Stories that make sense
2023 taught me that the thing that worked up until yesterday may not work today – and that the thing that didn’t work a month ago may be exactly right for now.
And my intention for 2024 is therefore to pay attention and keep an open mind, trying things so long as they seem to have potential and to be compassionate.
I don’t know where this year’s gone. (I mean, I know exactly why it’s gone, but that isn’t quite the same thing.) Which is unusual for me, because I usually make a point of being aware of where I am in time.
These last few days, though, it’s all seemed to settle down, though not on account on anything I’ve done myself. The Morville Year, which I’d bought and immediately lost in the extra safe place in which I’d hidden the present I bought at the same time, turned up (as did the present – too late for the birthday for which it was originally intended, but just in time for Christmas). I loved The Morville Hours and the way it moves gently through the cycle of the year, and have been looking forward to reading this, a collection of related articles.
Slow Time is an old friend, a book that’s encouraged me to explore the calendar and the traditions in which I grew up. And one thing that I have already noticed about organised children’s activities is that they are very keen on seasonal themes, so it ought to get easier from here on in.
One last thing. I was amused to note, firstly that I’d run out of my previous soap bar just in time to start the Christmas Spice one – and secondly, that the one I’ve just finished (and had been using all through Advent) was called Wake Up Call. If you know, you know.
In progress. The book says boots, but really, if you’re not walking yet, there isn’t much difference. These have not got off to a good start: I got out of synch with the ribbing, then discovered I hadn’t cast on enough in the first place, so frogged the lot and started again. Consequently it hasn’t got very far. (The turquoise thing underneath is a cycling sweater which will, realistically, never get finished, so I should probably frog that too.)
I have already managed to finish a pair of bootees this year, slowly, slowly, little by little, row upon row. They came out smaller than I’d intended (I am usually too lazy to do a tension square, and particularly when it would work out about as big as the finished product) but a row of crochet round the edge sorted that out. You have to be prepared to improvise.
I do try to be honest about my life on here, while also doing my best to respect the privacy of my nearest and dearest, and also assuming that nobody wants to see, for example, the nappy bucket. (Though the reusable nappies, which get about half of the use, are rather jolly, it’s true. Nevertheless.)
Anyway, under these layers of cat proofing is a rather lovely Victorian inlaid wood table, and that’s real life around here. Gorgeous stuff, if only you could see it.
A slower pace of life. Places I hadn’t found time to get to before (this is Denny Abbey). New groups, new people. A whole new world.
“Two leeks and a lemon,” I said.
“Is she calling you a lemon?” the man on the market stall said to my baby. Then he said to me, “There’ll be moments you remember. Enjoy them.”
“Enjoy the quiet,” said the woman in the bakery, leaving me to my coffee and my sleeping baby.
And indeed, lately I’ve been drawing inspiration from a mug that claims The secret of enduring is enjoying.
People say it a lot. Enjoy… Enjoy… Usually it seems to be those who became parents a while ago, perhaps regretting their own missed opportunities to enjoy. I think it’s inevitable. Enjoyment is an active thing, and sometimes (often?) you don’t have the energy to be as active as all that. But there are plenty of moments, and enjoying can be as simple as noticing.
Not much to report other than in the garden, but I want to establish the Monday format while I remember what it is I think I’m doing. I now have all the components for my big winter skirt. I also have ideas for a couple of quilts. What I don’t have, or not for long enough to get anything done, is free hands. I’m hopeful that a baby bouncer may help there…
In the back garden, chaos continues to reign. I am meaning to get out and pick the blackberries before the devil spits (or worse) on them at Michaelmas, but I have a nasty feeling that’s as far as it’s going to go. In the front garden, I co-opted my youngest brother to plant a passion flower to replace the two that died in the heat. Tony has cleared several bags’ worth of slate chippings and all of the membrane, and the next step is for me to order some more plants to fill in the gap. I have managed to put half a dozen bulbs in with my own hands while someone else holds the baby, or she takes a (very short) nap. It’s slow going, but then gardening often is.
I’m on Bluesky now. Having been mostly avoiding Twitter for a while now, I’ve rather lost the knack of microblogging, but for what it’s worth I’m at https://bsky.app/profile/kathleenjowitt.bsky.social.
We took the baby to visit her great-grandma. This was the first trip involving an overnight stay, and went very well, all things considered.
Things change every day. Usually they get slightly easier than they were the day before.
The baby does not like long car journeys. I shall leave it there.
Whingeing in a closed forum to sympathetic people. At the very least it relieves the perception of being on my own. Quite often, I’ve noticed, the problem in question removes itself quite soon afterwards. Coincidence, no doubt, but I’ll take it.
Putting the baby in a sling (see, in particular, Cooking and Moving, below).
And always, always, remembering that whatever the particular moment of difficult is, it’s temporary.
Finished Acts and Omissions; read Unseen Things Above; now need to see which of the others I have on my e-reader. I am, as ever, a little frustrated that Fox ducks out of showing us any really awful marriage, because I think that’s an important part of the conversation she’s trying to have in these books.
I got round to the Murderbot Diaries (Martha Wells) several years after everyone else and read All Systems Red late on Saturday night. It was enjoyable enough, though I wasn’t blown away.
And in between times I’ve been working my way through the Tiffany Aching books, and have finished The Wee Free Men and A Hat Full of Sky so far. I’d never read them before, and they’re lovely.
Some work on Don’t Quit The Day Job. I would like to do rather a lot more, sharpish.
And the Kickstarter for The Bicyclist’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which my story The Ride for the City (portal fantasy, Cambridge, bonding over terrible books) appears, has just over two days left to run. If you want a copy of the book, the Kickstarter is by far the quickest and most convenient way to get it, and also makes me more money.
I have obtained the fabric for the skirt I was talking about last time. (Olive green twill, with some rather lovely green and red shot lining.) I have also thought about the pattern. But I’m not going to be able to start cutting out until I have an afternoon without a small person strapped to my chest.
Good Omens, season 2. Quite fun but felt rather lightweight compared with the first season.
Some extremely impressive Lego models at Ely Brick Show. I think my favourite was the War of the Worlds diorama, but it’s a tough choice between that and the Underground station.
One-pot things that are forgiving with regard to timings. I have some chakchouka in the slow cooker at the moment. The other day I managed to turn all the green tomatoes into green tomato chutney.
At this precise moment, jelly beans. We’ve had a couple of rather uninteresting pub meals.
We’ve instituted an evening walk. If it’s late, it’s just up and down the road, to keep within the range of the streetlights. But several times we’ve managed what used to be my morning walk, a full fifty minutes.
A small deer (muntjac, maybe?) wandering across someone’s front garden.
Picked some of the pears, a few of the apples, and most of the tomatoes. Which feels like a huge achievement, actually.
Family. The friends in my computer. A little more sleep than I was getting before.
Bras. I’ve managed to lose one, which is weird and annoying.
And I’ve just ordered a travel cot. The hope is that it’ll do for naps downstairs as well as for actual travel. We’re going to need a new pram, as the baby is about to grow out of the pram bit of the existing travel system while being too small still for the pushchair bit.
Various points in the sitting room; she spent most of the week on the table at my left elbow while Iwas feeding the baby. You can tell from the fluff deposit.
Some painfully well-observed prayer in Acts and Omissions:
And not being a Charismatic Evangelical either, he hesitates to give the Almighty matey advice in the subjunctive mood.
A new bit from Day Job:
Why should the world that’s captured between the covers of books be one that only a tiny privileged minority inhabit? As we’ll see in the next section, even the pale, stale and male Western canon develops some significant holes if we remove those who wrote around the edges of their paid employment.
Rather a packed schedule, actually, and a party on Saturday!
Anything you’d like to share from last week? Any hopes for this week? Share them here!
Whoosh. Suddenly it’s six weeks later and we’re rounding off August with a blue moon. It seemed like a good moment to pick things up again over here.
The baby is delightful, and gets more interesting by the day. It’s lovely, too, seeing others’ reactions. So many people are genuinely pleased to see her, friends and strangers and the guy I know by sight but whose name is a mystery.
We have succeeded in getting out of the house. Several times. There was my birthday; there was Pride; there was the Cursillo study day (labyrinths); there was a barbecue at my aunt’s; there were at least three church services.
This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. And I would say the same thing at times that are not three in the morning. It’s the being on duty all the time.
It’s the first time in years I haven’t been in Ventnor for Fringe week. (I did have a weird feeling last year that It Was All Going To Be Different, though I hadn’t guessed how or why.) I lived it vicariously on the Instagram hashtag.
Hormones. I spent the first month crying about pretty much everything. (Child is not feeding. Child will not stop feeding. Child is small and utterly dependent on me. I wish Pa could have seen her…) Plus, of course, the lack of sleep.
Having my mother to stay. Coke (the fizzy sort). Keeping in touch with other adults over the internet. A sausage-shaped cushion thing that ties on behind my back. Remembering that this is my only job at the moment.
Also, let me stop a moment to extol the Really Useful Boxes. Because they are. Quite apart from storing baby clothes and nappies and toys, I’ve been using them as footstools, for handwashing, and for catching and evicting a huge spider. And the cat likes sitting on them.
A couple of ‘how on earth do I do this motherhood thing’ books: What Mothers Do (especially when it looks like nothing) (Naomi Stadlen); The Gentle Sleep Book (Sarah Ockwell-Smith). Both useful in confirming that I wasn’t missing something obvious, it really is this intense, and there’s only so much you can do before you just decide that this is the way things are and you’re going to go with it; both, I think, pushing back against the Gina Ford school of babyraising (which seems to have fallen out of favour among the professionals, at least in our neck of the woods). Of the two, the Stadlen is the keeper.
The Balloonists: the history of the first aeronauts by L. T. C. Rolt. Rolt was most famously the author of Red for Danger, the absolute classic of disaster analysis. There’s a certain amount of disaster in this (as you’d expect given the quantity of hydrogen used in the early days of ballooning) but it’s by no means the whole story. The whole story is very interesting and engagingly told.
Feeling in need of something trashy I reread Glittering Images (Susan Howatch) and began Glamorous Powers before deciding that really I wanted to read about scandalous bishops more than psychic manpain. So I have abandoned Starbridge and moved on to Lindford (Acts and Omissions, Catherine Fox).
Nothing to speak of in terms of new words on new pages, but I should have some news on an older project soon.
I’m planning a full skirt in olive green with lilypad patches. Need to do some maths and obtain the olive green…
A lot of daytime TV. I’m particularly enjoying The Repair Shop at the moment; I’ve been thinking a lot over the past couple of years about physical objects and sentimental value, about what things mean and how good it is when something can keep on doing the job it was made to do.
I’ve also returned to Ghosts, and this time managed to get past the second-hand embarrassment of the early episodes and into the kinder, more constructive stories of season 2.
Before that there was the world athletics championships; before that there was the super combined world cycling championships; before that there was the Tour de France.
Pretty cars gathered outside the cathedral. Some gorgeous work by Ely Guild of Woodturners (who, if any of them are reading this, ought all to be charging twice as much for their pieces as they currently do).
Is pretty much impossible with a baby. I did manage to pickle some plums (and regret leaving the jars in the conservatory in the hottest month of the year) and, several weeks after that, make the topping of a crumble.
A lot of ready meals. The charming snackpot that Tony assembles and brings me before he goes to bed and leaves me to the night shift (this evening’s contained two sorts of pretzels, dried apricots, crystallised ginger, a chocolate digestive biscuit, and three Mikado sticks.) And a reuben sandwich at the last (and, for me, only) Foodie Friday market of the year.
A little bit of walking.
Whatever will keep me from falling asleep with a baby on my lap. Minesweeper, mostly.
Dragonflies. Or are they damselflies? I’m not sure what the difference is. Butterflies. Sunflowers. Hollyhocks.
Chaos in the back (it is, infuriatingly, a really good year for fruit, and I’m not managing to get out to pick it, and if I were I wouldn’t get round to doing anything with it). Progress at the front, where we have much less in the way of slate chippings and much more in the way of lavender and thyme.
All the people who have come to see us, sent messages, cards and presents, and generally provided solidarity in a massive life change. The Rosie Birth Centre and the community midwifery team.
Leaving aside all the baby gifts, or we’d be here all night: a lovely turned elm bowl from the woodturners’ exhibition; a couple more Joanie dresses; a whole load of plants (Norfolk Herbs: very reasonable); more fabric patches than I actually needed; some Pride tat.
I haven’t been to the seaside this year other than incidentally, and I’d really like to. I don’t think it’s going to happen, though.
L. T. C. Rolt on the develoment of the dirigible:
Unholy marriages were consummated – most of them only on paper, fortunately – between the balloon, the kite, the ornithopter and the helicopter.
In the conservatory, either on top of a large cardboard box, or on the windowsill for optimum garden surveillance.
How has your summer been? Have you also given up on Twitter, or were you never on it in the first place? What’s your social medium of choice these days?
Kathleen Jowitt 