Hi there! You look great. I have almost too much to spill – there may be dribbling.

February started with bronchitis and ended in a new job; like Dickens, but with Netflix and Kleenex Balsam.

Not only were the lovely team at Papercraft just heartwarmingly nice about me leaving, but mega editor Jenny created two gorgeous fabric birds, inspired by (and frankly much better than) the tinfoil birds I made ages ago. So cute!



Even better, Jenny’s taken time out from her rigorous schedule of being fabulous and interfering with moose to post a free template for those birdykins, so you can make ‘em yourself. I know, right? Thank you Jenny! Now it’s time to take a long, hard look at your own boss and shout ‘Hey boss! Where my birds at?’

So now I’m working on the fantabulous The Making Spot, Future’s all-newish craft website. Whee! Quick, click over there and wonder at the amazing jumpers. Do it!

In other news, the boy turns 32 tomorrow, and will celebrate by working late, late, late. C’est la vie des Phins. I have no idea if that French is correct.

Goodnight, lovely peeps x

Since August, life in the Poringe has fallen apart in a painful but dignified kind of way. Holidays have been abandoned, weekends lost, episodes of Doctor Who missed. Tragic.

I’ve done what every good Scotswoman does when faced with adversity: I’ve made a massive amount of food.

Look! Here are lots of jars of mincemeat:



They don’t look very appetising, but each jar is filled with fruit, zest, spices, sugar, treacle and brandy. Mmm! I made this back in September, because it needs to mature for a good while before it’s used.

Next up, Christmas cake! I was feeling cocky and decided to use a much more complicated recipe than last year; there was a lot of whisking and soaking and warming and blending. Also, it took four and a half hours to bake. Crazy. I made the cake in early October, and now it lives in the cake stand and sucks up a few spoons of brandy once a week. It’s like a quiet but needy pet.



This weekend, I made sweet chilli jam. It’s good with cheese toasties, sausage rolls and other cosy lazy lunchfood. These will be Christmas presents for the lovely Tap! team, who’ve worked like demons all year long.



That’s it! When I’m stressed, I find an afternoon in the kitchen is pretty relaxing. I also like the ancient tradition of boiling, baking and jarring in the autumn. In centuries gone by, mincemeat, chutneys and dense fruitcakes were a way to preserve harvest fruits through long winters, providing much of the calories and good cheer required for dark days in the Northern hemisphere. I especially love that my modern mincemeat recipe held on to a medieval memory; the fruit sealed in beef suet to stop fermentation.

Next up is my birthday, then Christmas. Cake for everyone!

x

The boy and I have a strange relationship with money. On the large scale, we’re pretty sensible. We’ve never had an expensive holiday, our wedding cost less than a grand, we’ve both worked hard in grown-up jobs since graduating and so on. Despite (or because of) this, neither of us has ever been good at day-to-day money. Fancy coffees on a Monday. Off to the pictures at the weekend. The BeneFit make-up counter when Maybelline would do. Etc.

Partly it’s a ‘sod it, we’ve earned it’ attitude, which is obviously ridiculous. I’m also slightly aware of the ‘mean Scot’ stereotype, and never want to seem stingy with my cash when among my mostly non-Scot friends.

ANYWAY. This month we’ve slipped into a kind of competitive frugality. It was never agreed, but suddenly we’re both ultra-tight with what we spend. It’s getting ridiculous.

‘It’s raining, shall we get the bus?’
‘NO! Let’s walk!’
‘Let’s have these noodles, they’re only £1!’
‘Let’s have THESE noodles, they’re only 28p!
‘Shall we buy a coffee this morning?’
‘NO, let’s just walk past and smell the shop.’
‘NO! Let’s just say the word ‘coffee’ over and over until we feel like we’ve had one!’
‘Let’s look at a photo of a coffee on the internet!’

Etc. I’ve no idea what’s prompted this; we don’t have any more or less money than usual. But I suppose it can’t be a bad thing. The (imaginary) Milkybars are on me!

Why hello, I hope you had a wonderful Christmas!

I’ve got a full two weeks off work, and I’m very much enjoying the peace and quiet. After what’s been a rather stressful and fractious year, I was determined the boy and I would have a lovely Christmas Day, so spent the first week of my holiday cleaning, shopping and cooking so the day itself would be an easy peasy roast-the-turkey-and-heat-stuff-up affair.

These things never photograph well, but I can assure you it was delicious! For the food geeks among you, I did Jamie Oliver’s get-ahead gravy (amazing), Christmas butter (Christmassy), and the chestnut sprouts recipe from the December issue of his mag (sadly foiled by lack of sprouts – I had to use cabbage). I’m not really much of a cook, so I was pretty pleased with my Christmas dinner.



Because we’re big softies, we chose a turkey that’d had some kind of yuppie life, with massages and cooked breakfasts and holidays in the Algarve. That turkey had a better life than most humans. It’d only been roughly plucked, though, which meant I spent Christmas Eve with a pair of eyebrow tweezers and a stoic expression.

We also had gigantic slabs of The Cake. It’s very good, though oddly you can barely taste the half-bottle of brandy I poured in.



One thing I didn’t plan for was the death of our fridge-freezer late on Christmas Eve. Not a disaster, in the grand scheme of things, but I was a little bit heartbroken to see all my painstakingly prepared food starting to spoil and our breakfast prosecco getting warm and our ice cubes melting. We ferried everything out to the car boot and crossed our fingers that it wouldn’t freeze solid in the snowy night.

We’re getting the new fridge-freezer tomorrow, which after a week without one is terribly exciting. Chris has made a pile of ice cube trays and booze he’s planning to put in there as soon as is scientifically sensible. Hooray for cold drinks!

Tomorrow is also Hogmanay, which means I’ll get drunk too early, have a headache by midnight and fall asleep during Jools Holland’s Hootenanny. Tradition!

Winter wonderland
I say a lot of horrid things about our flat, but I really can’t fault the views from the living room windows. Today the garden and the trees are all covered in snow and it’s just lovely. I haven’t taken a photo, though; you’ll just have to imagine it.

In honour of the snow, I was allowed to open my birthday present a few days early. It’s a king-sized, dual-control electric blanket and it’s one of my favourite presents ever. Yesterday I cranked it up to its maximum heat setting and let myself cook like a cinema hotdog. Delicious.

Cake care & feeding
I can’t believe I haven’t told you about The Cake. Back in October, my colleague Angela told me that she was preparing to make her Christmas cake, explaining that was important to let it mature and to feed it brandy for a while before before Christmas. I didn’t know anything about cake-making, but I was very interested in Angela’s words of cakey wisdom.

The next day, because Angela is awesome, she brought me a large tupperware container filled with her leftover ingredients, a small cake tin and a printed recipe. A cake kit! So I whipped up my first ever Christmas cake, filled with brandy-soaked fruit, brown sugar, treacle and spices. Mmm!



When it was done, I wrapped it up and hid it under the table. Every couple of weeks, the boy and I open it up, spoon over some brandy, then pack it away again. It smells incredible! I suspect one slice will put us over the drink-drive limit, and two in quick succession will possibly render us unconscious, but – hey! – it’s for Christmas! I’ll post a pic when it’s finally decorated.

Everyone bake a cake! You won’t regret it.

Tap!
At long flipping last, I’m allowed to talk about the boy’s new job. He’s launching a new magazine for iOS devices, and it’s going to be rockingly awesome. I’m very proud of him. Look out for the first issue of Tap! Then insist that all of your iPod/iPhone/iPad-owning friends buy it by the armful. They’ll thank you for it.

Friday night Fry
We both had fun saying hello to Stephen Fry at his book event here in Bath. We asked him to sign our book to ‘The Phins’ and he said, in a delightfully Fryesque way, ‘Well, I hope the Phins enjoy it, every one of them.’



The book is excellent, by the way, but do make sure you read this one first. I think it’s even better.

Divine
As far as I’m concerned, Saturday nights are for staying in, wearing pyjamas and drinking sparkling alcoholic drinks. Now and then, however, I can be lured out by something exciting like the Neil Hannon gig in Bristol yesterday.

As a rule, I hate gigs. Especially standing ones. They’re hot and you get jostled and, when you’re 5’3, you can see almost nothing. But this was fantastic; witty and indulgent and up-close. Go and see The Divine Comedy if you get the chance, you won’t regret it.

This is the only photo the boy took; the empty stage from the back of the room. Atmospheric!



Tales from my Twenties
My lack of interesting things to talk about recently has been a bit depressing, so in the run up to my birthday I’ve decided to fill the rest of November with some Tales from my Twenties. I can’t promise they’ll be interesting, but at least they’ll be here for posterity when I’m old and forgetful.

Let’s go! This one’s a bit namedrop-tastic, but we’ve already had a Stephen Fry encounter, so let’s just make that the theme of this post:

Tales from my Twenties: HMV
When I first moved to London, I applied for a postgraduate teaching course that started in September, but needed a job to pay the rent in the meantime. Despite my wobbly grasp of classical music, I secured a full-time job in the classics department of HMV Oxford Circus, which turned out to be one of the best and maddest jobs I have ever held.

The classics staff were mostly graduates from elite music schools who could play entire Bach sonatas from memory and formed string quartets in their spare time. One of the till girls used to double her weekly salary by busking with her cello on Bankside each Sunday.

Both better and more frightening than the staff were the customers, who divided into Celebrity and Quite Mad (never both, surprisingly). Due to the store’s proximity to Broadcasting House, I had to learn to act casual when faced with BBC legends and other niche telly people, and I was TERRIBLE at it. I just stared blushingly at the till as I served John Peel, Paul Merton, John Suchet, Ben Miller and lots of other people I’d grown up watching and listening to. If I had to interact with them I went to pieces – my brain’s survival mechanism has now blocked out the most humiliating episodes, but I still have flashbacks of having to perform a random credit card check on Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio. At one point, Madonna came in to do an in-store gig. I stood within spitting distance of her, she a millionaire rapping badly about lattes, me a minimum wage earner wearing a polyester polo shirt, and pondered idly the events that had brought us to the same place.

The Quite Mad customers were (and possibly still are) famous in their own right within the store. There was a lady who came in almost daily with a cat perched on her shoulders. A well-spoken gent who always wanted the earliest music he could find; having exhausted our range of medieval music groups, he asked if we had any prehistoric recordings – not contemporary imaginings of prehistoric music, you understand, but recordings of music made in prehistoric times. Quite mad.

My favourite customer was a very elderly gentleman who dearly wanted to buy a very specific 1940s recording of a particular classical piece. A few of us turned the store upside down looking for it, grumbling all the while about all the work the fussy old duffer was causing us. Of course, when the CD turned up, the cover showed a black and white still from the recording showing the man himself conducting the orchestra. He was the JR Hartley of the classical world! I wish I could remember his name.

Here ends my tale of working in HMV. There is no moral other than this: if you want to work in a shop, work in HMV. Everyone is clever, crazy or famed, and you get a good staff discount too.

It is September! Perhaps one day I’ll stop starting all my posts by announcing the month, but let’s not hold our collective breath. Here are just a few of my frankly dazzling thoughts:

Old
I know intellectually that I’m in no way old. But that doesn’t stop me from dyeing my grey hair, wearing glasses so strong they’d give a normal person x-ray vision, and confusing younger people in pubs by referencing Gordon the Gopher and Bertha*.

Lentils
I don’t usually cook lentils, but I made this for the boy last weekend and it was delicious. The salsa’s a bit of a faff, but if you make loads, you can freeze a bit to heat up next time. Old-person tip!

Time off
I’m hotly anticipating my week-off later this month. Chris is too busy to join me, sadly, but I plan to decorate the spare room, sew shoddy dresses and visit Bristol. We moved to Bath in 2007 and so far have had zero desire to visit Bristol, despite being only 15 minutes away by train. We tend to go to London for shopping expeditions and stay in Bath for culinary adventures, but I feel we’ve neglected poor Bristol. If anyone has any top recommendations for what a skint lone woman can do in Bristol, let me know.

That’s it! Have a cosy, crispy September weekend, you lovely people.

*Peroni-fuelled synopsis: ‘Bertha was a big factory machine. She could make anything, and it came out of her mouth.’ That was a weird show, am I right?

Lots of things! You don’t have to read them, though. Why not take this opportunity to catch up on your knitting, or take the rubbish out? I won’t hold it against you.

Tedious weekend rundown

Last weekend was a little bit bonkers, in that I was shocked at how much you can cram into two days if you really try.

On Saturday we went with aunties Sheila and Isla to celebrate my cousin Alis’ 14th birthday. We all went to Crockadoodledo and painted bowls and mugs and teapots and a dish for Alis’ new puppy. The gentle people of Crockadoodledo were very friendly when faced with a party of whooping Scottish ladies (and Chris) and had no problem with us eating cakes, blowing out candles and stealing paint pots from other tables.

That evening, we went to The Coachmakers in London, where Jamie had turned 30, put on a waistcoat and ordered a number of beverages. We gave him a large model of a Rancor fighting Luke Skywalker, which seemed insane when we were on the Tube but made perfect sense when every bloke in the pub went ‘OOOH’.

As we hadn’t eaten since breakfast, we left Jim’s party at a scandalously-early 10pm and went in search of food. WITH EVERYONE ELSE IN THE WHOLE OF LONDON. Ed’s Diner was jumpin’ but we managed to get a seat and ordered burgers and fries and onion rings and massive Cokes. This is the manic face of a woman who’s been up for 16 hours and just walked several miles in heels.



I really wanted one of those boozy milkshakes, but feared it would tip me over the edge.

Thanks to the Last Minute Secret Hotels thingy, we ended up staying at the Park Lane Hotel for cheap. The room was teensy and quite basic, but the hotel itself is in an ace location on Piccadilly, and has the lovely Palm Court, a proper 1920s Art Deco bar. Sunday was our 5th wedding anniversary, so we went down early-afternoon and ordered cocktails; the shakey-shakey and buzzy-blending of which may have destroyed the tranquil afternoon teas of many American tourists. SORRY TOURISTS. Here’s the boy, looking like a man who’s just spent ten years living with a woman who can’t operate her own television. Happy anniversary!



After that we walked for miles and went to see the BP Portrait Award exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, which is excellent. And free! Go and see it, I promise you’ll come away inspired.

Accepting being the crazy lady

Cope’s recent post is a good illustration of my current renown among friends and colleagues for being something of a feminist killjoy. Poor Cope has been accused several times of sexism-by-blogpost and Chris’ editor Graham delights in goading me from time to time with talk of pink iPods and the like.

It’s difficult; I was raised to be polite and try my best to be respectful of different views, even if I don’t agree with them. When I was a teacher, though, my headmaster knocked an interesting message into my skull: ‘By ignoring it, you’re condoning it.’ He was actually talking about violations of the uniform rules at the time, but it really stuck with me.

Until about a year ago, the only thing I’d stick my neck out for, conversationally, was racism. On any other disagreeable matter I’d sit tight-lipped and seething until the moment passed.

Then I met a guy who was casually homophobic in everyday conversation. The first few times, I just coughed and turned away when he made outrageously sweeping generalisations or jokes about our gay acquaintances, but then my old headmaster’s words started to haunt me. By ignoring it, I was condoning it. This guy thought that I agreed with him. He thought his point of view was acceptable. The next time it happened, I told him to shut the fuck up. I may even have mused aloud on why exactly he was so obsessed with gay men. It’s possible that my voice was slightly raised to embarrass him in public. Either way, he never raised the issue of sexual preference with me again and it felt pretty good.

After that, I decided to speak up every time I heard a friend say anything socially antiquated and unacceptable. Thankfully, in my tiny Bath world, racism and homophobia only very rarely rear their heads, but frustratingly, sexism and misogyny are absolutely rife. And I just can’t let it pass.

I don’t hate men. I just want some men to stop talking about women as something other. I don’t hate women either. I just want some women to stop claiming pole dancing is empowering. Look here’s David Mitchell to lighten the tone!

Male or female, if you know you’re about to say something sexist, just don’t say it. You’re a relic.

More Holmes!

Okay, since Sherlock ended I’ve had to read a bunch of my old Conan Doyle books, and I’ve decided I want two things for the next series: more disguises and Irene Adler. Let’s make it happen, internet.

That’s it. Next weekend we are headed to beautiful Dorset for the Wedding of the Year! Expect photos. And cake.

Things here on the Ribble have been very quiet of late, mainly because I’ve been ploughing all my blogging energies into the PaperCraft inspirations blog. Look, you can watch our little iPhone video and everything! Here’s the rest of my August news:

Birthdays
It’s been a bonkers summer of birthdays; my grandma was 80, Linda turned 60, Jim’s about to be 30 and Alis is a shocking 14. Consequently I’ve spent a spectacular number of weekends catching flights and eating cake, like lottery winner gone rogue.

Sherlock
A few people have emailed and Tweeted to ask what I think of the latest Sherlock series and if there will be a Sherlock-cap (or a Caps-lock, as Brennan suggested in a moment of genius).

I must confess that as a big fan of the Conan Doyle stories, I was a bit concerned about the idea of a modern day adaptation; you know, in case they had Holmes ride a scooter or dance at a nightclub or something else insanely out of character. But OF COURSE I needn’t have worried!

There have been two episodes so far and they’ve been ace. I love the Baker Street flat and Holmes’ droll voice and the deep-into-London locations. Modern stuff that could’ve been cheesy, like the texting and emails, seem quite alright for a character that craves speedy logic.

Weirdly, the only bits that make me wince are the things that veer too knowingly to the source – the ‘three-patch problem’ was a clanger, for example.

So yeah, I’m a bit too late for Sherlock-caps, but maybe that would be fun if there’s a Christmas special or something.

Anniversary
It’s our anniversary this weekend, can you believe it’s a whopping five years since my ‘holy shit, we got married’ blog post? I might dig it out of the archives, just for fun.

Today the centre of Historic Bath ground to a halt for possibly the most exciting event in recent history; Nicolas Cage turned on our Christmas lights. Exciting, right? I tried to summon up a bit of Cage-fever in the office by writing ‘OMG’ on this picture of him and then sticking it to the noticeboard, but it didn’t really fly. Frankly we’re not going to be impressed until the reanimated corpse of Elvis Presley turns on our Christmas lights.

In other news, our kitchen flooded and a plumber had to come. Oh the glamour.

Kissu!

One of my favourite things to see in the West Country is the fallow deer herd at Dyrham Park. I love how they are almost the same colour as the scrubby grass:



And I love that they’re not-at-all afraid of humans. This buck wandered out in front of us as we climbed the hill back to the car park. He looks like he stepped out of a storybook!

Oh Christ, I’ve been away for ages. What the hell have I been doing? I mean, just what exactly has been SO IMPORTANT that I haven’t been able to update this site for such a ludicrously long time? WHAT?

Mostly, I’ve been letting my hair grow very large and cumbersome, scaring children with my upper arms and leaning on gates like this:



Crazy, I know. And it’s not only pointless personal websites that have been allowed to fester during this protracted bout of gate-leaning, no! I have also failed to do any drawing or crafting or French-refreshering or writing or reading. I don’t know why. I have a creeping suspicion that my bountiful creativity in the past may have been inextricably linked to being permanently stressed out of my mind. But, I suppose if I have to choose between sanity and anatomical embroideries, sanity wins by a nose.

It’s barely worth telling you about everything that’s happened in the last month or so, partly because it’s old news and partly because it’s fairly boring. In brief: We snapped and booked a holiday, Historic Bath got hot as a bastard, Carlos developed a terrible smell and the boy got special sunglasses that give him the power of x-ray vision.

Anyway, I won’t get all panicky about when I’ll be back, like this is the internet equivalent of Awakenings or something. I’ll come back later and tell you the tale of Carlos’ smell and the Curious Incident of the Doors in the Night Time. Or maybe I won’t. Argh, you can’t trust anyone, least of all easily-distracted Scottish women with gate-leaning to get on with.

Kissu!

The boy sent me a link to the ol’ homestead on all-new Google London street view, which made me feel all odd. Someone has put very ugly curtains up in our living room, and you can still see the slightly bare bit of wall where the New Cross Road sign fell off.

In other news, the boy and I are currently involved in a healthy livin’, money saving pact in which we walk home from work in the evening instead of getting the bus. It’s only about 2 miles, but up a ridiculous incline that gets gradually steeper and steeper until we’re almost crawling. If my trousers don’t fit better by Saturday I’m going on a pie-bender at The Raven.

The boy gave me a new camera gizmo to try out, and I inadvertently captured a perfect 40 second snapshot of our married life. I make pointless requests, the boy follows them without question, we talk to the car and I piss myself laughing for no good reason.

Lots of things have happened, and yet I have not told you lovely people about any of them. Unless you are on Twitter, in which case I’ve told you about all of them, in real time, in excruciating detail. Anyway. In order:

Everyone’s favourite Welsh-speaking American came to Bath and we played mini-golf. It was pretty great. Cope won, mainly due to his hardcore mini-golfing technique. There is a picture of me too, but it is not nearly as inspiring.

The boy turned 29 and bankrolled a madcap London visit to celebrate. We stayed at the beautiful Athenaeum hotel and were treated to the sight of our dinky Carlos being valet-parked by a doorman in a bowler hat. Hilarious. Adorably, all the boy wanted for his birthday was a rack of ribs at the Texas Embassy and an ice cream for afters. Done.

Happy birthday, you lovely man!

Sometimes I miss New Cross very badly. I miss it when I hear the Eastenders theme tune, or a siren, or when I play Monopoly or see a red bus. But sometimes I wake up and our street looks so very beautiful that my eyes almost combust.
That’s our drive from the living room window. It always looks lovely, but in the snow it is especially Narnia-esque. See that driveway across the road? A man comes out of there three times a day to walk a massive racing greyhound. All winter, the dog has been wearing a red coat with a white fur trim, like it’s a canine Father Christmas or something. Weird.

This is our other living room window, which looks into the communal garden. It’s testament to how elderly our neighbours are that the snow in the garden has remained totally smooth and untouched for an entire week. Everyone’s too feeble to tramp around in it. Including me.

Er, this isn’t our flat. It’s one of the crazy mansions that line the rest of the street. This is the best mansion, as it has a tower and you can have a good gawp at it from the road (the others are disappointingly hidden from view by trees and walls. Bah.) I have no idea how the builders of our shoddy sixties block got planning permission. Fact: when I walked down the road to take these pictures, some unseen oddball was playing a haunting melody on a penny whistle.

Here’s The Poringe in all its moonlit glory. The boy took this, in his slippers. He is insane. That’s me on the ground floor, looking out of the window and shouting, ‘Put your wellies on, you loon.’ Goodnight!

My tax bill was somewhat larger than I anticipated, setting OTAT10 back considerably. Arsecakes. Still, it’s only money, I shall just have to earn more. Such is the wonder of modern living.

In happier news, I have learned to make risotto and have spent the last week perfecting the skill, mostly standing in the kitchen and shouting in a mock cockney-Italian accent until the boy agrees to eat some risotto and declare it delicious. It really is delicious, though.

Tonight I am sitting watching the temperature drop on my weather widget and hoping for the pretty, pretty snow. Come on, snow.

Oh look, it’s the last day of December and I’ve done nothing but eat fabulous food, watch fabulous films and walk over fabulously frosty West Country landscapes. Fabulous. Here is a picture of me on Christmas day, apparently over-excited about our ice bucket, or the fact that the waitress found a cracker hat to fit my humungous head. Miracle.



The boy and I are staying in tonight, drinking Prosecco and obsessing over Juliette Binoche. I hope you all have a truly happy Hogmanay and a restful New Year. Cheers!

Last Monday I turned 28 years old, which was lovely. Thank you everyone for the wonderful cards and gifts, which were very thoughtful and beautiful and generous. I had a teensy dinner with the Copes and Alexes on Saturday to celebrate both my birthday and owning a table for the first time in years. It was lovely, here is a short picture story:

How to Have a Birthday Dinner


1. Hoover the Poringe to show off its poringey vibrance.


2. Put the boy in charge of cooking and allow him to buy all of the vegetables in Sainsburys.


3. Make everyone a tin foil bird wearing a party hat, because frankly it's not a party without a hat-wearing bird. Fact: I was going to do a tutorial about making these birds until I realised that Step 1 would be 'Form tin foil into a bird', which really isn't the most helpful advice.


4. Set table. This ginormous paper tablecloth is from Ikea, and I highly recommend it. The next morning I just scrumpled the whole thing up along with the crumbs and candlewax and spills and chucked it in the bin. Eco fail! You can see the birds on the plates.


5. Boot up the Conversation Generator 8000 (patent pending). As you can see, the digital readout signals when the generator is ready to operate at peak efficiency.


6.Put prosecco in an ice bucket and force everyone who enters to have a glass, even people who don't really like prosecco. Now that's good hostessin'! Note: The boy bought this retro ice bucket on eBay, it has a huge dent in it. What happened?!


7. Marvel at the boy's peperonata. There was chicken too, but he didn't take a photo of that.


8. Be charmed by your lovely guests! I wish I had turned my hallway into a police line-up style mugshot booth because they were all so dapper and and attractive. And they brought excellent gifts too, thank you! Here I have just served hot chocolate as a pudding, with serve-yourself squirty cream and Flakes, because who doesn't like squirty cream? Also, I don't know how to make any actual puddings. Even this was a bit beyond me. That's Hannah in the corner, who is lots of fun and made me a card with amazing buttons on it and told us some ooky nursing stories. Alex was good enough to turn up even though he spends every day sitting next to the boy at work. Also, he could talk about the twin topics of rugby and ukuleles, bridging the conversational creek between the Copes and Phins. Well done! The Copes came all the way from Wales, Rachel driving back the same night through dark and icy lanes at two in the morning. Not only this, but they brought me cheese in the shape of a heart, proving that Cope friendship is for life, not just the internet.

The End

Winter babies rejoice, our season is here! Bath is really outdoing itself in the winter wonderland stakes this year, with a carousel added to the market fun. Hooray!

Here is my friend Emerald, who also loves the festive season:



Emerald is my birthday-twin. As she is far too cool to enjoy my boring adult birthday dinner, she graciously invited me to her party this Sunday instead, to paint faces. How could I resist?

Much excitement over New Job; even small things like being able to sit down for minutes on end, and allowed to wear trainers and denim, and the blissful knowledge that I'm unlikely to pick up headlice at work. I'm sad, of course, that I won't be singing at 1030 every morning at New Job, although perhaps no one will mind if I stand up once a day and belt out Shine Jesus Shine with full clapping actions in the office.

In other news, we are experiencing the most beautiful autumnal weather here in Historic Bath. Hooray sunshine! Big up leaves! Etc.

That is all.

Most days are kind of similar, then every so often there's an eventful one that leaves you all bewildered and nauseous on the sofa in your bra.

Yesterday I went into work early in order to break it to my headteacher that I had been offered another job and was leaving. She was utterly lovely about it, which somehow made it more traumatic. Then I went about my every day business without telling anyone else because, well, there never seemed to be a good time.

As the day wore on, I began to feel distinctly dreadful. I felt suddenly hot and tired and not-with-it. I recalled that feeling of being suddenly unwell from the time I had The Actual Flu, where I was standing in Trafalgar Square, waiting to meet the boy and my visiting parents, and suddenly I felt so overwhelmingly awful and exhausted that I literally couldn't stand up anymore. I had to sit down, on the ground, next to the supposedly-banished pigeons. I didn't feel as bad as that, at least, and soldiered through the rest of the day like a proper playground martyr.

Having arranged to go out at 8pm, the boy drove me to a friend's house, and we went on to another house, a beautiful one on the other side of the valley, where there was a friendly dog and pyjama'd children and tasteful decor - the exact opposite of The Poringe. I drank two glasses of sparkling wine and outed myself as a soon-to-be school-abandoner. The boy came to pick me up at midnight and was heckled mercilessly by drunk women. He took me home and let me eat his dinner leftovers.

This morning I awoke feeling awful, so awful that even the crystallised ginger didn't help, and I can't think of a synonym for 'awful'. Apparently two glasses of sparkling wine, a resignation and some cold chips are just too much for my constitution.

Still, an eventful Friday, at least. Pip pip!

My life has taken a turn for the intolerably sensible recently, with me undertaking such daily tasks as saving money, eating vegetables, washing the dishes and climbing the lateral stepper through entire episodes of Gilmore Girls. All of these things are even more tedious than they sound.

Anyway, the only frivolity on the horizon is my birthday dinner which - Hello, I am insane - is almost three months away. So I am planning my birthday dinner as if it's my last night on Earth, continually bombarding the boy with questions such as 'Do you think I should have ice cream for my birthday dinner?' and 'How do you feel about prosciutto?' and 'Can I put the Christmas tree up for my birthday dinner even though it will technically still be November?' Somehow he has managed so far to nod along and even make helpful suggestions instead of shouting 'SCREW YOUR BIRTHDAY DINNER, WENCH, I'M BUSY,' which, to be honest, he'd be totally justified in doing. I give it another fortnight before he hits me in the face with a Victoria sponge and goes to live with his Other Wife in Abergavenny.

The boy has just told me he will 'give me a review' if I am blogging about my helping him with his work this week. I'm not, but let's pretend in order to get the scoop:

“Wife 2.0 comes with a slew – nay, a veritable raft – of beefed-up features, and offers the perfect balance of support and encouragement to any time-poor hackhusband. It gets out of your way when you just need to get on with the task in hand, but it’s there with hints, tips and nose-wrinkles when the work starts to get you down. It’s the perfect solution for any hackhusband with a to-do list down to his ankles, and I can’t recommend it enough. ★★★★★”
Christopher Phin, September 2008

Hey, five stars! Thanks! I'm not sure which of my features are 'beefed-up', but if he's referring to my arse then the Gilmores can bite me.

Here are the boy's new wellies and Robbie, the dog we walked this morning. I say 'walked', I mean 'trailed behind as he dragged us over several miles of uneven Somerset farmland'. Staffies really seem to like the boy; I wonder if his bald head makes him look like one of the pack?

My mum was down for a few days this week. She had a dreadful cold but, as she is a Scottish mother and unable to relax for more than 2.5 seconds at a time, still managed to scrub our kitchen from top to bottom and get the bus to BHS to buy us a bin. THANKS MUM! Now we own Brillo pads. In other mum news, my mum saw celebrity birdspotter Kate Humble when she was in town.

Meanwhile, I have been utterly swamped at work, but able to keep up by working crazy hours at home and worrying continually. Sadly, I have neither worried nor worked this weekend and achieved precisely nothing. Oh well.

Last night we had a thoroughly brilliant evening at Westonbirt Arboretum watching New Zealand's finest pop/rock beat combo. The gig was squarely aimed at Crowded House's core demographic of Berghaus wearing, toddler wrangling professionals in their mid-forties, with gourmet catering facilities, plentiful portaloos and military-style parking drills. Hoorah! The band themselves were fantastic, too; tight as a drum and indulgent with the ol' timey hits. We love you Crowded House! Here is a photograph I took before we got into trouble for taking photographs:

ETA: PHOTO DISAPPEARED!

Yeah, this is what the world looks like when you're 5' 3.

In other news, the boy and I wore matching kag-in-a-bags and green wellingtons last night. A year in the West Country and any sense of style has gone completely out of the window.

I don't really talk about The Doctor very much, but essentially my week revolves around that point on a Saturday night when I hang my disbelief up in the cupboard with the ironing board and watch some massively good time-travel. The boy is not such a big Doctor Who fan, but watches it with me anyway. I always get the impression he watches as part of an elaborate social study, as he often comments on the action and how much it may or may not frighten the average impressionable child. He also picks holes in the plot, but nods sagely when a genuine piece of historical fact comes up.

Anyway, a few weeks ago we were watching Doctor Who after the boy had consumed a couple of glasses of red wine. He said nothing for the entire episode, but at the end announced, 'Normally, this is just a high-camp kid's show, but after a glass of wine it becomes ... the full panoply of human emotion played out against the backdrop of all space and time.' Amen, brother.

And now here are some pictures of Nelly, the laziest greyhound in Bath.

This week's dog quickly identified Chris as our pack leader and obediently followed his every move. When I held her lead she just looked at him in a long-suffering way and huffingly agreed to follow as long as he was happy with the arrangement. The love-in was continued as the boy let her undertake some of her favourite activities such as leaning against his legs, bounding through long grass and standing in puddles, looking pathetic.

Ever since I had The Actual Flu a few years ago, I seem to take colds in a much more wheezy and pathetic way. I don't really know if The Actual Flu and the since-then wheezy colds are related, but I highly recommend that anyone who finds themselves with The Actual Flu seeks medical advice instead of, say, listening to Radio 4 and weeping until their husband comes home and notes that their lips have turned lilac.

Anyway, I am currently suffering from a wheezy, snotty cold and generally feeling sorry for myself. The only upside to this is that the boy has devoted himself to making amazing cold-fighting food, such as yesterday's excellent Chicken Soup Surprise, the surprise being a cup of whisky stirred into the pan. Thanks!

On the phone to my brother earlier, he casually asked if we had discovered the magical properties of the Japanese towel yet. We had not. He suggested we expose it to hot water. We did. Then we found out just how much better Japanese towels are than our boring European ones. The boy has promised to take photographs to post tomorrow ... steel yourselves.

At Bath Cats and Dogs Home, you can turn up and volunteer as a dog walker, which is how we ended up walking Buster, the cutest and saddest dog in the world:

Buster had to wear a muzzle in case he tried to bite another dog. Being a dog himself, Buster was singularly unable to understand the concept of a muzzle, and spent many tragic minutes trying and failing to pick up enticing-looking sticks all the way along our walk. He also had to wear a little coat to keep him warm and dry, although we did enjoy his hilarious head-and-tail shake, a kind of crazy bodypopping ending in a 'tthhhhrrrp!' as his hindquarters shivered to a stop.

Buster seemed pretty unfazed by his return to the kennel, although I would happily have smuggled him home under my coat. Bye, Buster, we love you!

It is cold, wet and windy here in Historic Bath™, which means I have spent the weekend doing only three things in fairly constant rotation.

Rawking
The boy bought me SingStar to play on the PS3 and we have both become obsessed with becoming the Ultimate Uptown Girl Champions. SingStar would be so much better if we lived in an isolated farmhouse miles from civilisation. It's difficult to throw your best shapes when you live in a ground floor flat. Also, Scottish rapping = funny.

Reading American Gods
If, like me, you tried to read the free version of American Gods a week ago and got face-smackingly frustrated at the torturously slow loading speeds, try again! It's much faster now and you won't be sorry. It's the only book I've read in ages where I feel genuinely surprised at everything that happens. On page 30 I had to shut my laptop, think for a moment and announce 'Well I didn't see that coming,' to the room at large. Which was empty, and didn't reply. Exciting.

Developing Lost Theories
The poor boy hasn't been able to enjoy a second of our downloaded Lost series 3 episodes due to my constant prattling about What Might Be Going On. I also have theories on when best to enjoy the principle Lost characters: Sawyer (wet), Desmond (blowy), Jack (drunk), Kate (silent), Hurley (driving), French Chick (punchy), Jacob (from behind the sofa).

Much geek excitement today as we shared pub-space with Kryten. The boy knew far more about Kryten than I did, mainly due to his worrying enthusiasm for Scrapheap Challenge, and momentarily entertained the notion of strutting up to Kryten and talking to him about Macs. Thankfully we both managed to stay at our table and kept our spying fairly discreet. Discreet except for the bathroom-stall periscope I installed. ONLY JOKING.

In other news, I am off work for half-term this week. Huzzah! Sadly our fridge-freezer is on the blink, putting paid to my excellent soup-making plans. I'll just have to think of something else to make. (Top hats!)

Much fun was had by all at this month's Philm Club. You can recreate the experience by making your very own Top Hat snacks!

Ingredients:
1 bag marshmallows
1 tube Smarties (why are they hexagonal now?!)
1 large bar Green & Black's 72% dark cooking chocolate
1 large bar cheapo supermarket chocolate
Roll baking parchment

Method:
Roll baking parchment onto worktop to make a non-stick surface. Rip open bag of marshmallows and tip Smarties into a cup, this will make it easier later on when you're spazzing around with a pan of piping hot chocolate, see?

Break chocolate into little bits and put in a pan over a low heat. NEWSFLASH: you don't have to melt the chocolate over hot water! I had no idea! The boy has blasted away all my chocolate-melting preconceptions! Crazy. Anyway, do that, then stir the chocolate until it becomes all silky and delicious-looking. Mmm.

Use a spoon to blob large dollops of chocolate onto the baking parchment. Put a marshmallow on each of the blobs. Put another dollop of chocolate on each of the marshmallows and add a Smartie. Obviously if you are of a creative bent you can make double or even triple-decker Top Hats. Leave to harden for a couple of hours. Peel off baking parchment, put on plate.

Amaze your friends and family with the delicious taste sensation of your Top Hat platter!

In the continuing drama of Our Minky Flat, a horrible damp patch has appeared on the hall floor and is soaking slowly toward our bedroom door. While this supports my assertion that the previous tenant was an actual corpse, I feel none of my usual smug satisfaction.

The good news? It's our landlord's problem. HOORAY!

In other news, I need to think of some classic '80s snackfood to serve at our Ghostbusters Philm Club. So far I've thought of 'top hats' and cheese-on-cocktail-sticks hedgehog (which the boy says is more '70s). What did you eat in the '80s? Other than phenylalanine and BSE?

Hi! I have lots of pictures to show you, only I can't show you them because I upgraded to Leopard because the boy made me and now I am too idiotic to operate my own laptop. Leopard is pretty fun though; don't let my stupidity put you off.

In other news, hooray November! Bath is shaping up to be a fairytale winter town, with all the little alleyways strung with tasteful lights and the Christmas market starting on the 29th. There'd better be augmented hot chocolate or all my girlish dreams will be shattered. Also, I have discovered that my birthday falls on a Saturday this year. It's been sixteen years since I last had a non-school birthday, I'm not sure I can handle the excitement. Start embroidering your celebratory pantaloons now!

And finally, news that could bring our marriage to its very knees. New Boosh. November 15th. BBC Three. Oh yes.

ETA: OMG you can watch the first episode online! And I have to go to work in ... 90 seconds.

Tonight we went to gawp at Neil Gaiman and listen to him say interesting and witty things. It was pretty great. He read bits of his works in progress and then spoke in a thoughtful manner about how the plots might unfold, as if he wasn't entirely sure himself. He was disarmingly open and somehow managed to answer the audience questions in a refreshing way even though I'm sure he'd been asked them a zillion times before.

The boy and I didn't manage to get our questions answered, even though I waved my shiny cracker ring around to attract attention*. Shame, because the boy had an excellent and insightful question that would have changed the course of literary history. My question, however, would have been along the lines of 'When are you going to kiss my face?', so all's well that ends well, I suppose. Or all's well that doesn't end with a restraining order, anyway.

Other facts about our Neil Gaiman encounter:

• Neil Gaiman has very shiny boots. The boy said it was so people could look up his trousers.
  
• We counted three children at this Children's Literary Festival event ...
  
• ... but loads of goths.
  
• We didn't get anything signed, because we were too dim to realise this was a possibility. Survival of the signing-queue fittest!
  

Check out this cameraphone snap that the boy has generously donated. Neil Gaiman's aura of lovely genius can clearly be seen floating to the left of shot. Or possibly it's dry ice. We'll never know.

*Apparently Neil Gaiman is not a magpie.

Historic Bath has got somewhat cold and autumnal of late, and neither the boy nor I really understand the mysterious ways of the night storage radiator. On Tuesday I sat and wrote my 'User column at the dining table, wearing the boy's kilt socks over my jeans and wrapped up to my ears in a huge scarf. After a fashion I began to feel rather vintage and Dickensian in my chill, and when the boy came into the room I began to bang at the keyboard with much vigour, booming 'It was the BEST of times, it was the WORST of times ...' in a pompous way, prompting him to ask if I required a pair of fingerless gloves. Which I TOTALLY DO, by the way.

Today I am knackered and my feet are frigging killing me. This is pretty shameful as my new job is only part-time, although in my defence it is also somewhat more physical than my last job. There is much in the way of running around and carrying tables and crouching down to talk to very tiny people. Being part-time has inevitably caused people to ask what I do with my afternoons. Oddly, I become very cagey and embarrassed when asked this and mutter into my cleavage until my interrogator gets confused and changes the subject. Unlike Cope, who sensibly wears his writer badge with pride, I'm just too embarrassed to tell people that I sew things and type words for money. The boy would probably tell you this is my Calvinist childhood talking - 'ARTIST, is it? Aye, ye'll be needin' a propur job afore ye have bai-rins, though. Ah'll jist pit the mince on!' Etc.

The boy is going out for a work thing tonight. I say he's going out for a work thing, but frankly I have no evidence of this. He could be going to visit his other wife and family in Aberystwyth for all I know. I bet she makes him brilliant packed lunches. Bitch.

The boy is off to Germany on the first of many business trips tomorrow. Pantwettingly, this will be my first night alone in the new flat. We all know how much I enjoy the culinary opportunities that his absences afford, but the new flat is mighty creepy.

It's big, for a start, and much more rambling than either of the London flats, with a long narrow hallway and jump-y out corners. And there are lots of cupboards for murderers to hide in once they've negotiated the easy 4ft hop into any one of our man-sized, ground floor windows. And the noises! In London there was the reassuring cacophony of sirens, buses and Peckham gang wars 24 hours a day. A night in our genteel Bath neighbourhood involves four hours of total silence broken in the dead of night by a fox being buggered by Satan himself, a sound so otherworldly that I fully expect the faerie folk to come and carry me off as a kind of lunar sacrifice to the god of squinty-toothed swearing.

Ah well. I'm sure I'll soon get used to it, and at least we now have a freezer and a plentiful supply of frozen delicacies for me to investigate. Tomorrow I plan to have a meal composed entirely of onion rings and houmous.

Back to work tomorrow. Hey-ho.

At the weekend we went to the national arboretum, which is like a really civilised forest. Totally level, neat grassy paths and an excellent café - everything the boy and I look for in our 'outdoor' pursuits. Thankfully the arboretum is pretty massive, so it's easy to get away from the hoards of dawdling morons and find lovely peaceful places to walk. You can also see lovely exotic trees like this Japanese maple that I snapped with my cameraphone.

In other news, I am anxiously trying to adopt the Bath Look before I start work next week. I can't quite get a handle on what the Bath Look is; it seems to involve floaty layers and a lot of tanned ankle. And there's something about the hair as well. I feel a bit formal and conspicuous in my London clothes, they're too severe. Anyone who can reduce the Bath Look to a formula wins a chewy cookie.

And finally: I made felt in our sink this morning and now the whole house smells like wet dog.

Have you seen Carlos, our lovely car? Ooh, but he is a beauty. The boy and I are so in love with him that we open the curtains at night and shout goodnight before we go to sleep. I think the boy would actually go out in his slippers and kiss his shiny bonnet if I weren't around.

If you have been 'lucky' enough to witness my directorial debut, you may have caught an excerpt of one of my driving lessons. It's the bit where Chris gives me gentle encouragement and I shout 'shut up' in an angry way. I have actually held a driving license for almost ten years, it's just that I haven't, you know, driven for at least six of those. The good news is that my driving lessons now involve less foul-mouthed marital discord and more white knuckle rides through Historic Bath.

In other news, I have developed a bizarre Internet Crush on fantasy author Neil Gaiman despite never having read any of his books except Coraline* which scared the bejezus out of me when I was poor and living in an attic. Has this happened to anyone else? The Internet Crush part, I mean, not the living in an attic part. Perhaps there is some sort of hypnotic undercurrent to Harper Collins' website user interface.

That is all.

*Jim gave me this book because he said Coraline reminded him of me. I thought this was sweet until much later when he told me that it was because Coraline gets a pizza for her dinner when she gets hungry. What?!

Bath is to New Cross what Veuve Clicquot is to Kia-Ora. The boy and I have gone from being the neighbourhood dandies to the local foul-mouthed tramps. Everything is beautiful; buildings, views, beer, people. I feel quite shocked that we've landed here after five years of rough and tumble in South London.

Moving was a living hell, and I'm having a hard time shifting down a gear. The art of relaxation is much underrated.

Back soon!