spoon-management

Funny thing about Christmas cards.  If you live at a distance from me you are more likely to get one during advent than if you live over the road or next door to me.  This is because when the weather is inclement, which it mostly has been this year - if not raining then perishing cold - it is often a step too far to deliver the cards by hand through the letterbox.  If you live in another country it is also touch and go whether the card will arrive in time because that means going into a post office and queueing.  For the rest, I can do everything from here: write, put in envelope, affix stamp - and then Mr. Signs posts them for me.  It isn't as though I never get out.  But when I do I have a kind of tunnel vision.  First I have to actually get to the car, which may be parked a short distance away because how things are in this road - it's everyone for themselves and you park wherever there is a space, which might not be near your house.  If the windows are iced up there is that to see to - back to the house for a bucket of hot water to chuck over the car or time spent scraping the ice off.  Then there is the car to heat up so as to make it bearable to sit in - if the car actually starts up, which is not always the case when it is cold.  If I go into the nearest town I have to find somewhere to park that won't leave me too far from shops or having to negotiate a steep incline.  The village is easy as long as you just aim to get to one place rather than attempt both chemist and health shop in one trip.  Bearing in mind that adventures of this kind have to be thought about when you are a few spoons* short of a cutlery set, you can imagine why I have finally succumbed and begun to do a bit of serious online grocery shopping.  It actually works quite well, though they didn't have the particular kind of celery and organic broccoli I ordered so substituted those for bog-standard kind which is fine but I was still charged for the more expensive items I asked for.  A quibble, perhaps, but something else to sort out.  Pleased to have got a fridge and vegetable rack stocked up without setting foot outside the house.  Not pleased that I forgot to cancel my Abel and Cole order so was completely vegetabled out yesterday until I managed to offload some potatoes, carrots, tomatoes, onions, turnips and green stuff onto my neighbour.

*spoonie = someone with a chronic, debilitating illness

Blue Light Show

One of my neighbours over the road has put up her blue Christmas lights.  We live on a narrow, uneven, unadopted country road and the lights are like a strong singer in a small, out-of-the-way nightclub where not many people come, but the singer has put on her blue dress made out of sequins that catch the spotlight, and you can't help but admire the singer but you also sometimes wish that this performance would stop, that she would go back into the dressing room or sit quietly drinking by the bar so you don't have to keep looking at her.

The blue light show will go on until the night of 5th January, breaking up the darkness of the holy nights.  There is something convivial about the lights.  They have heart.  You would miss them if they went, as you would miss the singer if she sloped off one night, never to return.

the day today

I don't know about you, but I can't wait to hear results of Rituximab trials for people with PBC and M.E.  If you don't know what I'm talking about that's probably a good thing.  There will be a time when people look back to this as a very dark age, before lovely Research blazed a trail that found methods of treating symptoms of those with delinquent immune systems.

Meanwhile, I am back in retreat-mode with post-exertional neuroimmune exhaustion.  The view from the window is good but my camera is out of battery and Mr. Signs and his iPhone are not here.  Beside me are several packets of Christmas cards and the latest issue of Mslexia magazine.  Downstairs are rooms full of mess and muddle and a chicken that is hoping to be roasted tonight, but right now standing up does not feel like a good idea.  I am not sure if anything other than lying flat is a good idea.
Actually, yes - eating chocolate-covered marzipan is a very good idea, even if only in the short-term.
Poetry workshop tomorrow is out.  Choir practice is a don't-know.  Family party for my niece's birthday on Saturday.  If I am to make that I will have to pay beforehand with sufficient non-activity.

No vegetables to go with the chicken but no way to get to the shops today.  Damnation.  But perhaps there is a stick of celery, one sweet potato and a few beetroot.

Advent now.  I do want to send those cards.

Lady Loves a Swine

There was a lady loved a swine,
Honey, quoth she;
Pig-hog, wilt though be mine?
Hoogh!, quoth he.

Just saying, because it's not all about food, even though these are destined to become that.  Being on a biodynamic farm means that life, while they have it, is good - particularly when Signs takes it upon herself to sing to them.  See how they love me?   I am in good voice because I have re-joined the local choral society in time for the Christmas concert.  I have always liked this song about the lady who fell romantically in love with a pig.  I delivered it to the best of my ability.

I will build thee a silver sty,
Honey, quoth she;
And in it thou shalt lie.
Hoogh!, quoth he.

I have a feeling that they caught the pathos embedded in the lines and the melody, though the element of humour will have passed them by.  Animals are capable of much more than we give them credit for, but they have no sense of humour.  So I delivered it straight.

Pinned with a silver pin,
Honey, quoth she;
That thou mayest go out and in.
Hoogh!, quoth he.

And why should the lady not love a swine?  Stranger things have happened and romantic love, as we know, is anarchic and rarely sensible.  It has laid low many a prince and princess, and one is lucky to emerge unscathed.

Wilt thou have me now,
Honey, quoth she;
Speak, or my heart will break.
Hooch!, quoth he.

There was no possibility of a happy ending for the lady, though she probably (one imagines) went on to make a good marriage and settle down, even if the ghost of a Hooch! sometimes echoed in her dreams.  My affection for the pigs is of a more robust kind.  After singing, I went on my way and had a steak and kidney pie with a side of cole slaw in the farm cafe (yes, still on the cafe trail).  Then I visited my sheep friends.

Guess which one most took my fancy.

sunday stir fry

Sufficient unto the day the stir fry thereof.  Tofu and veg.  And what comes to mind is some lines from a poem by Noosa Lee a.k.a. That's So Pants:

           ......  "I never thought
that love was waiting somewhere.
I always thought you made it
out of what was there, like
stir fry."

Soup and Substance

The leaves are nearly all blown from my next-neighbour-but-one's giant ash tree.  How did that happen?  I looked up from my notebook and there they were, the bare branches.  Last time I looked they were full of green and red.  A couple of writing buddies came over.  Candles were lit, coffee and fruit tea made, buckwheat crackers (yes) on the table.  But recent events and yesterday's activities (workshopping and choir practice) have sucked the marrow from my bones.  No inner substance, no writing, not even dishwater writing - the kind you pull the plug on when it's done.  I left buddies to their notebooks and mugs of fruit tea and went upstairs to the living room and looked at the sky, which was grey and unforgiving, but still, looking at the sky, and tree tops is something I need to do to replenish substance.  Rooftops are also good.  I have made more soup, sweet potato and lentil this time, some of which will soon be going to mater and co where it will either be eaten or left in the fridge until it has gone past its eat-by and thrown away.  You will be wondering how it is that I had the wherewithal to make soup, in the light of what I have said about substance.  But soup is like that - you can make it, literally, with almost nothing, a few bones, an old carrot, a handful of beans - and you can make it when you feel innerly without substance.  The mater knows this, or used to.  Her own grandmother made soup, she said, by singing into a pot.  Sometimes I don't even sing.  But the pot fills anyway.

autumn-on-edge

Look, it is autumn here on the edge, and look, it did not rain yesterday.  So Mr. Signs took this photograph as evidence, and because he has an iPhone and I don't.  The only reason I want an iPhone is for the photograph-taking.  This path is near a biodynamic farm with a hut that serves up pies, pastries, coffee and soup, even on a Sunday.  We had onion soup with hunks of bread and bought greens and salad from the vegetable stall.  I had an apple from one of the crates harvested from the orchards.  The rest will be pressed and made into juice which we will be able to buy (at some cost) from the farm shop.  We spent time communing with the pigs.  A particularly good-looking one came and eyeballed me.  One day he might be in a sausage I cook in my frying pan.  It is for this kind of reason that I tried to be a vegetarian and would have continued if it hadn't become obvious that doing so was making my precarious health worse.

We have been talking about the difficulties involved in continuing to live in Signs Cottage, and where we should live when the time comes to sell it.  To find the right place it would be easiest to move somewhere else.  I carry the forest as part of my inner landscape.  I don't need to be near it to do that.  But I would still be homesick.