Ah, summer

Ah, summer, best taken lying down, under a tree, looking up...there's something in the air...


Strawberries and cream: choose a cream thick enough to coat the fruit, put one teaspoonful in each bowl, stir in small teaspoonful of sugar and some vanilla essence. Wash strawberries and cut in two, fill each bowl, stir up with the vanilla cream...and ENJOY.

The cherry season, short and intensly pleasurable, is upon us. We have cooking cherries in the garden so I made a cherry clafoutis, this recipe worked well:

150 g of plain flour

4 eggs

300mls milk

vanilla essence

Make this into a batter by whisking or in a machine, and set aside in fridge.

Heat oven 180C

Stone cherries.

Butter an oven proof dish, heat to bubbling in hot oven, fill with cherries and cover with 3 heaped dessertspoonfuls of sugar (more or less, depending on sweetness of cherries or according to taste). Put into oven until cherries lightly cooked and sugar in a syrup. While still as hot as possible pour in stirred batter and cook for 25 minutes, until risen and golden brown (do not open oven door whilst rising as will fall). Serve with dusting of icing sugar.

Easter Broadcast (late)

I can't move on with this blog without mentioning Easter, which I failed to tell you about.

Find an egg as large and strong and pale as possible.

Take a trinity of coriander leaves, and bind them with the leg of a pair of tights, tighter than a bank robber's head.

Fill a large pan with onion skins and top up with water. Bring to the boil.

Gently lower the egg into the pan, and simmer for ten minutes, or until egg has become a golden or rosy brown.

Remove carefully, leave to cool, unveil.

Wood Between the Worlds

The library at the top

...and the middle section of our house.

Loft and Basement

You are looking down from the mezzanine.

The top half of our house, known as The Loft, started out as an architect's studio, white and bare.

We are proud to have renovated and divided it up into rooms using ecological methods and materials, to have furnished it with things found in bins and brocantes, and with the the cheapest and most ecological that IKEA can provide, and to have decorated with ecological paints.

I'm very pleased with this little number, made from two IKEA ladder shelves, and some untreated wood box files stained in sun colours.

The large yellow wardrobe we hauled on our backs from where it had been abandoned by the previous owner in the basement, we re-constructed it, cut it to fit and painted it. It houses our computer among other things.

Every last little corner was organised, beautified,



...the tasteless curtains were made from a 1970s tent liner, abandoned in a scout hut, the cupboard cost 3 Euros in a brocante.

The Loft was transformed into a veritable Temple to the Sun God...

...and just as I arranged the last art and craft tool in the last jar and wedged the cupboard door shut, feeling like Lucy the Prehistoric Woman, my back bent double and my knuckles brushing the floor, it was obvious there would be no more box lifting for me for a while, yes, just as I found myself late for the cooking dinner and getting children to bed shift, bereft of a single shred of strength, my husband J-C said to me...

'Tomorrow the people are coming to tile the basement floor'.

Lightening flashed, horror film chords struck,

'AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH'

whimpered Lucy the Perhistoric Woman.

'THIS IS SIMPLY NOT POSSIBLE...you are maaad, maaad maaad...' (collapses on floor face contorted in a gruesome mask of pain).

What is the problem, I hear you ask. This is the problem, yes, here it is, exposed. You are going down into the basement...

SHOCK

HORROR

PROBE

Yes, while I was waxing lyrical about beautiful boudoirs and palaces to the Sun God, the horrible truth was lurking below. Shock, horror probe! Yes the sordid truth is, that while we were gagging with horror and snorting with superiority over How Clean is Your House, secretly, our Hell Hole Basement could have qualified for an entertaining episode.

How did it come to this, the interviewers would ask, as Aggie ran her pastic gloved finger over the cement dust?

This lot was dumped in the basement two years ago, when we moved in, and while we converted half of our house from an empty office into a house.

It was like this: on the day we moved house, I said to the removal men said I ' Put all boxes on these tables, not more than 2 boxes high as we will have to store them here for some time, while we renovate The Loft, and I want to be able to access my things.

'Yes madam' they said, as they rushed by heaving and dumping...my boxes, 16 boxes high, anywhere they fancied.

Then we found out the concrete floor had never set properly while the foundations were layed, and was effectively, 5 centimetres of carenogenic lung-caking cement dust.

Life happened, we rummaged, we added to it, mixed it up, kneaded it, turned it over, rummaged in it again - until it was done. As you can see.


This was the beginning of the end, the day we began the basement.

And the basic fact is, since then, we have been sorting out the basement...

We are still doing it. One day, our whole house will be organised. I hope this has karmic significance. If not, I may ask the question; what happened to our life?

Jenny wrote

Jenny wrote: just wondering what happened to the blog ... I went to read it today (the last few weeks have been very busy with STUFF) and there didn't seem to be anything new. Life catches up with a blogger?



I replied: yes

Glasses

I've finally succombed and taken up the prescription for glasses. It's an age forty five thing. I've been in denial for some time for the following reasons:

• Fear that wearing glasses will make my eyes lazy& I will become dependant
• Conviction that I can see perfectly well
• Glasses cost a ****** fortune
• Yet another opportunity to lose, misplace or break something
• Anyway, glasses won't help me see in the dark

All of the above reasons are of course good ones.
At the optician's, not a single style suited me, and not a single price.
J-C came into the bedroom as I was reading in bed, wearing them for the first time. He did a visible double take.
'It is like having a different women' he said. At this I frowned over my glasses in a corrective manner.
'If you go and see the childrens' teachers wearing those, you certainly will be taken for a serious woman' he said. In France, being considered 'serious' is the highest compliment. In England, it is taken as a sign that something is wrong.
The next day B saw me wearing them. 'I like your glasses Mummy' he said, 'You look like a Grandma'.
R has not noticed them at all. Could this be because he himself needs glasses?

Almond Tree

I love our almond tree, every time I come into contact with it I am filled with an upsurge of lovely tree-ness. Here it is, in its hour of glory. It took some days for the intense but slight almond-honey scent to develop.

It had been planning to flower some time ago, but kept its buds closed tight against a barrage of hoar frosts, gales and lashing rain.

Then it was really ready to open, it was bursting, it was holding on...I fretted about my beloved almond tree, would it choose the right moment? The weather cleared. Still the tree did not flower, it was waiting, it knew better than me when would be the moment.

I dipped into my biodynamic calender, the next 'flower' day was over a week away. It seemed to me impossible that the tree could avoid bursting forth for another week away. Last year it flowered in mid February, it was already the well into March, and the buds were straining at the leash.

On the eve of the flower day the little buds unleashed the first few flowers, and on the flower day itself, the first glorious sunny day for what seems like months, the tree bloomed. And ever since, it has been blue skies and warm sun. What a wise old tree.

Once upon a time in the 1960s a research chemist called Marcel Vogel was visited by a young woman who claimed an affinity with plants. He invited her to take part in an experiment. He wired up the plants to something similar to a lie detector and she went into a sort of meditative state, here is how she describes her experience:

First I wondered how I would get inside the plant, I made a con scious decision to let my imagination take over and found myself entering the main stem through a doorway in its base...there were no mental pictures, rather a feeling that I was becoming part of, and filling out, a broad expansive surface...there was no sense of time, just a feeling of unity in existence and space. I smiled spontaneously and let myself be one with the plant'.

The lie detector went zany when she 'went in' and died down when she 'came out'. The name of this young woman, I did not make this up, was Debbie Sapp ...

This story comes from a book published by Penguin called 'The Secret Life of Plants' by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird. It's an extraordinary read. It was published some time ago and it doesn't seem to have been discredited (although some sceptics disagree with it and claim to have discounted it). I'm still trying to get to the root of it...