Autumn
I need the summer sun. When September came and I hadn’t had my fix, I felt cheated. The past six weeks have made up for it. Despite the last few days of chilly mornings, I finally feel that I’ve had some sort of summer. But there are no memories of eating by the pond or even a barbecue to fuel me though the winter. Bizarrely I even began to worry that the trees were not dropping their leaves. This morning there was leaf dropping evidence when I drove to work and when I opened the back door, first thing, there was a misty autmny...
read moreFreezer Daemons
This week Danny discovered that there’s a trick to searching our freezers. If you forage in one you need to know the possible spaces in the other for the bits that you can’t cram back. Hunting for chicken soup in the barn freezer Danny was introduced to the Freezer Daemon. The invisible one that hops in when you have pulled several layers out and are moving into real Alaskan territory. If he had found the soup he might have had a fighting chance. I suspect that the Freezer Daemon is in cahoots with the Min Pins. Following the...
read moreIll in bed. Time for reflection
Twenty five years ago a talented craftsman passed me a small sculpture that he had made for his son. It was a model of the child, asleep in bed. The bedcover was the landscape in which he lived and played. He pointed out key places. The little copse where he climbed trees. The clear chalk lined stream where he fished for minnows. The butterfly meadow. The place where they had glimpsed the fox. When I am ill in bed, I remember this exquisite bed with its landscape cover. The world beyond our duvet and downy pillows diminishes and the bed...
read moreBBC Radio Cambridgeshire interviews Cottage Smallholder
Sara Varey, a broadcast journalist for BBC Radio Cambridgeshire, invited me to do an interview for their Good Food fortnight. I was really chuffed. I emailed her to find out what she wanted to talk about specifically. The topics she wanted to cover included the blog and why I had started it as well as my smallholding. My blood ran dim. We might be called The Cottage Smallholder but we are not proper welly wearing, sheep shearing rural folk. An email flew instantly back, informing her that we only have a third of an acre, keep chickens and...
read moreMagimix and colchicums – very special birthday presents
My mother remarried when I was eight. I encouraged the union. My prospective stepfather had a car, a Riley 127, and liked Cadbury’s créme eggs. Just before our first Christmas together the vacuum cleaner blew up. Back then, this was a luxury item. “Don’t worry,” said Arthur as he tucked in his napkin, “I’ll buy you a nice new one for Christmas.” The chirpy remark was met with a sharp retort, so swift it was hard to believe it hadn’t been rehearsed. “A hoover is a household expense....
read moreAvoiding the dog house
I was sitting in the little tea room across from the office where I used to work with a rather bored and sophisticated man. His languid glaze suddenly focused on the patina of tooth marks on my lighter. “We have a real problem with The Contessa. She chews all our lighters and is eating a biro a day.” My companion was stunned. “What Contessa?” Clearly imagining a faded dotty old lady, rifling through our drawers to find lighters and biros to guzzle. When I explained that The Contessa was a Min Pin his interest evaporated...
read morePerfect wedding
I love a good wedding and savour the best ones that cross our path. Call us old romantics but you can’t beat the ultimate celebration of soul mates. Katherine and Paul married in the Orangery in London’s beautiful Holland Park at noon on a sunny Saturday, September 1st, 2007. They are a great match and it was a wonderful day that touched us to the core. There were moments when I wiped away tears and so many more when I laughed. We realised that something was massively amiss when our old friend Miles was not leading Katherine up the...
read moreOn holiday today
Off to London for a wedding today. Our friends Katherine and Paul are tying the knot before emigrating to Australia. They have written several Guest Blogs and wrote about their first visit to the cottage here. Back on Sunday.
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