Spring Days

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This Spring has been lovely. We have just had some wonderfully hot days, where the three of us have been out beneath the sun, walking with the dogs, or busy down at the allotment, fretting over the courgette plants Grandad grew for us from seed in his greenhouse.

With the house move still not completed, and with building work still to be finished, I find that at the moment I feel very in-between with homes, and it very much feels like a waiting game. So to banish those feelings of rootlessness and restlessness, which always leave me feeling a little twitchy and unsettled, I find I am spending more time outdoors to find some balance and patience.

We are enjoying the warmth. I am enjoying watching the girls playing on the grass, discovering soil and getting their hands and feet dirty. (Why is that the sight of my daughters’ dirty toes at the end of the day fills me with an inexplicable sense of love and pride?) We have all caught the sun on our faces and feet.

 I have a lot of new things to be doing this summer after taking on the allotment. There has been extra work, clearing the plots and turning the soil. I have planted potatoes (the first shoots have just popped up), two rows of kale, some courgette plants and runner beans. I find it actually to be very soothing to be at the allotment. It is usually just the three of us, and Pip running around near the compost looking for the rabbits.

This is our last summer here are Bent Corner. It is a home which will always mean a great amount to me. It is where I became myself in so many ways, the first time I was able to have a home of my own and to live by myself. This is the place where my daughters were born, where I was pregnant. I have so much to be grateful and thankful for, having lived beneath this very kind and friendly roof.

Meanwhile our new home is slowly being uncovered from layers and years of strange make-overs and modernisations. In place of pine, there is the original stone fireplaces and oak beams. It has been quite scary, seeing the house being peeled and stripped and knocked and chiselled, but slowly it is coming to life and beginning to smile.

I smile with it.

Recipe for Welsh Scones

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If you asked me some of the things I remember most from my childhood, scones would be one of them. It seems a strange thing to remember so well. They seem very different to English scones, especially those summery indulgent cream tea one’s you have down in Devon and Cornwall. Those soft and cloud-like mounds of whipped cream, or scarlet jam on fluffy white scones, ate in a café garden by the sea.

No, these Welsh scones were much smaller, less bouncy, Welsh scones with a lick of butter, accompanied by that scalding hot dry tea. They came from a tin, the lid prised off and the small side plates, fine delicate white china decorated with the smallest of dainty red roses, laid on the table as the kettle boiled, ready for the tea. It was a different sort of eating and I loved it very much.

Everyone seemed to have scones when you went to visit. Often my Dad would take me to the nearby farms when he was helping them out, or returning a favour from having been helped on his farm. Dad would be outside talking to the other farmers, all of them dressed in their blue thick cotton workwear overalls, a narrow wisp of a roll-up, often unlit, just resting at the side of their mouths. I would be invited to go into the farm kitchen to talk in nervous welsh to the Farmer’s wives, who would welcome me in and sit me at their tables.

Perhaps it is because of the homeliness of it all, which makes me rememeber so fondly. For years after I grew up, I have had an almost obsessive love of kitchens and the life I imagined that went on within them. More than any room in the house, this is the space I space I craved to have for my own, and to fill it with the family life I experienced back then. All the conversations, meals, laughter, tears and arguments ebbing and flowing, with the kitchen table centre stage. A place to rest your elbows, your heart and your dreams.

My Step-Grandmother at the age of 80 something, herself a farmers wife, still makes these scones today. Her son and Grandson’s, who work on the family farm, still come to her home to collect their scones. I am not allowed to use her particular recipe on my blog, as it is something of a secret family one – but doing a little reading around, here is a version, close to Elinor’s, but different enough that I am not betraying a family code in any way.

RECIPE

225g self raising flour
A pinch of salt
55g  unsalted butter (some recipes here use half butter half lard)
150ml of milk
30g sugar

In a bowl sieve the flour and add the salt. Add the butter and begin to rub the mixture together with the tips of your fingers. It helps to raise your hands above the bowl when you are doing this, to bring some air in to the mixture. When combined it should resemble damp breadcrumbs. Add the sugar and combine with a knife. Add the milk and lightly mix in the milk into the mixture. Mixing together should be done as quickly and as lightly as possible.

Cover your hands in flour and also flour the surface you will be rolling on. Aim for a mixture just over an inch thick (it won’t rise so it needs to be chunky). Use the cutter quickly and put on a floured baking tray. Brush the tops with milk and bake for 13-15 minutes until golden.

Serve with piping hot tea, preferably drunk from china cups with roses on them, mist beyond the window outside, and a sense of Hiraeth in your soul.

A childhood

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I have been trying to write a new post for over a week now, and a combination of Florence not settling early enough, and me being too tired at the end of the day to write, I have written, deleted, written and deleted to the point of feeling that I really must have nothing to say.

But the truth is I have so much I want to say. I am in a curious stage of in-between at the moment and that is possibly at the heart of why I am faltering every time I try to write. I am getting ready to move but I haven’t moved yet – and the home I am creating isn’t quite ready for us. So it feels like I am waiting, gathering, collecting and sorting, ready for it all to begin.

I am trying to make use of this fallow time, and within it use these moments of transition to let go of certain things; be they emotions, possessions, habits. And in their place begin to imagine instead new ways of being. I want to bring the slow and gentle pace of living into the heart of how we live. Mostly, I am desperate to nest with my children, to cook and bake and make a home.

Our Home.

Me in 5t

I always find it really hard to describe myself, especially in those kind of work situations, when you are asked to ‘tell a little bit about who you are’ to the rest of the group. I never know where to start…

So with that in mind, and knowing that a blog like this requires some kind of description, I thought I would give 5 images; with each of those images representing something, somewhere, or someone, that tells you something of who I am.

 IMG_2726My Family

They are my beginning. In every sense. Having waited for so long to become a Mum, and coming to terms with the dread that I might never be, I now have two twin girls. The three of us are now just starting out on an adventure to build a family, and a life.

P.S This is not a perfect photo and this is why I chose it. Looking closely, one of my daughters has a mucky face, the other is chewing her sleeve – while I look on with a grin, ever so slightly in the wrong direction.

But the thing is, it’s just the three of us, and I took this picture myself. And that pretty much explains it all. We are three.

Little Corinne

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So this is me. A little girl who is four years old, dressed in a hand knit cardigan and a tame bird rested on my shoulder. I look at this photo sometimes, and when I do it tells me so much about who I am. When I am a little lost, it reminds me of who I am.

I grew up in Wales, although I was born in Derbyshire. My childhood involved farms, mountains, the sea and speaking two languages – English at home and English, and second-language Welsh both at school – and to the farmers’ wives, when visiting neighbouring farms with my Dad.

Those memories, sharp as pins, of sitting in clean, proud kitchens with welsh dressers and dainty china cups with roses on, influence me still. The steam rising from the hot tea, plates of scones with a fine dryness that needed the piping hot tea to balance it. There was a solemnness8 to the farmhouses, which I liked, a kind of Chapel-Sunday feeling.

As time and years pushes my childhood self further and further into the distance, there still lingers the little girl above in much of who I am today. If I knew her now, that little girl in the lace up sensible shoes, and hand knitted cardigan, I would give her a little cuddle, maybe watch over her in the company of more confident children who perhaps saw the world a little differently to the way she did. And I would provide her with an unlimited supply of notebooks, pencils and pens. And contraband bags of cola cubes.

 

Which leads me to….

Reading, writing and books

Oh my life, these three words are really the DNA of who I am. I read first, then when I could write, I wrote, and I haven’t ever really stopped. My first piece of writing was a poem, about a stream, which began rather whimsically and romantically ‘I like to wander by the stream…’ (Perhaps a little homage to Wordsworth there, and my Mum recited that poem to me a lot, sooo.) I ended the poem with the word plop, I think having run out of romantic and creative steam. No matter. I was only seven years old *polishes knuckles on jacket lapels*

Oh go on, you’ve twisted my arm, here it is.

 

The Stream

I like to wander by the stream

It is a happy sound

I like to wander by the stream

It is a pleasant sound

I like to see the fishes when they swim by

And the sound they make is plop

 

Today I still love poetry. There is something in its immediacy that moves me inexplicably. Whereas a novel sweeps and expands, a poem takes you to the heart of something, and captures those moments not always easily written about in prose.

One of my favourite poems (no make that my favourite poem) is about a man hammering a nail, by Ralph Gustafson. The poem’s speaker illuminates that moment, that action of hitting a hammer, and in doing so conveys to the reader a fleeting glimpse into that man’s life, and the richness of his interior world. The action of the hammer, says the speaker, may be repetitive and singular, but the richness of the man’s interior world and the depth of his  feelings, gives the repetition of hammering a hugely significant and almost spiritual meaning. That poem, to me, conveys everything I love about language and poetry.

 

Reading for me has been a source of comfort, inspiration, escapism, a medium for self-education and a way in which I have learnt about the world and the people that live in it. As a child (see above), I read the Famous Five, imagining myself as the diffident, rebellious, non-conforming George. Growing up in the wilds of Wales, she was my role model. I saw myself in her, I still do, as a matter of fact.

Then there was the wonderful Neverending Story. It was the experience of reading the book, which I loved as much as the book itself. It was a dull, rainy winter. I remember sitting, absorbed, bound, captured and taken away by the character Bastian, and his escape from the bullies into that strange, dreamlike world.

I read it in the kitchen, my back against the battered Rayburn, and I stayed there, all day and into the night, reading, reading, reading. When I think of that experience now, it makes me feel secure, safe and warm. To be taken somewhere else but knowing that you are grounded in the surroundings of your own home, knowing that everything is just as it should be.

Later on, in my early twenties I found a love for nineteenth century fiction and particularly anything written by Thomas Hardy. I read Tess of the D’urbervilles and fell in love with Tess. Her character, so brilliantly and beautifully and tragically written, still feels to me like she is a real, breathing woman. I became obsessed with his stories, the way his use of language and prose forced the reader to slow down, to not expect so much, so quickly, allowing the story to unfold at its own pace. His treatment and exploration of fate, destiny, free will and the interconnectedness of our lives just made his worlds so tangible and absorbing. He also wrote about place and belonging that resonated with me so much, feeling as I did at that time, as if I was displaced and rootless. He spoke of home, and I longed to go there.

I carried on writing myself all this time, journals, letter, reviews for the bookshop I worked in. I wrote in secret and filled books and notebooks with my thoughts. I started stories a dozen times over, with ideas I never managed to complete. I think it was when I decided to go back to University as a mature student to study English Literature, that I really began to settle into a more coherent writing voice. Don’t get me wrong, I am definitely neither prolific or successful. but I do write and I know far more about my own voice now, and the kind of writer I am. I just can’t imagine myself ever not writing. It is just how I make sense of what I see and how I feel. The part of me I can’t express is all hidden and woven into what I write.

So ….

The next is a strange one.

Worry, self-confidence, me.