After-sales; chitchat; pease

After a good start with Bram, things went a bit pear-shaped last night, and, disheartened and worried, we felt that the few days might be more to be endured than enjoyed for all of us. Tom decided to go to bed and read, only to find his still-quite-new shiny Kndle p@perwhite seemed to be broken, freezing weirdly or failing to come on altogether, then flashing up unhelpful messages. Assuming it would have to be sent back, I looked around for the very deluxe packaging and paperwork it came with, without success. I snarked at him about this, then e-mailed the relevant French limb of The Megacorporation from whence I had bought it. Within the hour we had a phone call from a very patient and polite young woman who calmly took me through the elaborate procedure of holding down the on-off button for forty seconds and waiting a few more, which miraculously resuscitated the device. If it did it again though, she said, let them know, as it might mean it really was faulty. No fuss about packaging and paperwork.

~

Bram's much better too, and the rain cleared by after lunchtime so we had another good walk. One of the things about having a dog to walk which gets you out on a regular basis is that even, or perhaps especially, in these quiet parts, you run into people, stop and talk, keep a bit up to date with things. Our former neighbour, who looks after our field, stopped his van, curious at seeing me with a dog again, and we chatted about dogs and exchanged information and thoughts about septic tanks, to our mutual benefit. When we got back, Tom said he'd go out alone on a provisioning foray. Bram seemed in fact quite bothered by his absence, and, while still quite reticent, genuinely pleased to see him and join in the rather deliberately exaggerated welcome home celebrations.

~

Less regular walking also means I'm more ignorant about what goes on in the fields round and about. When E came the other day, she pointed out (with a view to where it might not be a good idea to walk) a rather fine young silvery roan bull in one of the pastures. He was new to me, and I realised that the handsome gold coloured Limousin who used to be seen all over the place, a rather gentle seeming character, easily bossed around by the farm dogs and his harem of black and white cows, and who sometimes featured in my Molly walking blog, I hadn't seen for a long time. Scarcely earth shattering, you might say, but of no more nor less importance than many other things. When I did get out walking this year, back in the summer, I noticed a lot more fields of these pretty violet flowered peas:

sometimes on their own, sometime mixed with field beans, like small broad (fava) beans, and a cereal type plant:  

(there were some fields of just the beans, which I sometimes filled my pockets with and cooked, can't remember how)

I picked a bunch of the flowering peas and put them on the window sill, sometimes using the top shoots for salads and stir fries, but mostly just to admire.

What they were used for I don't know, they didn't seem to be there long so they clearly weren't harvested for the peas and beans, but whether they were made into silage or simply ploughed in as green manure I never saw, or spoke to anyone to learn. Pretty while they lasted anyway.

Wood, wool, cauliflower curry and a hare

Time for a 3BT post, plus a picture:

After weeks of procrastination, I make a phone call, leave a message and within a couple of hours, Pierre Poisson is on our doorstep and we make a date for a firewood delivery. It's a matter of some pride to hold out on winter fires, as I mentioned before, but also the business of asking for our logs is always slightly discomforting; it's a quid-pro-quo arrangement involving our land, so not clearly defined, and Pierre is not getting any younger. Now, however, it's been amicably arranged, and is another thing out of the way, and we can look forward to the fire as and when we want it.

Quessquitricote - our fortnightly knitting group meeting - is well attended these days. An odd thing is that meetings seem to have a preponderance of one particular colour, today it's the pink/red part of the spectrum. It's busy and noisy, but one by one people take up their wool and walk, and finally it's just down to Soize and myself, and her twin girls, who are never noisy. We talk about dogs and cars (and a bit of knitting) until the librarian calls that she's already locked the doors. I wonder about trying to explaining the concept of a lock-in but don't.

On the way home through the descending autumn evening and spitting rain, I'm not only looking forward to my midweek glass of wine but also to Tom trying a new cauliflower curry. It doesn't disappoint, it's simple and light, but warmly spiced and cooked just right, just beyond al dente, with the cumin seeds and oil to enrich the rice and a good home made tomato chutney. Much as I enjoy eating meat and fish, I love and crave this kind of veggie food more, I know, than Tom does, and appreciate his making the effort to prepare it.

Picture: experimenting, not altogether successfully, using the integral webcam thing on the notebook as a kind of scanner, a card with a hare from my lovely sister. Can't have too many hares.

Visits and yallery-brown things

Still about, this hillside haunting. Had a visit from my lovely sister, which was most enjoyable. She's not been here as late in the year as this, but resolutely refused to admit being cold despite that this can be a difficult time where temperatures are concerned, a chill in the air but not enough to light the fire yet; we have to have it in for easily five months of the year and are reluctant to start too soon, as then we don't feel the benefit, as one's mothers used to say.

We got about, visited Lamballe market in its autumn plenty, caught the annual Mathurin Meheut exhibition there before it closed for the winter, puppy-sat and walked Dutch E's lovely but rather timorous new young dog Bram, and visited the mohair goats of Corlay, which surprisingly I hadn't done before, and where we indulged in sumptuous fibre and scratched the little kid goats' woolly foreheads. We ate rather well, pulled pork and fish pie and rotisserie chicken and Tom's finest sour potato and chicken massala curries, with Turkish flatbread from an interesting and hearteningly popular new stall on the market run by a chap called Aslan.

Then my Mayenne brother and sister-in-law came and took her away, on the way back from an overnight jaunt on the Paimpol peninsular, which it was good to see them enjoying, and we were able to catch up a bit with them, eat some more, and discuss the sticky issue of septic tanks.*

So I have drifted away from here again rather, and taken few photos. A degree of seasonal lassitude and general reluctance about all kinds of things has set in, pleasures become chores, chores become onerous. The inspiration and good cheer of our Low Lands trip is fading rather; I know that I gazed and gazed at Memling's St Barbara and her velvety drapes, and had a quiet kind of antique torso of Apollo moment of conviction, and brought it back home with me intact, but both spirit and flesh are weakening somewhat now. Thinking about seasonal affectedness, I find it hard to be sure whether the low level of anxiety and apprehensiveness that the approach of winter brings is cause or effect. I do look forward to winter; I love to be lazy, hibernation, cosiness and indoors are pleasing to me, but always there is the uncertainty of what it will bring, how the fabric of the house will stand up to the weather, the hedgeman cometh with his robust power tools and his robust chiding, and there are still jobs to be done which my inward turning tendencies recoil from, will the plans of winter travel and visitors which promise to brighten and enliven the darkest days be brought to nothing by catastrophy? The summer is ended and we are not saved...

But all manner of things shall be well, no doubt, and in spite of this, and although the blogging world is a quieter place generally, I continue to be touched, amused and moved the words and images of my blogging friends. Saddened too, by departures, sad news, melancholy reflections, of course, but always grateful.

So, here are a few yallery-brown things of the season, but no falling leaves.

In fact this looks more like something of high summer, but is still blooming away with freshness and aplomb, a piece of waste land just as one enters Lamballe from our direction, planted entirely with sunflowers and phacelia, agaisnt the gold of the yellowing poplars. Unfortunately they were all turning away from us when we passed.

My sister is always up for Lamballe market. bless her. We browsed all the veggie stalls, scanned the Dutch couple's haberdashery and laughed at the big van full of shockingly expensive, passion-killing flannelette nighties, old-ladies' polyester housecoats and winter undies, as usual. Then we sized up the rotisseries chicken and homed in on my very favourite veg-man from Finistère. I think everything there is grown locally to him, it is always seasonal and sometimes surprising. It's a big stall with just the one man running it, so you select your own and queue to weigh and pay, which keeps it cheap and also means you spot something else while you're waiting to put in the beautifully illustrated brown paper bags.

The only thing I needed was some green chillies, which I didn't really expect him to have but lo, there were a small box of Espelette  types just by the scales, along with some fresh cobnuts:

(The ones with the husks still on are from our purple filbert tree, we share them with the voles, alas no squirrels for a long time. The Brazils are left from who-knows when, the odd chestnut from hereabouts)

I couldn't resist pink Roscoff onions, picked out by rustling through the loose outer husks like a bran tub, at a euro a kilo, which makes the string I got from the sets I grew in the garden absurdly uneconomic, but then there are other, sentimental reasons for growing them. He still had a large number of tomatoes of every size shape and colour, and though I don't really care for yellow tomatoes I had to bring this  elephant-man one back, it was the size of a small pumpkin, and marvellously striped:

These are my butternut crop, a variety called 'Sprinter', specially selected for chillier, shorter seasons, I got seven decent sized ones and a couple of runts. Again I probably saved little by growing them as they are to be found everywhere just now, but there is still satisfaction in having, and sharing, them;

Tom, who isn't over-fond of any kind of yellow squash, says they remind him of the mandrakes in Harry Potter.

And of course, there is knitting, some of it yellow. A very quick knit was these Minion mittens for Princeling's eighth birthday, which I gather went down well,

though I know nothing of Minions and am rubbish at crochet, which was necessary for the eye-goggles.

Taking much longer was this pullover for Tom. He chose the colour, the rest is my fault, I might say, but in fact, once upon a time, he had a gold coloured sweater, in a fine acrylic rib which, despite that unpromising description, we both rather liked. He still has it in fact but it has grown thin and tired and he has grown out of it. I undertook to replace it, and, in a state of hope over experience, I somehow thought (modified) drop shoulders and half-fisherman's rib would be a good idea. Half a year and half a hundredweight later, I was drawing towards the finish line. He slipped the sewn-together body pieces over his head, and I held the sleeves up to check the length. Again, why did I not know? It's not like I haven't been caught out on this before. If you should be interested, and in the position of knitting a drop-shouldered jumper, especially a chunky one, hold your nerve, those sleeves may not look it now but they will be long enough! 

But no, I spent many more hours and quite a bit more wool MAKING THEM LONGER. Aargh. Then when I had carefully sewed it all up, and he tried it on again and, of course, the drop shoulders did what their name indicates they would do, and the ends of the sleeves hung down way below his hands almost to his knees, did I do the sensible thing and unpick the seams, undo the tops of the sleeves and unravel them till they got to the required length? No, I decided, I kid you not, based on the fact I had once fairly successfully cut the bottom off a waistcoat in stocking stitch and picked up the stitches again, to chop off the ends off.

The Sunday before last was then spent in a yellow snowstorm of snipped yarn, obsessively trying to find a way to viably pick up the always unfathomable structure of half-fisherman's rib so as to re-knit the cuffs. The end result was massive, weirdly truncated sleeves, brutally gathered into cuffs like leg-o-muttons, and attempts to disguise this butchery by not-quite-canny enough wielding of the crochet hook.

But did Tom look with horror at the resulting garment? He did not, but has been wearing it proudly much of the time since, despite its not really being cold enough, and I consider myself blessed among women to the final degree of uxoriousness. So we went out into the autumn garden for a photo shoot.

I favoured the background of autumn leaves, but when he wanted to pose in proper knitting pattern style, he was without means of support, and ended up laughing rather a lot and getting puffed out in his big hot sweater:

Then he found a plant tub and regained his dignity and an elegant pose. Roger Moore eat your heart out.

* Still ongoing. We are now tending strongly towards a micro-station even though we won't receive any grant towards it. An old sand bed soak-away, still the only system accepted by the SPANC as being worthy of subsidy, is really too problematical and encumbering, and really very backward.

A meandering kind of post about colour, knitting, plants etc

Some attempts at artistic, still life kind of pictures of knitting. 

This one above is only partly of knitting, the Thai silk scarf and the bottle of Jameson are just as important, but I felt light was quite Vermeer-ish, and typical of the equinoctial sun into that part of the room of an evening, and that there is light in the evenings is cause for joy. 

The same light falling on red cashmere,

just forty grammes of it, laceweight, but knit double, and made into another example of the ever-popular Hitchhiker pattern.  

The name derives from the supposed fact that there are supposed to be forty-two of the little points or steps that run down the edge of it. However, it is modular in its construction and you can make it with as many or as few points as you want. This is the third one I have made now (the previous ones were a rainbow-coloured and a blue) and none of them has in fact had forty two points, the first had thirty-seven, the second, made of much finer wool so needed to be bigger, had sixty-something, this one has a scant thirty-one, owing to its being made of just forty grammes of very fine cashmere (discounted but even so). I was slightly disappointed when the yarn arrived that, despite being assured that it came only from Mongolian goats living at very high altitude, it wasn't as fluffy and soft as I expected. However, once I was knitting with it, and even more when I came to wear it, its inner beauty became apparent; it has a long, sleek staple, and is so light and soft you don't know you're wearing it, except you're warmer by an order of magnitude.

I'm afraid our friend Dutch E does not get such luxurious fibres for her birthday present. It occurred to me that though she has a spring birthday, she always gets a rather wintry present from us: a bottle of sloe gin and usually of recent times something knitted. She is extremely fond of sloe gin and provides good coffee every week all the year on yoga mornings, so I have to make sure I husband the supplies so that there's always some available in March. If it's the vintage of the winter just passed I try to caution her to keep it as long as possible before drinking, which maybe she can for a few weeks, rarely longer, but this time there's a good bottle left from the winter before (this winter's is still on the fruit, I have been sloe slow). She's also an enthusiastic recipient of hand knits - and she must genuinely like them because she's Dutch and so does not tell white lies. So I took up some scraps and leftovers and thrifted skeins from Emmaus,

and set about making her yoga socks. These are kind of like leg-warmers, kind of like socks, only there's a slit where your heel goes, so and ribbing at the bottom which surround the arch/instep, so the foot and lower leg is covered but the toes and heels are free to grip whilst one is endeavouring to hold the tree or archer pose, for example. You can wear them inside Wellington boots too it seems, but I've never got around to making myself any so I've no idea if they're any good in either capacity, and have a feeling E will just hitch them up over her ankles and wear them like leg-warmers. Knit-savvy people might notice that these are being constructed in the round on tiny, 9-inch circular needles, a technique I'm lately experimenting with. The little jar that once held Espelette pepper flakes now holds safety pins for use as stitch markers, the smaller pâté one tapestry needles, beads and rubber bands to stop the stitches falling off the needles; the cup contains tea and the book TS Eliot. Attention span deficit, moi?

When knitting things which come in pairs - which owing to the bilateral structure of the human body - is most things apart from hats and scarves, even jumpers having two sleeves therefore requiring a level of duplication - there is always the question: to match or not to match? I am something of an enthusiast for non-matching; as well as being a source of originality, creativity and interest, it goes some way to getting round the well known SSS - second sock syndrome, or indeed second mitten, second glove, second leg warmer, even second sleeve - whereby one makes an article with brisk enthusiasm, only to experience a sinking feeling on realising that you have to do it all over again. So I decided to vary the stripes on the yoga socks:

This, however, does induce some frowning among my knitariat - did I not want to make them match? I tried to explain that there is roughly the same weight of each colour on each... But I fear they transgress the pensée unique, they are not worthy to be citizens of the Republic of Knitting, One and Indivisible. In addition they do not follow the tricouleur rule, the aesthetic maximum of three colours which divides good taste from what the English do. Ah well, it was conceded, they'll keep her legs warm, that's the important thing. 

However, I think there is a case that my yoga socks are upholders of liberté, egalité and perhaps most of all, fraternité: they are an expression of a degree of creative freedom, they are equal in size (E's legs being likewise as far as I have observed) and contain equal amounts of the same colours, just in different distribution and placement, and though they may not be identical twins, they are brothers. So, marchons!

Anyway, E being Dutch and arty and not averse to all things, counter, original spare, and strange, and usually up for some wacky colour combinations, is very pleased with them, as well as with the sloe gin.

I'm not sure truly that these things aren't more about personality than nationality or culture, though I also remember German students I used to teach in the UK rather thought their British host families were over-fond of inappropriate amounts of colour. In spite of all temptations to belong to other nations (and no longer having the vote in his own) Tom remains an Englishman, pretty much through and through, but he is quite uncomfortable with too many gaudy mismatches, and really prefers things to come in properly matching sets and a fairly limited range of generally sober colours. He can just about cope with mirror opposites, such as these slipper socks, though I don't think he'd wear them himself:

They are experimental, first trying out the tiny circular needles and then the application of bathroom silicone to render them non-slip (effective but needing further work on the application). They are weirdly shaped and rather remind me of some of the examples of early knitting and proto-socks developed in places like Turkey and Persia in the middle ages. I rather like them though.

~

Someone who doesn't worry too much about too much colour is David Hockney, who was the subject of a documentary the other night (I put the link in to the i-player even though you can't get it outside of the UK). It was one of those rather irritating wandery documentaries where people who have very little to say are encouraged to say it at great length as if it carried great import. Nevertheless I stuck it out and there was more than enough to make it worthwhile. Mentioning it in an e-mail exchange with my brother, he said he was rather put off by the hyping up of figures like Hockney, 'a pseudo-blond with silly spectacles' and that there was more satisfaction to be gained from the work of less trumpeted outsider artists. I dare say he's right, but these things aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, and I do enjoy Hockney's continuing enthusiasm for life and readiness to try new things; even the silly glasses have gone now he's achieved grand-old-manhood. He's never been really difficult as an artist it's true, and his British based landscapes of more recent years are very accessible indeed, the best of them, such as these,

seem to me to bring back the very first sense of wonder and exaltation I can remember as a small child on the top of the Chiltern or the Malvern hills, looking out over 'the coloured counties'. 

And among the many somewhat banal things he was quoted as saying, I found some comfort in the unremarkable truism: 'Just because you stop doing something doesn't mean you've rejected it'. I know it's obvious, but one can expend quite a bit of energy in anguish and sadness by forgetting it.  (I also rather enjoyed the scene where the Hockney family were playing Scrabble, and they'd had to replace the 'X' tile with a cannibalised 'I' because the cocker spaniel had eaten the original).

~

Other cheerful things. A communication from the garden centre where we have a loyalty card of dubious worth stated they were offering a free plant and free 'rempotage' - potting on. Reading the small print I wasn't quite sure what this might consist of, but went to find out, and in the middle of the flowering plants area, a cheerful girl in rubber gloves stood surrounded by a vast amount of fluffy potting compost. One had to buy the plants and the pots, but they would pot them on for you using their own compost, up to ten. So I took the opportunity to spruce up the herb containers, with new plants of origano, Moroccan mint, lemon and dwarf thyme, in good sized pots, 

and some parsley for the window sill in a very traditional terracotta pot. 

Kitchen windowsill, with parsley and also pea shoots, cress, daffies, potted jasmine (a fragrant extravagance) and the free plant whose name I don't know.

I like terracotta but can only have it where I remember to keep it wetted enough. I have no green fingers, kill plants very easily (unless I'm trying to, in which case they thrive stubbornly), and am not honestly a talented gardener. I tend towards what I think Joan Bakewell said, that gardening is outdoor housework. To me now it has somewhat taken the place of paid work; a demand from outside (inasmuch as the seasons and the growth of plants dictates its necessities), a kind of rent I pay for my room in the world, good for my moral and bodily well-being but to some extent a kind of duty which I'm often reluctant to get on with, yet once I'm there doing it I usually realise how much I'm enjoying it, really much more than actual housework. I'm aware this is a kind of heresy, and sounds rather churlish and ungrateful. 

Anyway, having the potting-on job done, though a very small one which I could have done quite easily in a short time at home, gave me a boost and an incentive to get on with the job of clearing up and re-ordering the herbs, and I feel the better for it, and today the seeds came from Chase Organics, including, for the first time from their catalogue, some Roscoff pink onion sets, though presumably for appellation controlée reasons these are sold as Keravel pinks.

~

So, a meandering and rather long-winded post of mostly domestic detail and cogitation. We're expecting visitors at any moment so I'll most likely be gone again for a bit...

A wet Sunday in November

Which I ended up spending binge-watching Noggin the Nog dvds. It was that or Bergman; I was in the mood for something Scandi and I don't do Wallender or Borgen.   Here's a taste of it:

Amazing, it's even older than I am.  I also did a couple of square foot of pretty rough lace knitting while I watched, which I won't try to show you; it might end up as a Christmas present anyway so best not in case the recipient sees.

And here is some of a pumpkin I cut up for dinner - courtesy of Lyse and her green-fingered husband, who have kept us very well stocked with veggies and vitamins this year. Merci Lyse! (But I'll leave all the andouille for you...)

Strange fruit

Woe is me,

a surfeit of quinces.  It's that time of year again.  Our friends have a quince tree, and Japonica bushes besides. In their early days here they hankered for and planted one of these most beautiful, elegant and archaic of orchard trees, and greeted the first few fruits with delight, but now we are submerged in the things, as well as quince jelly, paste, membrillo, even chutney.  We wonder what else one can possibly do with them, dine on slices of them with mince eaten with a runcible spoon?  Not very promising, though Nigel Slater did yield a recipe involving putting them in a stuffing for lamb with bulgar wheat, which he said had the advantage of getting rid of a couple of them, so he must have been in the same boat. But lamb here is expensive, and unless you go towards Mont St Michel, fairly indifferent, we seldom buy it, and Tom doesn't like bulgar. 

Fruit gluts here are often something of a problem, since we don't do dessert much, and beyond the odd slice of toast with marmalade, if we do have jam I'm afraid we rather like it red or purple with a bit of chewiness, so all the jellies soother than the creamy curd in various shades of gold and pink, pretty though they are, tend to sit around a bit. We seek out savoury applications, but these don't really use a lot, and we rather like our ham plain with a slick of mustard and our cheese plain with a glass of wine. Fruit liqueurs are a fairly safe bet and usually get drunk some time over the winter (as may we) but we still have some of last year's quince ratafia, not bad, made with the tail end of a bottle of rum, some very cheap and sweet Muscat de Samos and a bottle of Lidl vodka, and something similar may happen to these in the end.

Yet I can never refuse them, if only because of their heady perfume, and that they make me feel as if I'm living in a mediaeval tapestry. Our friends don't seem to learn either; the Quiet American, typically beguiled by all things Old World and quaint, and intrigued by my experiments with scrumped medlars a few years ago (gosh but it makes me sad going over old blog posts, snows of yesteryear and all that, and always reminders of loved and lost ones...), is still making noises about planting a tree, so if we all live long enough hereabouts we'll be wondering what to do with a surfeit of medlars, which sounds very Shakespearian.

No glut of pumpkins this year, these two were the total of my crop. I've vowed never again to grow the big watery, tasteless rouge d'étampes things again, but a few more butternut squash wouldn't go amiss.   Tom professes not to like these either, but they can very easily be roasted and slipped into our soups and stews without too much objection, and I appreciate them greatly.  We had a couple of third-hand samples of other people's surplus though, so we won't go short of our beta-carotene.

The final real fruiting oddity though, was a mysterious plant that seeded itself in the back of a flower bed. I kept meaning to pull it up, assuming it was a nightshadey sort of weed, but when I went to do so, it had expanded considerably, and on closer inspection turned out to be an edible physalis plant.

It bears very small boldly marked flowers, which all kinds of bees find irresistible, but which don't seem to turn into fruit so are presumably the male flowers, and an abundance of the lantern cased, cherry sized fruits.

I can't imagine how the plant was seeded here, I buy them occasionally but we eat them all up, and certainly don't throw them in the compost or spit the pips out or give them to the birds. Something sometimes  gets to the ones on the plant before I do however, and I find empty husks, so perhaps a sharp-eyed bird found one somewhere and deposited the seed in the evolution honoured way.

We've eaten quite a number of them ripe already, but the plant continues to spread and sprawl and make more and more green fruit.  A friend who grew up in southern Africa says they grow like weeds on verges and rubbish tips and anywhere you like there, and one year she grew some here and the summer and autumn were long and warm enough to yield a good picking. I can't imagine these will come to much now though, although I've tried to train the stems up the hedge to get them most sun and light, and the eager bees are determinedly braving the October chill to bustle round the flowers. I wonder if I snip the biggest ones off and leave them in their husks on a warm windowsill they'll be viable.  Unlike many of the exotic fruits which have become fashionable of recent years for their decorative beauty and bizarre shapes, (star fruit? bleugh!) they have a unique, intense and quite delicious flavour which just shouts vitamin C at you. Standing with bare legs of an October morning and biting into a cold one reminds me I'm alive, and glad of it.