Frogs, Ponchos, Blazes and Guinness

Early on in the summer, we dug out a small pond. Although we'd talked about it on and off, it was an impulse buy when visiting the aquatics shop for tropical fish. It was one of those pre-formed, plastic ponds like a large, black jelly mould. It wasn't too hard to dig and impressed the children no end.

We bought a water violet. Unfortunately, it didn't survive the constant prodding from children wielding fishing nets but the buttercups and the michelmas daisies which grew and draped into the water like small-scale willows thrived. We'd filled the pond with water from our butts. That's water butts and I'm not sniggering. Not a bit. Anyway, there were lots of wriggly things in there, mosquito larvae so we were told but at least something was already alive and visible.

I am ashamed to say that in my impatience, I kidnapped a large frog my husband disturbed whilst weeding. I put him in the pond. The frog, not my husband. The following day, it was still there. Within a week, our daughter spotted a different frog, a medium-sized adult one. And then another. And then some froglets (it was well past the spawning season) one of whom liked to float on the breeze from one side of the pond to the other. Now, we have a collection of adult frogs who seem to be permanent residents. The maximum number we've spotted in one go is five. This is fairly amazing considering that the pond is only about three feet by one and a half at its widest points. Our regulars include a red one, an absolutely huge one whose body is the size of my palm, another with a silver-coloured throat, a lighter yellow one and a darker browny one. They all seem to coexist quite happily, hiding under the vegetation with just their eyes and nostrils above water. Whilst their eyes are characteristicly bulbous, their nostrils are so tiny and delicate. I am envious of their stillness, the way that they can emerge from beneath and break the water's surface without any ripple or sound. If startled, as you approach, you may hear a 'plop' or see a pocket of air, a speech bubble rising from beneath shouting 'Go away, you great oaf!' You might get a glimpse of their fat little thighs as they retreat amongst the roots of the rushes. I wonder what they say about us?

This has become such a subject of fascination to us all that we've decided to add another, much larger pond. This time, we've used a heavy pond liner. In the photos, you'll see the pond in the making. Again, we've filled it from our butts so the food for the frogs should be present from the outset. We've got to move a fern to the water's edge so that they've have cover and it would be lovely to see some frog life in there before they go into hibernation. I am trying so hard not to 'encourage' our froggy friends to move across to their new habitat. It's almost next door. Barely separated even. In fact, if you screwed your eyes up, it's almost one pond. Sort of. If you examine the photos of the new pond, you'll see just how close the old one is. So it's not really like I'd be moving them, is it? OK, I won't but I can't wait to see them there and I'm looking forward to what the spring might bring to the pond. Maybe I should write a story about frogs whilst I'm waiting?

So whilst the frogs slip beneath the surface of the world and hibernate at the foot of our pond, we've got a new pastime. We've got a fire basket for the garden which is what you will see in the last two photos. It's probably what men have been doing around their garden incinerators for decades. The only difference is that it looks a little more ornate and has a wire rack on the top for grilling. We've only had it out once so far but it was great fun. A bit like having a camp fire without the singing. I did make up some stories for the children whilst we sat there trying not to set fire to ourselves. One of my other recent purchases has been a poncho-type thing. Unfortunately, I couldn't wear the poncho around the fire because I didn't want it to be ruined. I'm sure that the cowboys in Blazing Saddles didn't worry about the sparks or human combustion. Once the building work gets under way (and I'm sure it will eventually, soon, maybe), it might be useful to be able to grill the odd sausage or pot of beans outside. Maybe we should take a lily pad out of the frog's book and hibernate until the house is more habitable. I've got a wetsuit but does anyone have any flippers I can borrow?

Going Green

Since our house move and the shift towards a more elemental existence (eating huge amounts of seasonal vegetables), I've begun to approach food preparation differently. The first glut was the lettuce, then came the cabbage, the cauliflower, followed by the runner beans. What I can't do with a tomato is nobody's business.

Never having had such vast quantities of fresh food at my fingertips, I would be found at the local supermarket doing one of two things: I was either buying something exquisite but limp and expensive from a far-flung country or I was buying what the supermarket flung in my face at the end aisles. The former would inevitably be disappointing because most vegetables don't travel well. Consequently, their taste is impaired, probably their nutritional value too and not only that, their constant availability gives the illusion that their appearance on the shelves is somehow effortless. Of course, you can compensate for their deterioration by adding things, smothering them in over-complicated sauces and feign authenticity.

The second option was to buy the seasonal vegetables, often at a reduced price due to increased supply. This was no bad thing at all and something I still do when it's a crop we don't have ourselves. However, having witnessed how quickly vegetables deteriorate without swift and proper storage, I am more trusting of our own produce. I know exactly when it was harvested and that nothing has been added to preserve its condition.

Yesterday, we harvested our crop of butternut squash. I say 'crop' but it was only one squash. Not what you might class as a glut. We think that it was overwhelmed by the sweetcorn and didn't thrive too well. Anyway, I wondered what to do with it. Clearly, it deserved special treatment. Usually, I just roast them and they're delicious but this particular one was a little stunted and wasn't going to go far between five people. I had a flick through the recipe books and stumbled upon the idea of making pasties. I happened to have a large quantity of homemade pastry in the fridge so it seemed sensible. I added grated cheddar to the pastry, chopped celery, onions, potatoes and carrots into tiny pieces, crumbled some blue cheese and made up a small quantity of onion gravy to moisten the mixture. I made four huge pasties and although I was a bit worried that they would burst open, they turned out perfectly. The children didn't detect the blue cheese, ate the vegetables without complaining and tell me, why don't we add cheese to all pastry? Delicious!

The inspiration for this combination didn't come from any of the fancier books on my shelf. It came from one aimed at vegetarian students. In other words, for people who haven't really cooked for themselves before. My point is that sometimes, the simple things are the best. Take away the complications and sophistications of over-travelled ingredients and recipes and you're left with the best, the cheapest and the tastiest. And it gives you the chance to get creative and to stop banging out the same old tried and tested menus week after week which, in my experience, is what would happen on my weekly trip around the supermarket aisles.

How can one little squash give me so much pleasure? Size isn't everything you know. It's elemental.

Flying Pigs

The school term has been going for just over 2 weeks now and I had hoped to have posted here sooner. Even my journal writing seems to have a desperate tone to it with lists of things I must do before ..... and this, for me today, is the interesting part. I'm not sure if I'm alone here but at the back of my mind there is always the thing which is so prospectively delightful that I almost can't bear to engage in its execution.

I'm torn in 2 directions here. My personal philosophy from a creative viewpoint is that the present moment is most important, that you shouldn't put off doing things or make excuses for the lack of the perfect conditions. However, a tension arises between this and responsibilities to others. Don't get me wrong. I don't resent or see my family responsibilities as obstacles to happiness but it's interesting that I am placing them in front of the goal.

There comes a point where the 'To Do' list will grind to a halt and I think I'm nearly there. In the past 3 months, I have reorganised every cupboard, redesigned our household filing system, gone back through all my MA folders and associated writing and shredded mountains of unwanted paper. In a sense, it is a process of reclamation of the self. Two years of putting things on the back burner whilst I struggled to write, study and be a reasonable mother are over. I've discarded the pieces that I know are irrelevant and ordered the remains in the most reverent fashion. To recognise irrelevance I must have reached a point of knowing. Otherwise, I've made a huge mistake and thrown away all my best clothes, shredded vital documents and the most important parts of 2 years' work! No. I think it's been good. Cathartic even.

OK, so the house still looks messy but I know that underneath, it's organised. And anyway, it'll all be pulled apart in a month or so when the building work starts. But there's another reason for all this frantic organisation. I seem to be losing my memory on a regular basis. Now, I have to rely heavily on my diary and calendar. This is a new experience for me as I've always had at least a vague idea of what I'm supposed to be doing. Remembering to look at the calendar is something else. I'm thinking of tying it around my neck. Last week, I only remembered my doctor's appointment half an hour beforehand and that was only because my mother rang to ask if I needed a babysitter. I went to the surgery not knowing precisely why I was there, came out and suddenly realised that it was our daughter's first Brownies evening starting in half an hour from then. Brinkmanship is not the way to a peaceful life. Needless to say, I'm still in contact with the doctor, trying to rectify the mess of turning up and forgetting half the things I went there for. Brownies, at least, went well so disaster there was averted.

Maybe my head has been too full of filing and catharsis. Maybe this week I will write something astonishingly good. Maybe. I'm afraid it won't be here because I'm going to be working on submissions for competitions but I might pop in to let you know how it's going.

Today, I am going to defrost the freezer and plan the week's menu. Today, I hope that our son's (suspected) swine flu is on its way out and that no one else takes up the baton and runs with it instead. Oh, and I've got just an incy-wincy little bit of filing left to do ..... Tomorrow is another day.

The Hardware Shop

The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker ….. a nursery rhyme about people who actually did things, made stuff. They were the job they did. Will it come around again?

Yesterday, I wrote a piece about the greengrocer's and today I am moving on to the hardware shop and its natural relationship to the modern DIY store. A sort of bipolar snapshot that is less about the history of retail outlets and more about what we value as a species. A bit like yesterday's attack on fruit and vegetables so I apologise for the recurring theme but maybe it's useful to examine the idea of the shopping parade and what it represents. Let's turn the clock back and see what is revealed as I ram-raid the shops of my youth.

The parade itself is L-shaped but the overall effect is that of a square with the missing corner occupied by a box they call a public house. There are two paths into the parade: the pavement leading down from the community centre, past and under the bridge made by the old peoples' flats and then the more direct route from the car park which takes you along next to the pub. This second entrance is flanked either side by grassy areas, littered with cigarette ends, teenagers on bikes and I think, some picnic-style benches belonging to the pub. But that's the thing. That's what would be there today, I imagine. I do know that it was a foreboding path to follow. Maybe I'm just projecting what is common now back into the past. A flaw in my memory. I'll assume that we've negotiated the teenagers, the pub's guard dog and resisted looking in through the darkened windows at the fruit machines twinkling hedonisticly. Not fairy lights. You'd go to the hardware shop for those. Right. Up the steps, don't hold onto the metal handrail, it's got chewing gum stuck to it. Now, at the top, dead opposite is where we're headed. The serious shop. All the others on this side of the L are lightweights. This is the shop to buy the things you really need.

The glazed door is a mozaic of stickers arranged around the 'Open' and 'Closed' sign. Unlike the greengrocer's, the door is usually closed or maybe in summer, wedged a few inches open with a piece of wood. As you push your weight against the glass, a bell tinkles above your head alerting the shopkeeper to your presence. The fact that you've stumbled in from the sudden give in the door's hinge mechanism or that the only line of vision you have is the tiled floor leading you straight to the till seems to be ignored as a means of announcing your arrival. The layout is a labyrinth of shelving stacked higher than you dare look for fear of flinching and knocking the displays over.

If the shopkeeper is occupied with another customer, you may get a chance to browse around this grotto but inevitably, you will be greeted with 'Can I help you?' and the fun will end. I remember tap washers, screws, rat poison, mops and rabbit food. There is always one of those portable gas heaters and a smell of paraffin. Mr Hardware wears a brown cotton coat, a bit like a doctor's. Mrs Hardware is never to be seen but her touch is evident in the knitted toilet roll covers and doilies in the window display and the varieties of threads and floral sticky-back plastic rolls.

It was the shop you went to buy everything that you couldn't get in the other shops. That much, I suppose, is obvious as it wouldn't be sensible to have an overlap but what I mean is that he sold the means to mend things. He sold little things. Or just one thing if that's all you needed. No sales, no offers. I don't think he wrote to any of his customers. They just came to him when they needed something.

This weekend is 15% day at our nearest DIY store. They sell similar stuff to our Mr Hardware but in bigger quantities. It's such a bargain to buy these quantities that if you're lucky, you might even get one free. For what? They probably won't have your tap washer because they're all made to a special design, you may have to replace the whole unit and hell, you may as well buy a new sink, a new kitchen even and yes, today is 15% day. So you've saved all that money.

I may hear you saying that the hardware store was old-fashioned and out of touch with modern style. Perhaps it didn't even address the issue of style at all. And that's a good thing. Mr Hardware didn't try to decide your style for you, he respected what you already had and helped you to fix it. If he couldn't then so be it and you could go off to make your choice elsewhere. The DIY store has already lured you out of town, swallowed you whole in its cavernous hangar and convinced you that their range is style itself, that you have a choice. Their choice. So you don't need to bother yourself with going elsewhere. A little Orwellian maybe?

The Greengrocer's

The shopping parade of my youth: butcher's, baker's, mini-supermarket, newsagent, greengrocer's, hairdresser's, off-licence, fish and chip shop, launderette and hardware store. The pavement outside would always have been fouled and there would be a dog chained up to the railings outside, snarling and leaping at passers-by Nervous cats could be seen peering through the gaps between shrunken yellowed net curtains at the windows of the flats above but then taking your eye off the pavement below was always a mistake.

This morning, I revisit the most curious of those shops: the greengrocer's.

The heavy glass door with a thick diagonal handle was always propped wide open with squashed cardboard boxes, regardless of the weather. The air was warm with business, thick with the smell of bruised green cabbage leaves, earthy beetroot and damp newsprint. They rolled around the dusty floor with odd cooking apples as if being coated for batter. Thick brown paper bags hung on hooks by a loop of string next to the oversized scales, waiting to be punched into life in order to receive their cargo; produce deftly tossed in by dirty, lined hands belonging to weathered ladies with an intimidating patter. Greengrocer speak. Not the coarseness of a market trader but loud enough that their voices never faded even when they had their backs to you, shuffling and grabbing crab-like from the crates lining the shop walls.

Then we all got a taste for packaging. The ladies must have retired from the shop. They'd all looked like they were ready for it anyway. The earth and the smells gone, we ate varieties of fruit and vegetables only distinguishable from one another on the basis of shape and colour. Taste was as uniform as the supermarkets themselves. They were so pretty and we could buy them at any time of the year and we proudly stacked them up neatly in our trolleys. We would buy one and get one for free, the one which ended up in the bin because it not longer looked perfect. We congratulated ourselves on our wealth. Improved travel and international markets allowed us to interpret the availability of beans and tomatoes of exotic origins as proof that we'd conquered the seasons as well as our body clocks.

So how come it feels so good to eat runner beans for days on end, to give courgettes away to your friends after a rainy spell in summer? That they are so abundantly delicious that you search recipe books for new things to do with .... with whatever this week's crop is? Because we're celebrating the natural alliance between man and nature, trusting that harmony between them is more valuable than aesthetic perfection or material wealth which only ends up in the kitchen bin with the packaging. Oh, and it is real and can be right there in your garden. That's real fast food.

I'm sad that summer is ending but the pumpkins are swelling, tanned and promising another delve into the recipe books as well as excited children anticipating October 31st.

He's worn me down

Monty seems to have found his voice again. He's been pestering me, trying to get to the laptop and I've finally given in. After all, what can be the harm in the innocent ramblings of a senile old dog?

I, meanwhile, am at some sort of in-between stage with my writing. Making lists, plans, writing the odd poem to keep the creative juices flowing and waiting for school holidays to end before I start writing more seriously. So much material accumulating it almost hurts. Anyway, I'm going to pass over to Monty now. Perhaps it will keep him quiet for a bit.

Hello Strangers

Well, it's done and dusted. The dissertation is handed in and I'm in a very foreign place. I have nothing academic to do. So this is it. I just start writing now. Easy, huh?

The holiday's coming up and I will be taking my little journal along with me but it's SO nice not to feel the pressure of having to do something in particular. Except the housework .... but even that is only to maintain hygiene seeing as how it's all going to be ripped apart in a couple of months.

The best bit is coming up; all the planning, choosing things to go in our new space. I'm sticking my head well and truly in the sand and definitely not thinking about 'having the builders in', a phrase which seems to hang over people like a black cloud. We have suffered from our lack of space since we moved, whilst waiting for the planning and quotes and no doubt when it's all finished, we'll look back and wonder how we ever survived. At the moment, we can afford to be positive because it's all still a dream or at least it is until the end of September when reality will come knocking at the door.

In the meantime, I'm back here even if it's only a few days until our holiday. It will be odd not having access to the internet. Or shops, or civilisation. Yes, it really does look isolated and yet on the beach. It sounds rather perfect doesn't it? As I write, my son is on his way back from a month-long holiday in Australia. Thanks to the internet and phones, I've exchanged snippets of information with him throughout. This is reassuring as a parent, of course, but I think that if it was me, I would prefer to disappear altogether. Otherwise, you're not really gone, are you?

Now, time for a celebratory glass of wine and to put my feet up. Tomorrow is the last day of the school term, my last day of solitude until...until September and then the builders turn up!