoy cabbage and julienned carrots for less than £1.25 a portion.

Wannabe Gastronomy indeed.

Recipe.

Fish pie mix

Potatoes

Two small onions.

1/2 pt milk,

1 1/2 tablespoon white flour,

4 eggs (or prawns, yum!)

1 tsp Fennel seeds (optional) you could use dill or parsley, crushed.

butter and milk to make the mash and a big knob of butter for frying the onions.

Cheese, a couple of ounces should do it, more or less depending on what you have.

Salt and Pepper to taste.

 

Method.

Boil the potatoes and make the mash with the butter and milk, put to one side. Boil the eggs for 8 minutes, peel and quarter.

Fry the onions in the butter until soft, add the flour and milk to make a roux sauce, add the herb of your choice,  when smooth and bubbling add the fish and stir again until bubbling take of the heat and pour into your dish. Let it cool for a few minutes to make things easier, layer on the eggs  that were cut into quarters so everyone gets a bite and then layer on the mash and then the grated cheese.

Put on a tray and into a hot oven 180 C for half an hour whilst you prepare and cook the veg.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Who could not be cheered by the sight of a big blowsy bunch of sunshine yellow daffodils.

Not I.

Noticing the days lengthen and the blossom gently springing to life makes me think of how I want to spend my long summer days and I know this of me, it is not weeding. It took me quite a few years of married life to realise that most of the gardening whether that be on an allotment or a patch of lawn with flower borders needed to be planned and attended to by the end of the Easter weekend. Miss that magical four day slot and life seems to move on at such an incredible speed that one never seems to catch up.  Of course if Easter is particularly early, one might need to hold fire on the tenderest of plants and certainly tomatoes and runner beans are a definite no go, but the planning and the sheer hard labour of that first cut on the lawn or that first dig of the earth can be done.

This year we plan to bring a little of the allotment back into our garden. We have neither the energy or the inclination for an allotment plot, not least that the waiting lists are many years long but what we do want to bring back are the best bits. And for us those are a greenhouse filled with the tastes of summer, warm aromatic tomatoes, crunchy yet juicy cucumbers, bright and glossy peppers and dark and mysterious aubergines and perhaps just a few runner and french beans scattered through the flower border.   Somewhere we can play and construct feats of Heath Robinson engineering to grow the tomatoes up, we can talk animatedly about newly discovered pests and diseases and wonder aloud if we have the watering versus feeding regime about right.  And talk we will, in the garden long into the summers evening, with candlelight, the smell of tomatoes and just a glass or two of home brewed beer.

Construction started, our very own greenhouse,  I’m just so excited, what fun it will be.

 

Leap year, February 29th, every four years, we know you well. This day always brings back memories of my youth aged 17 and at the time living in a hostel where we girls had the brilliant idea of sending the sexiest, in a woolly jumper and slippers kind of way, boy many many valentines. You should have seen him, he was tickled pink and proceeded to gather them all together and read them out to us in the evening.   But this game was a long game and on the 29th we all proposed to him, every time we saw him.  I remember uttering the immortal words ‘Gareth, will you marry me and I’ll make you Marmite sandwiches every day!’ as I trundled through the corridor from the kitchen to my room with my supper. I was with another girl, we burst into laughter and he, well he was not happy.  We apologised the next day and eventually he did manage to see the funny side of it.

Now you may not be in the lucky position or even want to propose to a boy, but I think having an extra day appear on the calendar can only be a good thing and as such should be grasped with gusto. The perfect day to explore new ideas or challenges or just to have an extra half an hours walk in the fresh spring air which is thrusting its fresh shoots into winters gloom.

These have been flowering all winter.

And this has just started to flower.

The Fig tree is bursting into bud.

As is the Ceanothus.

Experimentation with the Geraniums. I normally pull them up as they are very tender plants, or so I thought.  This year I left one in a pot to see what would happen through the winter here in London. I think we have had a couple of frosts, but that is all and it has survived. I think I will leave them in this year and see what happens.  It will be interesting to see how it flowers being on a more mature plant, it either needs cutting back to flower on new growth and so therefore not flower well or will be magnificent.  Time will tell.

Long before the days of Sex and the City and the watching of Carrie Bradshaw’s predilection to designer shoes, I was a little obsessed myself. Unfortunately not being as deep of pocket as our heroine I contented myself with the best of the commercial market, helped no end by a stint in a shoe shop where I could wander the shelves trying on to my hearts content and indulging myself in the sales with the addition of my staff discount, it was bliss.

Now my heels are lower and in some ways, with responsibilities, my purse is tighter but when hubby told me about Selfridges shoe department I gave a huge intake of breath, ‘the biggest shoe department in the world?’ I stuttered and then my jaw dropped and my eyes glazed over.

35,000 sq ft of shopping space devoted to shoes. 35,000 !!!! Eeeek. Thousands and thousands of shoes.

Fortunately for me, this was half an hour before closing! So it was just a quick stroll around, it was fascinating to see high street brands such as Topshop, Office and All Saints give way to designers such as L K Bennett, Kurt Geiger and Tods, then to stroll through to the designer rooms where shoes by Stella McCartney, Chloe and Marc Jacobs are perched.  Just when you think that you can’t hyperventilate any further there are 11 boutiques that house designer labels such as Gucci, Louboutin and Chanel, there are over a 150 brands to coo over.   Oooh I could spend a long time here, possibly having had my credit card removed by hubby before entering, lest I spend our life savings in one gloriously decadent moment of madness.

Enjoy.

 

 

It all started with a flippant comment from me sometime last week when I was hauling out a saucepan from a cupboard whilst trying not to let the rest of the contents topple onto the floor. ‘I wish we’d got a hanging rack for the pans’, I muttered.  Hubby as frustrated as I asked me where I would put them and I indicated an area not thinking he would take me up on it.  But then he got enthusiastic – this is what retirement does to a fella, normally I’d wait for at least two years! – and he mentioned it again and started to.., I don’t think pester would be too fine a point on it.  So I started to show him what was on pinterest at which point he got Really enthusiastic and made me fine tune my design and call out part numbers from the Ikea web site.  You have to remember at this point that I was in the midst of dying from a vile cold virus and as much as I wanted to play along, I was not going to do Ikea in half term on a dreary Sunday.

So he went and came back triumphant and on Monday, they were assembled, and I was like ‘Oh, that spurt of enthusiasm didn’t last long’ but then on Tuesday morning when I got up I found this.

Well not quite like that, I did the hanging of the pots and we went back out on Wednesday to buy the utensil holders at the bottom, but it was done and it was beautiful and best of all it really works.  It holds an enormous amount and its all reachable and organised and it makes me look like quite an accomplished serious cook, which I suppose after twenty seven years of married life and an ‘0’ level in home economics I am!

Hubby’s first week of retirement was a whirlwind of theatre trips, shopping, fine art, nice dinners and champagne as all good retirements should be.  The second week quickly deteriorated into looking after his sick wife as I’d caught some vile virus in the style of the nastiest of colds and five days later am only just starting to recover.  So much of his time has been spent either chatting with me whilst I am curled underneath a hand knitted blanket trying not to expire from something deadly, 

(And very relaxed he looks too.)

or leaving me to it whilst I go and do a bit more sleeping, at one stage I was heading very close to twenty hours of the day, whilst he potters on quietly downstairs.

And potter on he has, having had a bit of a brain wave during the first week we bought a home brewing kit for him and for her – I prefer a paler ale than hubby.  We have brewed before but this latest adventure stems from the price of beers in London, the worst case being caught for £8.00 for a half of bitter and a single 25ml shot of gin and a tonic in a grotty back street pub, it takes the shine of it to be stung for those sorts of figures.  So whilst I was being a poorly girl, hubby started the brew and it fermented very nicely and is now into its second fermentation.

And not counting the cost of the set up, will roughly come in at 35p a pint.

You can’t say fairer than that.