Monday 20th March - lazy suppers

 I am constantly amused when I read Nigel Slater's Kitchen Diaries. n one entry he is casually knocking up a 'simple supper' (several main ingredients, a dozen spices, one hour's soaking time, three hour's resting time, bake for several hours, basting every twenty minutes or so... maybe I am exaggerating just a teeny weeny bit) and then we get an entry like March 3rd;  

 

We had baked beans on toast for supper last night.

I notice that the weather in March - 2014, was it? - was just as grim (if you dislike cold as much as I do) as it is was this year.

I have bought lined trousers, normally phenomenally expensive from this particular manufacturer -Rohan - but nearly half price in the sale. Oh bliss. I should have done this weeks ago, when my proper size might still have been in stock - they had my size (not telling) but not 'short'. So I am wearing them with massive turn-ups while I give some thought to how to do something more permanent. The money is well spent - We both still wear items bought from Rohan ten or even twenty years ago.

Thursday 16th March - Living on the edge of chaos, and 'niksen'

The past 24 hours have been a bit fraught...

I discovered yesterday in one calendar that I had a zoom hospital appointment for 11am today which wasn't in any other calendars. At least is was a zoom appointment; getting to hospital appointments in London is a bit of a logistical exercise and having a couple of days to find suitable parking, decide travel times and routes and round up paperwork is easier with a week's notice at least.

So why so many calendars? Oh well, a digital calendar is great - I can see it on my phone and my laptop and my tablet and Himself can see it on his phone too... but there is something solid and satisfying about a pen and paper diary that you can add notes to and flick through and stick notes in and mark up with a high lighter or even an underline here and there... so, I live dangerously, on the edge of chaos, with the paper diary and the digital diary, both equally brilliant and both equally problematic...

It's usually fine, until, days like yesterday, for example.

Yesterday was also further complicated by my father ringing me up about a letter requiring him to attend a hospital appointment locally tomorrow afternoon. So, I fell to reviewing Friday afternoon - one piano lesson, one group zoom - and on reflection cancelled both. Just in case everything ran late.

This morning, my father's appointment was cancelled, for good reasons, I have to add, and so I have unexpectedly found myself with a clear diary for the rest of this afternoon, and for the whole of tomorrow.

Now, because of the events of yesterday and this morning I find myself with a free afternoon (today) and a free day (tomorrow). I could reinstate the piano lesson and the zoom, but instead we shall both indulge in a bit of 'niksen'. There are books about it. Maybe I shall order one and read it, but then, if I was reading, would I be doing 'niksen'?

 

Monday 6th February

I have a daily task checklist... most of them only take moments, and not all of them get done every day;

1. Lectio 365 (10 minute daily prayer app on my phone)
2. The Psalm for the day in a book called Through the Year with the Psalms
3. A short chunk of New Testament, currently St Matthew's gospel
4. Sketch-a-day
5. Duolingo lesson
6. Deep breathing for five minutes, for  Zoe app study
7. Blog
8. Step count; target is 2023 but I do aim for a bit higher
9. 5-minute ballet video
10. Sewing project
11. Knitting
12. Art
13. Piano practice
14. Notebook Swap
15. Eat some fruit, or have a smoothie
16. Eat some fresh salad
17. Housework

If I do at least 10 things then I reckon it's a good day! I reckon to do the first six items before I even get out of bed...

Ballet hasn't happened for a couple of weeks but I might go back to it soon. The notebook swap entries aren't getting written either at the moment, but there's plenty of time before the end of the month.

Today I've done 12 so far; I've included knitting in my tally so I shall stop burbling in a few minutes and knit a few rows to make this come true. 

How do I manage? Why do I have a list? It's easy to get around a dozen or more items done through the day, especially when I'm not the one in charge of meals, laundry and general kitchen chores! As far as housework goes, my share consists of cleaning the bathroom and doing some hoovering. 

I started the list, which has morphed through various versions over time, during the first lockdown. I felt completely adrift when my hectic teaching schedule just stopped, without notice, and having a list helped me fill the day.

Besides, it looks colourful in my diary. This picture is from  couple of weeks ago. I see piano practice didn't happen all week. Neither was I very diligent regarding housework either!

Sunday 1st January 2023 - New, yes, seriously...

The Bible opens with the creation of the world at the beginning of Genesis, and end (after pages and pages of apocalyptic imagery of death and destruction) with the creation of a New Earth and a New Heaven. I have to admit that I rather switched off as David Suchet read through the first 20 chapters of Revelations through December - 'enough,' I thought to myself, 'I get the idea...' 

Today doesn't look particularly 'new' - the garden is damp and soggy, the sky, after suggesting it might brighten up first thing, is grey and uninviting.

But it is a New Year! I have a New Diary! 

This is the one I write in every evening - notes of what happened, maybe observations or even some 'thoughts' about the day just passed.

I always write in these 'handholds'; it's a small chunk out of the Bible divided into seven statements to 'hold on to' through the day, especially helpful if I'm having a trying time.

  

I've actually got two paper diaries - this is the paper appointments diary. With the handholds, of course!

New adventures lie ahead, to be scribbled into the next pages of the sketchbook journal;

And here is the last week - warning - there is a scribble of McCavity, the cat for Christmas Eve. We are still missing her, mainly at breakfast and bedtime, and when a shadow in the garden or in a corner of the room catches our eye. The vets sent us a beautifully handwritten condolence card - what a lovely, lovely kind thought. That has never happened before - we weren't even registered at their practice before the fateful day. 

When I weigh up the sorrows and the joys of 2022 the scales tip over mightily towards joy. 

I wish you all a 2023 with plenty of joys through the year. 

Friday 30th December - Getting into training...

Just two days left to set myself up for the New Year - oh, now that it is heading to the end of today there's even less time left...

I'm making a clear difference between New Year Resolutions and Good Ideas

The resolutions that I chose more than five years ago have served me well and I have no intention of changing them. I've managed to keep them without too much difficulty, and so enjoy the nice warm glow this gives me that I'm not going to risk upsetting that. They are;

Eat chocolate several times a week.

Deliver, otherwise put by, two bags of stuff for the charity shop every month (size of bag and quantity of contents not important).

Keep on with writing a page in the diary at the end of every day. My bright yellow 2023 Moleskine page-day diary is all ready for Sunday evening.

Now Good Ideas are an entirely different matter. If one, or several don't happen in any day, or in any week - well, that's life. It's just an idea.

It is a good idea to eat more fruit, and having a fruit smoothie every day would be one way.

It is a good idea to eat more vegetables, so how about a side salad with lunch (main meal) or supper?

It is a good idea to be more active, so trying to do the 5 minute balletbasedmovement videos everyday is a way to achieve this. Also aiming for a daily total step count of more than 1500, even more if possible, would go a long way to maintaining a minimum level.

I've been practising the Good Ideas all this week to be ready for Sunday. So far so good...

Tuesday 30th August 2022 - too much for one post?

There's been a bit of a gap - and I find once a gap in something has happened it gets increasingly hard to restart.

What have I been doing for a week and a half?

The simplest way to try and recall everything is maybe to post all the pictures I have taken since the last post on 18th August;

Which I have just done, and then deleted anything which was in the nature of a reminder to myself about something or other, or relating to a piano lesson...

Ah, here we go, this was the Johanna Basford picture for week ending Sunday 21st August. I'm pleased with how it came out, but I still hadn't decided what to put in the diary spaces on the facing page. I have a diary on my computer, linked to the phone, and a paper journal-cum-diary, and also a page-a-day diary I write up in the evening.

Scibbly sketches; - one of the folksongs set by Benjamin Britten is 'Oliver Cromwell is buried and dead - hee, haw, buried and dead'. I've always loved this song, and the setting.

How Peter Pears can get the words out so quickly and clearly is a marvel.

We have developed a terrible mini-magnum habit. "Just the one," as Mrs Wembley always said in the sit com "On the up". I can barely remember anything about it except Joan Sims as the cook, Mrs Wembley.

There have been quite a few takers for the apples I have left out at the gate.

and there is a slight possibility of someone wanting djembe lessons, or wanting to be in a djembe group. There are significant problems in running a drumming group over zoom, namely the time lag between the different people on the zoom! I suspect that drumming in the garden would have to be severely limited too, for the sake of the neighbours.

Wednesday morning is always and event - our on-line grocery order arrives - what shall we actually get this week? We usually accept the substitutions unless they are truly bizarre. This tie a pizza was squashed, and we got to keep the pizza AND received a refund. There was always the memorable time our curry meal with rice for 2 turned out to be two packets of rice and no meat... 

I packaged up a couple of water brushes (where you fill the handle of the brush with water) for a friend to try, but she had gone ahead and bought them. Just as well, with the postal disruptions. They are so convenient.

My side of the dining room table;

His side of the same table. We are still managing to clear half of it in order to eat. It has saved considerably on the laundry, and one is far less likely to get spaghetti sauce all down one's shirt.

I should say I am far less likely to get spaghetti sauce all down my shirt.

This is something called Plum Shrub. The jar is two-thirds filled with halved and stoned plums (you add the stones as well), then one third filled with sugar, the zest of a lemon also goes in (I now have an odd-looking bald lemon in the fridge...) and then you fill to the brim with rum. Seal tightly - I've added tape as the lids leaked - and keep in a cool dark place until Christmas if you started it in August. Then you can strain and use the liquid as a mixer or a liqueur to drink, and eat the plums. 

I have never made this before, so you can follow this recipe at your own risk. It comes from 'It's Raining Plums' - a collection of recipes from the Daily Telegraph, edited by Xanthe Clay. One of the cookery books I saved from my mother's hoard.

Perennial Kale. I might give this a go. The suppliers look most interesting and I shall have a browse around their website.

I've posted these pictures of seed packets here as I got sick of having them hanging over my guilty conscience. So the other day I emptied the contents over a couple of bare patches in various flower beds and will just see what happens next year. I put the picture here as I didn't know where else to put them, and the last thing I wanted was to have Empty seed packets cluttering up my life!

I reckon that's more than enough for now - we are up to Saturday 27th August. I must reassure Ang that I have started on the stitching for August (better late than never?) and will hurry it along...

Saturday 9th July - The Missing Day

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Week

Last night, as I was writing up my diary, I found I was writing on the page for Friday. But somehow I was convinced it was Saturday... I went back and relabelled a couple of pages, but was still convinced that something was wrong. It does happen that some evenings I don't write up the page, so that the following evening I have two pages to do. It has crept to three pages in the past - but bitter experience has told me that this makes things difficult when I try to catch up.

Anyway, sometime around mid-morning I finally realised my mistake - it was when I was wondering why the link to the Sunday morning service, live-streamed from our church, was so very late in appearing in my emails.

I blame the heat.

Tonight I shall re-relabel the pages in the diary, and all will be well again.

One consequence has been, that as I listen to David Suchet reading through the Bible in a Year every (well, nearly every) morning I am now several days ahead of where I should be. Do I listen again? Or risking breaking a habit?  It's Acts of the Aposltes at the moment (every day is a chunk of a Psalm, and currently the next adventure in the Acts of the Apostles and a chunk of Old Testament - Hezekiah has just asked for the sun to go backwards ten degrees. 

Acts is, at the moment, sounding rather like a script for an adventure of the 'Indiana Jones' variety; Paul has just survived a shipwrecked in a storm, only to be bitten by a snake and worshipped as a god by the locals.

(I'm a bit unimpressed with Hezekiah, he was very happy to hear the prophecy that there will be peace only in his life time, as it means at least he will have a quiet life, and after he's dead he doesn't care. But then 2 Kings is full of Kings who behaved in a more or less appalling fashion. Plus ca change, plus ca meme chose.) 

Tomorrow, everything will be back to normalish maybe probably.

Tonight will l be another hot night I expect.

Saturday 9th April - Drawing again - playing the piano again

 I'm back to drawing every day again - just a small picture to record a moment of the day. I was given a small sketchbook a couple of years ago, about 5" by 8" at a rough guess, with space to draw two sketches on every page to create a visual journal.

I made SUCH a hash of the first few pages that I put the book away. However, I decided to cut the first few pages out and start again;

This is after a family zoom discussing a forth-coming mad-cap trip to Cornwall that some are going on later this year;

My cold frame sits on a battered garden table to I can reach into it without bending down. I planted up quite a few pots with tulips, crocuses and daffodils last Autumn and am now seeing the rewards of that cold November afternoon. 

We had another small family zoom; just us, son and daughter. Daughter has only just moved into her new flat so the walls are still bare.  

The pictures for the 6th and 7th April will have to wait, as I roughly sketched the designs on the postcard project cloth, which has not yet been posted.

I tend to do the drawing when we have gone to bed, before I write the daily page in my diary of events, thoughts, happening of the day. I have a packet of water-colouring pencils, a brush, a tiny bottle of water to activate the pencils and a cloth for minor disasters by the bed. I need a light touch with the water; firstly because the paper is thin, and secondly because the pen is my ordinary fountain pen with washable blue ink!

I broke my Lent Resolution again the other day, ordering a book by Andrew Eales called 'How to Practise Music'. My excuse is that I have several students who are at the point of needing to know how to practise in a more thoughtful, focussed way, and this book seemed like an excellent summary. I'm only partway through, but it has inspired me to get started again.

I'm playing 'In the Bay' as an 'easy win', and exercise in memorising, the Chopin Nocturne 'for work' as I am teaching it but can't really play it (1) and the Impromptu is an old friend that I first played over 40 years ago.  

Studying the Chopin today was useful; I emailed this photo to a student to advise on playing an awkward bar in the LH (by the yellow sticker) a misprint (those red annotations) and a suggested fingering change (heavy pencil markings). "If a picture paints a thousand words..."

We'll see how this goes - the number of times I've tried to get a daily practice routing going is beyond counting.

  

Noah's Ark;

yesterday, leopards 

"can leopards change their spots?" Jeremiah 13 23

Today, gazelles or wild does

"I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, by the gazelles or wild does:

do not stir up or awaken love until it is ready!"     excellent advice from Song of Songs, 2:7

Not many windows left.

  

Tuesday 5th May - Ten days have passed...

Where have I been these past ten days?

Here, actually.

My zoom piano teaching schedule is now at capacity; 18 students a week over three days since I last posted. It makes Wednesday, Thursday and Friday very intense, and Saturday and Sunday a bit of a blur. Monday and Tuesday I raise my head and see what's going on, and then 'how did that happen?' it's Wednesday again!

But, as I thought, after a couple of weeks I have managed to create a system that roughly works  for keeping my lesson notes together, the music together, and the admin running along parallel. The bit I hate is checking my bank account to see if the payment has come through... have they forgotten to pay? Or is it just a banking processing delay over the weekend... I'll remind them next lesson that the last lesson's payment hasn't appeared...

I have rewarded myself by spending nearly all my earnings on a loverly superduper ridiculously extravagant large red leather folio to hold notebooks to record everything in. It was so expensive that having my initial gold-blocked in the corner hardly seemed to add to the cost. They did throw in a little tin of leather polish and polishing cloth, all in a little bag, for free. It makes the admin a little less admin-ish.

Strange things happen in zoom lessons. The child suddenly disappears from view, and reappears brandishing a pupppy at the screen. Or her younger brother.  Put the puppy/brother away, dear, and show me how you should sit at the piano, no, not crosslegged...

My fiend's daughter works in a kindergarten, and zooms lessons to the three and four year-olds. children. She says they spend a good deal of the lesson shouting 'David! David! David's Mummy, are you there, we can't see David on the screen anymore, we don' know what he is doing'. Or 'Sarah's Mummy, Sarah's Mummy, Sarah is jumping up and down on the table...'  I don't know why the parents think that the teachers can do crowd control from the screen. Once this lockdown ends and they go back to the school, she and her coleagues should really spend the first few weeks training the children to react like well-trained dogs to whistles and commands, like those amazing dog trainers on television.

I would be almost unable to remember anything much about last month if I hadn't kept a diary, taken photographs from time to time, and done all the daily thumbnail sketches.

   
It was a Johanna Basford post that gave me the idea; she suggested you pick out one word, which I did for the first few days, but after that I mostly just sketched a picture. They are only the size of a large letter stamp - just enough to trigger a memory of the day.

I've set up a page for May, and already I am two days behind. Sunday was quite a dull sort of day - I spent most of it creating this page and trying not to wander round whining 'I'm bored'.

I did make a cake with leftover fresh pineapple. Himself ate the last of it today. I've discovered that a two-egg sponge recipe fits nicely into the little panikin that you can use in our air-fryer. It is a great thing for cooking cake - heats up in less than five minutes, and switches off once it has finished cooking.

Monday - pottered about in the morning - what did I do? No idea.

I did discover a new composer; I was reading in bed when this extraordinary music came on. It is composed by Kaija Saariaho, and was one of the movements, called 'Moss' from 'Six Japanese Gardens'. I think I will order the CD if there is one.

And now it is today, Tuesday. We have worked out that this shrub

that burst into flower a week ago is a Virburnum, 'Japanese Snowball'. It is very pretty, glowing in the rain or the sun near the bottom of the border. This border is the setting for a series of surprises; James the gardener didn't get round to telling us everything that he planted when he dug out and replanted the whole length last Summer, or what it would do, or when it would do it. We just have to go and look and see what is happening. That tiny red dot to the left of the shrub is the first of the Salvias, 'Hot-lips' coming out - I had no idea that they would start flowering so early.

You can just make out the little daisies in the corner of this bed; we bought two pots from the National Trust property Standen one hot Summer's day last year, and planted them in the raised bed where we tend to have coffee in the morning once it is warm enough (not today, for sure). They are everywhere in Cornwall - a weed, I expect - but we love them because they remind us of all the times we were down there when the children were small. 

I want to buy lots of pink and white fancy tulips this autumn and plant them everywhere. And blue cornflowers. And irises. I've seen them everywhere on a short walk to the post box on, let me just check the thumbnail pictures, the 26th April.  

Tuesday 21st April - Nearly a week

Friday - Saturday - Sunday - Monday - Tuesday -Something happens each day, to be sure, but I have to go back through calendars and journals and diaries to extract the details...

This is turning out to be one of the best memory joggers;

along with photographs on my phone.

The piano keyboard is Wednesday of last week, when I signed up for an on-line piano course on practising techniques. It a 'how to practise' rather than 'how to learn these technical skills' and I'm finding it very inspiring;  the course, and also starting piano teaching again after a break, has got me playing much more than I ever did over the last couple of years. But I might have written this in the last post.

On Thursday as we looked out of the kitchen door we saw a very bright star in the sky directly over our garden gate.

'Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight,
wish I may, wish I might, have the wish I wish tonight'

is a song I have been teaching for around 10 years... a simple, rocking tune using just two notes.

I was having a zoom chat on Friday morning with a friend when an ENORMOUS parcel arrived - we looked at eachother in blank amazement, wondering who had ordered what without saying anything to eachother?

It was addressed to me -  and came from Canada, and inside was this;

There's a hardware store there called Lee Valley follow the link and get lost in a world of wonder for several hours. We've bought 'essential must-buys' from there every time we visited. Search on 'music' and you will see what our friends started with - and with skill, persistence and determinations turning into this beautiful glockenspiel! If you want to play the starlight song, pick G and E and play

G E   G E  G EEGGE   

GGE   GGE  GGEEGGE 

The rest of Friday and most of Saturday were screeds of emails, letters, telephone calls, catching up with friends, completing the last pieces of unfinished business from being furlouhed by one employer, and setting up the schedule for on-line zoom piano lessons starting on 22nd April.

Sunday was 'zoom church' -  an oddly moving and chaotic time of songs and Bible readings and sermon and prayers; one person is the Controller, from his study, another person 'assissted' by her ten-year-old son does the powerpoit screens, the Bible readings, prayers and songs all came from different households and our vicar gave the sermon from his house in Kent because he hasn't been able to move here yet. It was well 'attended', many still finishing their breakfast, drinking coffee (me) colouring, doing crochet (me - I was delighted as I got four rows done!) The square for Sunday is a merging of the colours of the blanket I am making as a wedding present for some friends. The deadline was august - now - who knows...

Monday is when I did gardening, and we also discovered that our drains were blocked - again. Himslef and two neighbours and a set of rods managed to clear it, just in time for the water authority man to turn up and say - 'it looks fine now'. He did check it with a camera, and disinfect everywhere so his time wasn't totally wasted.

I made a tiny sketch on the bottom of a post card I sent to my father. I also took pictures in the garden; the lilac is in flower, the apple blossom is wonderful, the camelia has two more buds 

The anenomes have come back to life (I thought they had been eaten by slugs or pigeons)

and Leo has a new favourite spot, balanced on a wooden beam and leaning against the fence after the sun has warmed the surfaces for an hour or so. 

I did a tiny watercolour of the anenomes for another postcard

Today I've had a zoom chat with friends, and then we went out for a little 'tour' - dropping books off for my father, who islooking very well, I might add, and collecting some plants from a friend who is handing out 'extras'. I've two courgettes to plant up, and four hollyhocks which she has to 'weed' out of her borders.

Tomorrow I have to try and be a piano teacher again - so far I will have two pupils on Wednesday, five on Thursday and four on Friday, I reckon three - five pupils on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays shouldn't interefere too much with my 'retirement'!  

Sunday 29th September - News, Views, Whatevs

What's to say?

I'd have to look in my journal to try and remember this week.

Monday - the usual teaching
Tuesday - the usual teaching, round to friends in the evening.

I started and finished a couple of summer sketches; a trip to London

and this one - which I did a slight 'tinker' to just now; spot the difference?

Wednesday - the usual teaching

Thursday -  it was going to be a day of waiting in for deliveries, but they came early, and as a school had cancelled I had an unexpected free afternoon. So we all went off to the pub, me and Himself and the Grand Old Man. They had steaks, I had 'a lady's meal' (I am not quoting Himself) of hake and chips and mushy peas. Lady's meal or not, it came on a smaller plate!

Friday - another waiting for deliveries day. I stayed in bed for ages and ages, reading, dozing, reading, dozing until even the cat was bored.

Then I finally got dressed and came down, and did a diary page picture

and wrote some more novel, and went off to drumming.

Saturday - oh my word, Saturday, weary Saturday... I went off for the normal morning teaching. They have a problem with damp in the practice rooms where I work, so they leave the electric heaters on, turning the room into something like the Palm House at Kew, but with an all pervasive smell of rot and mould. It's not good. I would open a window if there was one, so have to be content with switching off the heater and leaving the door open while I'm in there.

I taught my eight pupils, escaping into the corridor at every opportunity to breath the fresh air through the open windows, and then it was the drive to visit my godmother (50+ difficult miles each way). It is always worth visiting her; she works hard at staying cheerful and coping with the difficulties strewing her. 

But still I was glad when we arrived safely back home. It is not a drive I could safely undertake after teaching all morning; the traffic is hurried and harsh and aggressive and unforgiving.

Sunday! We've arrived! We went shopping in the afternoon, collecting this and that for my godmother for next time we visit. I'm not sure how her oesophageal stent will cope with the pickled herrings that she is desperate for, but perhaps she'll manage if we cut them up small enough. 

While he was doing the hard work of shopping, I sat in the cafe (which was unfortunately unable to serve tea or coffee! due to a machine breakdown) and wrote some more of The Book in a notebook I happened to have in my bag. I've stuck the pages in, and that brings me up to the target of 1000 words per week for several  weeks in a row. Happy Happy.

,

The garden is still looking wonderful - so worthwhile all the angst and drama of getting it done. The whole process started this time last year, and was delayed every month and beset by obstacles. At one point I was ready to throw in the towel and live with the weeds. But look at it now!

Salvia 'Armistead' and 'Hotlips', Rudebeckia, and a Holly

The white passion flower is still producing lots of flowers

This fuschia is a potted up cutting, given by a friend

That last photograph is the corner of the raised bed where I have even managed to plant a some bulbs - no idea if they are daffodil or crocus or narcissus, I'll find out in the Spring. It will be a surprise. The plastic grid is to foil any attempts by the cats to appropriate the soil for their own purposes.

I've made a rice pudding in the microwave, and Himself is providing the first course of roast chicken, which will be ready very soon now.

Just three work-related emails left to send (I've done the other dozen already) and Saturday's lessons to write up and I'm free!!!!!! More happy happy!!!!!