Want to Come on Another Jaunt?

I can’t believe that this was three months ago already, this week we’re going back to the hospital for another check up.  The appointment is, of course, not mine, I’m just the navigator.  But I’ve got to meet and make friends with two lovely people, friends of a good friend of mine, and we had a lovely day out at the same time.  (My good friend is the driver.  It does take four adults to go to a hospital appointment).

It was a city that we’d never visited before, Portsmouth, but my good friend is always one for an adventure and an explore so this is our wander on a bitterly cold winter’s afternoon:

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A Domestic Month

It’s hard to believe that we’re half way through February, the second month of the year.  I am still trying to come to terms with the fact that it’s January 2013.  The weeks have flown past and I have been busy but again I’m bursting my own bubbles and believing that I haven’t really accomplished anything.

It’s funny how I always do that to myself.  I’m the biggest cheerleader going (minus ridiculously tiny clothes and gymnastic ability) for everyone else but I always knock myself down.  It’s never enough.  I always expect more, better from myself.  Why?

I still don’t know.

I set myself from goals for January and I didn’t really make them.  When I have been busy with other commitments then I’ve mostly been busy being Tired.  It’s been a month where honesty with myself has been challenging, in lots of ways, especially when I comes to owning up and being entirely realistic about my health.  My health isn’t good.  It isn’t good when I ignore it but when I choose to be aware, conscious and self-sympathetic, it can be a somewhat tough reality check.  For someone who has never understood the idea of doing just one thing at a time, being able to sit (and even lie down) with nothing doing is a little worrying, disturbing.

I have been too tired to knit.

That makes me miserable.

Knitting is how I express myself.

Knitting is how I enjoy myself.

Knitting is where I get material for blog posts.

No knitting.

Just too tired to work the needles, lift the yarn, never mind attempting to follow patterns.

I can count even worse when I am tired.

So I’m behind on the first goals of the year.

Have I failed?

I really don’t know.

I’ve done other things.

Made progress in other areas.

Does that compensate?

And I’ve been baking.

And in some ways, I’ve been find ‘me’ in that area too.

Or instead?

One of the first things that I tried this year was a friend’s coconut cake.

She made it for a day out a couple of months back and I was smitten.

Or smote?

Anyway, I should perhaps declare here that I don’t like coconut.

Or coconut doesn’t like me.

As coconut-loving husband didn’t come with us, he missed out.  So I decided I’d make one for us at home.

It was also covered in buttercream.

I need to say something about buttercream too.

I hate buttercream.

Always have.

I only occasionally met buttercream when I was a child and the whole not-mixed connection of lumpy, greasy butter and coarse, gritty sugar never did anything for me.

Husband has never met a bad buttercream in his life.

He can’t understand my surprise that buttercream can actually be quite good.

I now have a ‘thing’ for buttercream.

The recipe was sent through by email and I started making it up.

I got to nearly the end when I met the direction to ‘add the milk’.

No was there no milk in the ingredients.

Hmm.

I added a guestimated amount of milk, bearing vague memories of lemon drizzle cake in mind.

It didn’t turn out badly after all.

Possibly I added too much milk, but I only found out when friend kindly, and very eventually, sent through the correct measurement.  It didn’t come out too badly or soggy.

It was then smothered in buttercream.

Mmm.

Husband doesn’t think it tastes of coconut.

I don’t how he could come to that conclusion.

You can even see the decimated coconut in the photo!

Ah well.

Because I don’t get on with coconut, I rarely use any in baking.

I seem to have had a little bit of a coconut spree this month.

Because next up was Australian Crunch.

Another friend gave me the recipe.

It is much coveted as it something of a local culinary institution.

(I don’t think the Australians know anything about it, actually).

It’s a schooldays delicacy.

A frugal recipe that probably was adopted simply because you just chuck everything in a bowl and mix, because it uses up all sorts of odds and ends and as I said, it only requires cheap, basic store cupboard ingredients.  (Apart from coconut.  It’s getting hard to find decimated coconut in the supermarkets now that I actually want some!)

My middle school made it.

My husband’s school in this town didn’t.  He had never heard of it and really couldn’t get what the fuss was about.

However one of the other secondary schools in town did do it and several friends who attended that school, about the same time, are complete fans/addicts of the stuff.  Another friend who went to the third secondary school in town, about twenty years before, also remembers it very fondly, served with mint custard.  I know of another school, not too far away, that also made Australian Crunch.

To give you an idea of how desirable a foodstuff this is, I’ll tell you a story, a true story.

Some of the local bakeries have cottoned on to the fact that making and selling Australian Crunch would make them extremely popular with their customers.  I have friend who knows exactly which bakeries do it and what she thinks of them.

The other day, we were out together and stopped for her to buy a snack.  Faced with an entire panoply of freshly baked goodies, she chose Australian Crunch.  And before eating it, she photographed it with her mobile phone (isn’t technology great?!) and sent the photo to another Australian Crunch fan/addict.  I believe that the accompanying message was something along the lines of:  Naha, I have Australian Crunch and you don’t.

(We’re all highly mature adults round here).

My friend who gave me the recipe didn’t grow up round here so was oblivious to the status of the recipe she’d acquired.  She couldn’t quite understand why I was so excited to be given a copy!

Making Australian Crunch makes you very, very popular.

One of my other friends, a cake-hater and who thinks that my brownies are ridiculously rich and inedible  actually ended up having three pieces of it.  We couldn’t believe it.

Like some of the best things in life, it isn’t entirely photogenic.

But it’s good stuff.  Really good stuff.

Oh, and husband is now a fan/addict.

I made a second (double-sized!) batch shortly afterwards to fulfill demand.

There have been other culinary highlights.

These strawberries:

They were the best we’ve had all year.  It wasn’t a good summer for soft fruit.  And these were reduced too.

There is something unbelievable gorgeous about a sun-ripened, firm-fleshed, fruity, meaty strawberry.

I made red velvet cake.

From a packet, admittedly.

But, hey, honesty and realism do allow for ‘cheating’ now and then.

I honestly have tried to make it from scratch before but English food colouring and beetroots (even combined) failed utterly.

(If anyone has a decent recipe for an English version, please let me know!)

And made cream cheese frosting to put on the top.

And thus started another ‘thing’.

(Baking Tip:  Always straighten up the edges of your cake, this will give you morsels to ‘test’ your frosting or icing with).

Because I’d made quite a big batch of frosting, I had to make a chocolate cake to use it up.

And discovered that my friends also have a ‘thing’ for cream cheese frosting, quite a serious ‘thing’.

(Oh and if you want to have a whale of an evening out, have one of those occasions where everything doesn’t go to plan, end up going out for impromptu meal then finish up by eating chocolate cake (with cream cheese frosting, naturally) in the car in a dark car park, cutting it up with a penknife.  (No guesses who has a penknife on them!)  To add to the entertainment stakes, the frosted cake needs to have be turned upside at some point so it looks something like a crash now).

This is the second chocolate cake:

We wisely put two layers of frosting inside the cake and put a thin layer of melted chocolate on top.

(I hate it when there’s like an inch of chocolate on the top of a cake, it’s nearly impossible to cut through and then completely shatters when you finally force the knife blade through).

Oh, and some tinned cherries and cherry jam in the middle too.

However, because this could only happen in my world, our world, the chocolate was setting faster than we could spread it.  (It didn’t feel that cold but apparently the chocolate did).  So what do us little geniuses do to remedy the problem?  Hairdryer.  Hairdryer, my friends, is the baker’s best friend.

Enough said.

Anyway, in case you come to the unhealthy (and inaccurate) conclusion that we only ate cake in January (there was a lemon drizzle too, at another point), I’d like to share with you another first.

My first homemade soup!

(I know, it’s utterly shocking and scandalous that I could have got to this old age without ever having made soup).

Do you remember those chillies we grew?

The ones that were never jalapeño after all and so didn’t grow quite as big as expected?

Well, they pack quite a punch.

We’re having to use them carefully and sparingly.

I garlic-pressed two wee chillies into my giant (I’ve been living on it for the last week!) soup batch.  Most of the skin was left behind.  And it didn’t taste too spicy.

Not then anyway.

It’s definitely ‘infused’ since.

It sneaks up on you.

And then kicks.

But what else can a girl do when life hands her a humongous butternut squash?

(By the way, husband is refusing to eat it.  Why?  Because sweet-toothed husband thinks it’s too sweet.  No, I don’t get that either).

Ah well.

That’s life.

Would You Like to Come to Tea?

Once a month, me and my friends (I’m sorry but ‘my friends and I’ just sounds way too pretentious!) meet up to knit and crochet together.  We each take turns hosting it and the original idea was that we’d of course have a drink alongside (tea or coffee being somewhat obligatory in this country at least) and maybe a slice of cake.  Maybe.

The maybe cake has turned into a full-blown tea (of the afternoon tea variety and not the meal which may also be called dinner or supper).  I’m sure that you can believe that we are very conscientious in our sampling of all the wares!  Whilst the hostess is technically responsible for producing the eats, most bring ‘a little something’ too, resulting in quite an abundance and variety of delicious treats.

Last month it was my turn to host.  We don’t have an official rota but we’re running out of places that are big enough to take us all, our little group does seem to have expanded over the last year.  I have quite a big sitting room which is presentable but is in a rather derelict rest-of-house situation, especially when it comes to the bathroom.

It turns out that good friends are completely nonplussed by such issues.  They can also relate plenty of their own tales of DIY woe, although mine does seem to be on a particularly epic and enduring scale.  They genuinely believe that they’re just here to visit, knit (or crochet), chatter, preferably nibble/scoff and not to judge.

And I believe them because I trust them.

So I invited them all over.

But then of course started panicking.

I do that.

Tiling means that my house is experiencing a particularly bad episode of dustiness and there’s something heavy and imperturbable about any kind of building dust.  This is also a lovely terracotta colour which guaranteed to show on everything.  (I mean, it’s bad enough that we have black shelves in the sitting room, they advertise their dustiness very brazenly).

And I would have to cook.

I love baking.

But I get Tired.

And I have been Tired anyway.

Maybe I had bitten off more than I could chew?

I have had everyone over before, which was where the real embarrassment lay.  It doesn’t seem like we’ve made much progress!  Or maybe enough.  I shared some photos then of what I made so I wonder if you would like to come to tea again?

My sponge cake was requested again so I really couldn’t not make that.  It’s a fairly straightforward although beating the egg whites to firm peak does require a chair and some television-distraction.

This was all that was left afterwards:

Not bad for a 26 cm diameter sponge do you think?!

(Well, several did take pieces home for spouses and children.  We don’t want them to miss out entirely!)

I think I’d like to invest in a square cake tin for the future, I use my round one all the time but for bigger occasions, it would be a lot easier to slice a smaller cake into squares then try to do wedges.  Wedges are fiddly things and tend to collapse.   You can more squares out then wedges.  You can see from the above photo that we ended up with rectangles after a while, we’re not quite sure how that happened from a round cake, but hey!  I just hand over the knife and tell someone else to brave it.  I don’t like cutting cakes.

But I did cut this one horizontally all by myself this time.  (I bake it as one cake and then it needs sawing in half with a very good knife).  It was a little wobbly and uneven but cream and jam hide a multitude of sins.  (Although they possibly produce others too!)

I also made some mini omelettes in bun tins, they weren’t particularly photogenic as I think I put too much spinach in.

The first person who walked through my door that afternoon was accosted to try an omelette before I put them out.  I needed a taster, I’m allergic to egg!  They passed muster and out they went.  They did go down rather well, except for one poor friend who seemed to have all the chilli powder in hers.  Whoops.  We can laugh, fortunately.

If you want to have a go, use your normal omelette recipe but pour into bun tins and bake for something like twenty minutes.  Make sure you use a good quality bun tin because they will stick otherwise.  Even when greased.  (Ask me how I know!)  They’d be great for lunchboxes and picnics not just parties.

Then I moved onto a recipe that I first tried back in the summer but that didn’t turn out brilliantly at the time.  I decided to risk it again but use proper marshmallow puff for the insides.  I remember having the stuff when I was very wee (I’m not sure how or why because we were on a tight sugar-free diet at the time!) and I saw it again in America, the land of all sorts of amazing (and probably not entirely healthy) concoctions and confectionaries.  Friends send me a jar every so often.  But it’s now appearing in the supermarkets!  And the really good things is that it’s suitable for vegetarians whilst marshmallows aren’t.  Time for a marshmallow-fix!

I made whoopie pies:

There was a recipe ages ago in the Sainsburys magazine and I never got to make it then.  There was a brief episode when ‘they’ were trying to make whoopie pies be the next big thing after the cupcake invention/discovery here.  It never quite took off in the same way.  Although I can now get a box of ‘whoopie pie’ mix in one of the local supermarkets.  I use inverted commas because they are made of sponge with icing the middle.  Not batter, not marshmallow, not really a whoopie pie.

Apparently, whoopie pies started with thrifty Amish housewives using up leftover batter (well, America is the land where they eat pancakes and waffles for breakfast) by baking it into little pies to put in the husband’s and children’s lunchboxes.  They also spread them with marshmallow puff, something that seems pretty ubiquitous to an American childhood.  The name is said to have come from the reaction when they were discovered.

Cute, no?

So I dared and I risked and I made them again.

The trick is not to use too much filling in the middle.  I thought that they would need loads to not be dry and bland but they just slip apart, disintegrate.  You only really need a smear.  Honestly.

And whilst making them (having had a realistic moment and starting with the plain straightforward vanilla recipe), I decided that I wanted to ‘liven’ them up a little.  I had food colourings and hundreds and thousands at my disposal.  Hm.  Primary school artistic science came back to me, if I add both blue and red food colourings, I would have purple icing!  Yes, small things do really please.  And purple icing rocks.  I like purple.  (I blame having a deprived sugar-free childhood, colouring is making its way into my baking all the time now).  And in any case, pink always looks so twee and girly and predictable, no pastels for me, thank you!

Well, the purple icing rocked but it kind of ended up looking a little too blue on the actual whoopie pies, it looked better on the tray.  Yes, I did make that much mess with the icing.  That’s why I had sensibly got a tray out.  And yes, I have told myself to refine my technique sometime.

But everyone loved them.

They are fun.  I’m looking forward to making some more.

Oh, and don’t use tons of colouring but it actually starts becoming taste-able in the icing and it’s not a good taste.

I also made some madeleines because I haven’t made any for literally years.  I flavour them as the Spanish do for their magdalenas, with lemon and almond but make them in the French-style.  It’s the best of both worlds.

And amongst the treats that everyone else brought (and some had to take home again because we simply had more food than people or space!), was a cake that one friend had brought back from Hungary.  It’s a walnut cake and it’s more like a bread dough than cake per se and although it does look very dry, it’s yummy.  A little bit like baklava but not ickily sticky.

I have no idea what it’s actually called, Hungarian Walnut Cake but a little bit Bread-ish was working for us.

It was a lovely afternoon and it just shows that sometime it’s worth taking risks.  Real friends can be real friends.  And the sweetest thing?  One of our friends who came over later said to husband (who is even more paranoid and distressed at the idea of people coming over than I am and therefore was not told until after and evicted, hey, it was a strategy that worked) that she really liked our ‘posh’ flat.  Posh!  She takes things for what they really are, it is a lovely well-lit spacious flat, and not for what they might not be.  That really made my day when I overheard that a week or so later.

Yes, sometimes it is worth taking the risks.

Real Friends …

… ask you to the beach.

… tell you that you don’t need to bring your deckchair because they have one in the boot that you can use.  (Even though everyone else is sitting on picnic blankets on the floor).

… tell you to bring both sticks.  You ask how they know that you have two sticks because you only have ever use just the one.  They think that they’ve seen you use two before but it doesn’t matter, just bring both because you’re gonna need them.

… warn you that there’s a steep hill and steps (especially on the way back) but you all agree that it’s worth it.

… pick you up.

… let you knit in their car all the way there.

… offer to carry your bags, if you’d like.

… let you walk at your pace, however shamefully slow that might be.

… aren’t worried when you get the camera out to take some pictures.

… carry your hat so you have both hands free to hold your sticks (it’s windy).

… believe you when you say you’d rather scale the cliff on the rocks and grass than try the steps.  (I don’t do steps).

… bring you here:

… let you sit in your lone deckchair and knit all the time that we’re there.

That’s good friends.

(I don’t know those people, they were just in my frame).

They

… don’t worry when you go back up the hill at even more shamefully slow pace (I think snails were overtaking me).

… don’t get funny when you stop to breathe every now and then.  (Snails definitely breathe easier).

… don’t get cheesed off when, despite the fact that you’re the slowest (by miles) member of the party, you stop to take a few photos.

I like friends like these.

I like places like this.

And yes, I did make it back up that ‘hill’.  Eventually.  I have the photos to prove it.  But thank goodness for ‘four wheel drive’.

PS.  It’s absolutely ridiculous that I have never, ever, ever been here before.  People come from all over the world just to see this beach and I’ve grown up not too far away from it and have never seen it for myself.  Something ticked off anyway.

Five Images of a Perfect Summer

When this week’s Mama Kat’s Writers Workshop prompt asked us to describe our perfect summer, I have to say that I stumbled.  It’s the word ‘perfect’ that I have the biggest problem with; I know that perfection isn’t possible.  If it’s not possible, why even bother to aspire for it?  And Life being what it is at the moment, well, most days are just about surviving.  It also made me think of Trifecta’s normal prompt this week.  Normal seems to be something that other people are perfect at.  Perfect summers exist in that elusive normal world which is just one semi-detached house, manicured lawn and fancy car away from our own world.  My world, that is, even if I can’t speak for yours.

But I miss summer.  Summer is something that I’ve never quite been on the easiest of terms with.  Summer was something that just happened, a convenient name for the long divide between two terms of school, a hanging around and waiting for the world to start again.  In most of the recent years, the summer weather has fallen in April and while July and August can be warm, they’re always grey or wet.  Not exactly inspiring weather conditions.  Then, these last few years, we haven’t had transport.  We can’t go for days out in the countryside or pop to the beach whenever the sun comes out from behind a cloud.  It feels a little like we’re missing out on summer.

Slowly, I realised that perhaps I do hold a stereotype of the perfect summer, it’s somewhat disillusioning because I know it can never be attained, I’ll never be able to get all of these variables under control at once.  It’s a dream, a fantasy.  The perfect summer will always stay in that perfect world where normal people apparently live.  Because in the real world there is always work or family commitments that don’t allow you to skip off and enjoy the one day of summer that may suddenly appear, there are financial pressures and a complete lack of a summer wardrobe and all the billion and one little stresses and worries which don’t really leave even if the sun does come out.

Here is my perfect summer:

The Weather

In this perfect summer of mine, I won’t settle for the odd sunny day and warm weather.  Oh no, I want a whole season of summer.  A reliable period of warmth and sunshine where you can actually get used to the concept before the clouds appear again.  And the raindrops.  I want a holiday brochure perfect blue sky, warm but not too hot.  And for the sake of the farmers, I don’t even mind if it rains overnight occasionally.  It can be a beautiful start to a day, the freshness of a sweet summer shower, dewdrops on the grass, a faint mist over the streams.  But I want the sun to burn on through and clear it out of the way.  Every day.  Oh, and no humidity either.  Neither my body nor my hair can do humidity.  And beautiful, crisp sunsets late in the evening.

The Place

In this perfect summer of mine, the weather will be gorgeous so that means that there is only one place to be: the beach.  There will be a beautiful beach with warm, soft yellow sand and gentle blue-green waves lapping at the shore.  The water will warm enough for swimming and splashing.  I’d like some green countryside to walk in too, somewhere to seek the shade during the middle of the day, gentle hills of fields or some other agricultural delight, olive groves or vineyards if I really push the boat out and my perfect summer transports me to some exotic destination, like a Greek island.  Perhaps some interesting, little historic places to wander around because even in a perfect world, I doubt my attention span will take sitting on a beach doing nothing day in, day out.  Whitewashed villages, old forts, a decent museum or two.  I love architecture.  But near the coast always, a soft seaside breeze to gently waft through the streets.  Some restaurants and a good market will also make this the perfect place.

The Look

In this perfect summer of mine, I will not be my usual ungainly self wrapped in more layers than a parcel at a children’s game, I will have a perfect summer wardrobe of soft floaty cotton blouses, long skirts and even a nice sundress or two.  I will not worry about showing my arms and I will not persistently remain an albino shade of milk bottle.  It does sound a little vain but in that perfect, apparently normal, world, everyone looks nice.  They have perfect hair and skin and they have the right clothes.  In that perfect summer, I will suddenly fit in my own skin and be able to concentrate on enjoying what’s around me.

The People

In this perfect summer of mine, there will only be friendly, happy people.  Good weather does this people generally.  I will be surrounded by friends, perhaps those friends who I haven’t seen for ages and miss so much.  It’ll be about catching up and sharing memories and experiences.  We will laugh and chat away the evenings into the dark of night.

The Food

In my perfect summer of mine, there will be plenty of good, fresh food.  I don’t mind cooking in this perfect world if I have a good kitchen, good food and good friends to share it with.  There will be plenty of ice cream, eaten in cones with it dribbling down the hand in the heat, and watermelon.  There will cocktails and long drinks.  There will be bags of fresh fruit warm from the market, strawberries and cherries.  We will eat in restaurants when we feel like it because in this perfect world there are no money pressures, no boring places with  limited menus of just fish’n’chips or steak.  There will be long lunches with salads and so much talk that people almost forget to eat, sitting under the shade on a veranda or patio.

In this perfect summer of mine.

I miss summer.  I miss dreaming.

Related Articles

• Mama Kat’s Writers Workshop (external link)
• I Dream
• A Few Word Pictures on a Sunny Afternoon
• What Shall We Talk About?
• The Call of the Beach
• Trifecta:  Normal

Apologies and an ABC

I’ve been very quiet the last week or so I know.  Sometimes the real world clamours for attention too!  Sometimes you just have a bad week where there’s nothing creative simmering in your beleaguered brain cells.  (I think I have a few of those, honestly).  Sometimes you just have a bad week where you feel rotten in one way or another and retreat to the safety of your duvet.  (I think all three were applicable last week).

But out of all that rotten-ness?  Something amazing.  Like the proverbial honey.  In fact I did something amazing, although totally scary, I spoke up, told someone how I was feeling.  I’ve never, ever, ever done that before.  And I wasn’t judged.  But I did finally realise how exhausting it is living with the fear and threat of judgement all the time.  I realised that I am surrounded by some totally wonderful friends who I can trust and as a mark of appreciation, I spent Saturday making muffins for them all.  (I do that).

So I’m back and I don’t think I’m going to whinge anymore because I have another pressing matter to deal with.  In my absence, Celia of the Kitchens Garden blog (always prefixed with ‘lovely’ wherever you find her mentioned on another blog) awarded me an award!  I got a very immature, teenage-like thrill from this.  It’s like I’m ‘cool’ or ‘in’ or something!  (So sad, I know!)  The award is the ABC award which stands for Awesome Blog Content.  Now I would contend this anyway but the last post I wrote is the throwing up one so I’m not entirely sure about it at all!

I’m very anxious about following the proper protocol for this so if I do get something a little wrong, please be kind!

Apparently first of all I have to thank the (lovely) Celia for honouring me with such an award.  And possibly I need to promise her and you some better content shortly too!

Then I have to nominate some other bloggers for the award whose work who you may wish to visit, this is the hardest part I think because there are so many amazing writers out there and I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings so here is just a sampling 0f some of my favourites for content:

• Susan B Anderson who is a very accomplished knitter, amongst other incredible talents, and she inspires me regularly to try new techniques, to learn and expand, to be more confident with my skills;
• Over at My Pajamas Days, I receive yet more inspiration but this time in terms of living life to the full, despite the towns, and amazing writing which is real, honest and beautiful;
• Then Uprooted Magnolia always has a stunning image, or two, to share and makes me homesick for a place where I’ve never lived, the American West;
• The one-of-a-kind Jester Queen I know will be thrilled to receive a nice, shiny award and her blog is chock full of fiction and humour.

(If you’re on the list and it isn’t your cup of tea then don’t worry, no one is going to get stuffy about it, it’s just a bit of fun with voluntary participation!)

Then I get to victimise you with my own alphabet of me, the idea of which is that you get to know me a little better (but that’s rather a haughty presumption that any of you’d be interested in getting to know me) so I’m going to get creative.  My alphabet will follow in a separate post because yet again I’m going to be a little verbose, it’s the getting started that I struggle with after all!

Revising Expectations

I was talking the other day about how I really need to read patterns through thoroughly before embarking on them and I guess that’s really a metaphor for life.  It said there on the very first page on my pattern that it would be about 48 cm but I’d somehow decided that it was going to be about 15-20 cm.  Then I got a little surprised when it kept growing.

Sometimes we don’t read the small print, maybe because we don’t care or because we’re in a rush.  Life has small print.  Life also throws more surprises at you than a piñata.  I think this would also be a judicious place for those unfamiliar American baseball similes, something about curve balls or coming out of left fields.  (Don’t worry, I know even less about cricket, at least baseball bears an uncanny resemblance to the pastime, not sport, of rounders).

Speccy compared it to directions in her comment.  Sometimes you can feel that you’re nearly there but then you notice just one more stage at the very bottom which completely changes the scale of the thing.  I remember turning up somewhere in the very middle of an Irish nowhere with the directions to pull up by a house with a certain colour door to phone for an escort the rest of the way.  It’s rather difficult to tell the colour of a front door in the pitchy black when it’s a long way up a garden.  There’s also been occasions when people who are so familiar with the route omit a key detail in their directions.  It doesn’t help.

The problem in life is that we don’t always get a printout, a pattern or the directions handed to us at the start.  Life has more of an improvised feel, it’s a pattern of our own design.  We try this and adjust that.  But that’s the key point.  You can’t always just keep going on blindly, sometimes you have to look things up or ask for help.  Sometimes you have to look back and adjust the mistakes or change the shapes.  Knitting is more forgiving, you can rip back a little, worse case scenario you can frog the whole thing.  Life doesn’t give you many opportunities to start over so I guess that makes it even more important to review and revise as you go along.

Sometimes a crisis will come along and you have to jump feet first into that deep water.  But sometimes even crises require a different approach.  Sometimes you have to plan before you jump, taking the time to come up with a workable solution rather than making matters worse with two of you now flailing in the water.  Sometimes you’ve been doing all you can to keep someone’s head above the water but there comes a time when you have to hand over to someone else, someone who’s maybe a little more competent or experienced or even just less tired.

Last week was a week when I had to revise my expectations.  It was busy and only my second week out of the fog but I enjoyed it.  It was full of good friends who reached out and helped me get to where I need to be.

But I had to be bold in both senses and ask for that help.  I had to acknowledge that I needed the help first too.  And that I wanted my life to be in a different place.

Then I learnt what true friends are like and how you don’t get burnt when you ask them for help.

I finally accepted that there are days when I can get on with a little housework or some projects and there are other days when my body just wants me to leave it in peace, preferably under a duvet.  You know what, I was fine with it.  I could see my own achievements clearly for once and I was happy with what I had done.

I’ve had to accept that life and housework isn’t about ‘everything’ or ‘perfection’.  It’s about doing what I can when I can.

I’m also learning that my perception of myself isn’t always accurate, others see me differently, in a more positive light.  I see myself as incompetent failure.  My friends, the opposite.  But that’s a discussion for another day about the mask I wear and how I project myself.

When knitting, you can often see the finished article in your head.  That’s what spurs you on.  What’s more difficult, especially when you’re designing your own pattern, is how to get there.  It is a case of improvising but you have to sit yourself down and regularly take stock of where you are and what you need to change.

In life, it can be harder to visualise where we want to end up.  But that’s apparently what drives success, knowing your destination and it being real.  It’s no good kidding ourselves either that we want to be somewhere else and sometimes our journey dictates our current destination.  But you have to keep adjusting your course and if you end up take a stop in some apparently not so pleasant place then you have to revise those expectations one way or another.  Maybe this is where you’re meant to be and it’s not such a bad place after all.  Maybe you need help to get back on the road to your actual destination, maybe you’re a little lost because you haven’t consulted your directions or pattern for a while.

In life and knitting, I need to take the time to find out where I’m going to end up and ask myself if that’s really where I want to be.  I probably also need to work on visualising my destination, where I want my life to be.

The indomitable Jester Queen has recommended that share this post with the Just Be Enough Linky.  So here goes!  (I hope it fits).

Dialogue

Write on Edge has been prompting us to work on dialogue this last week, well I was away and not really in the right place to conjure up meaningful words.  But at the same time dialogue was a theme resonating in my own life.

An exchange of ideas via conversation

Where a group of people talk together to explore their assumptions of thinking, meaning, communication, and social effects

Dialogue is essential in more than fiction, it is the essence of nonfiction, that is, our everyday lives.  Many people feel that it is our ability to communicate that makes us human.  But all that make me wonder why then we find so hard, if not impossible at times.  Sadly it’s the important things to the important people that go unsaid.

Have you heard the cute little phrase beloved of kitsch fridge magnets and the like, ‘friends are the family we choose’?  I like it.  It’s true.  Friends can be closer than family because blood isn’t enough to keep people together much less like them.  True, good friends are one of life’s greatest honours.  I’ve also seen somewhere in the blogosphere another phrase, beautiful and true, about how family (therefore the friends that we’ve opted in) are the ones who travel life’s road with us.

But while I’m all for friends and my personal definition of ‘family’ is generous, why has family fallen so much from favour?  Why are we no longer being held by our family ties?  Distance, lifestyles, communication?

Maybe if we now get to choose our ‘family’, we should also be thinking to get to know and opt some proper family members into that elite circle.  It’s so sad when someone passes and you’re full of regret that you never got to know them better or realise only then that you had so much in common with them.  But it’s too late then.  Get to know people, talk to them.

Family is changing but it doesn’t have to bad thing.  We’re apparently a generation empowered and besides which we have so much communication technology available to us that there needs to be no excuse.  It might be a different type of relationship but with email, social media, mobiles and goodness knows what else along with more longstanding things such as telephone and letters, there is no distance that is too great.  You can keep in touch.  There are no adequate excuses if you truly value your relationship.  Send a text message, send a card with a mile long twee poem and your name at the bottom.  No excuses.

It becomes a tragedy when family, close family nevermind anything further, knows so little of each other’s lives, when they don’t know each other and their shared history.  When all they can share is moments of grief that drag them together and still they have no words for each other.  It’s a tragedy when they come together in that grief to mourn a passing that could have been prevented with just a little dialogue.

Please, please reach out.  If you love someone, talk to them, tell them that you love them and more importantly, encourage them to talk to you and genuinely listen.  Teach your children to believe in family and to always communicate.  Don’t be fooled into thinking that bottling up, sweeping under the carpet, hiding away are the techniques that will give you a long and happy life.  Man up as the Americans say and cry, hug, talk and listen with those you love.  Whatever your tie to them may be.

Talking saves lives.  Talking saves families.

Coming Out

It’s funny how we ‘hide’ certain aspects of our personalities or certain of our likes or dislikes in order to gain the acceptance of our circle of society.  We like to blend in and sometimes we place too much importance of being the ‘same’, choosing to suppress and deny the elements of ourselves that we feel aren’t going to make us more popular or acceptable.   We always talk about peer pressure in terms of teenagers but the reality is that adults are just as bad.  Too many of us will do anything to be ‘accepted’, we want to morph ourselves into clones of whatever social niche we’re trying to burrow into.  However this behaviour is rather shallow, sad and pointless.  To thine ownself be true.  And what good or value are ‘friends’ who won’t accept us for who we truly are?

After all we’re not talking about big fry.  Admittedly some of us may well have true skeletons in our cupboards, but most of the time they seem to do with some embarrassing incident from way back when rather than anything illegal or criminal.  We’re talking about the quirks that make us all the gloriously individual people that we are.  A liking for ballet or opera may not be ‘cool’ in some circles but is it really something to be mortified about and hide?  A preference for some inferior cheap plonk or a cheesy film?  Of course there are some more serious things, maybe a health condition.  Do we pretend that such issues don’t exist just to make it easier for those around us to accept us?

I’m proud to be a unique individual.  I value friendships but I’ll not do anything to fit into some particular circle.  I preach honesty and openness.  But there are things that I don’t talk about …

I keep quiet about my health, keep it under wraps and cover for my symptoms so that I often seem fit and well, able to join in with whatever’s going on.  Most of my friends don’t even realise that I’m ill.  I’m worried about being judged, I’m worried about missing out.  I definitely don’t want to make life hard for others either.

I have ME.  I’ve had it half my life now.  It’s something I’ve lived with all my adult life.  I keep it quiet because that’s how I was taught to deal with it, don’t make a fuss.  I guess also that because it’s one of those ‘invisible’ conditions it’s hard for people to deal with and people have lots of misconceptions and prejudices, like it’s something made up and I just need to pull myself together.

I have depression.  I’ve had it pretty much most of my life, at least two thirds of it.  My family still doesn’t seem to recognise or accept that I suffer with it (not my husband, he’s a brick).  As a result I wasn’t diagnosed for years and it was certainly something I wasn’t encouraged to talk about.  So I don’t.  I keep quiet and muddle through.

Those are my two skeletons.

How to Be a Good Friend

There are three gifts that you can give if you want to be a good friend, a true friend.  You can only be a good friend when you are prepared to share these gifts generously and willingly.

The first gift is: LOVE.

The second gift is: TIME.

The third gift is: YOUR EARS.

If you are a true friend and your friend is true then you will never regret giving these.  You will be repaid by the happiness and security of a friendship that makes life all the better.

Thanks to all those who are true friends to me and I hope that I may always be a true friend to you.