Leak

At the beginning of January, when we're all skint after Christmas and have no money for bread, let alone house repairs, my roof sprang a leak.   Although I didn't know this at the time - all I knew was that my landing carpet was wet at the top of the stairs and there was water pissing through the electric light fitting!  My first reaction was to tear down the stairs and turn all the upstairs electrics off.  There were then many trips up and down stairs to work out what had happened and even Mum and Dad, who were on a jaunt to Norwich that day, came to try and work it out.   No joy.  

So, after four hours hanging on the 'phone to the insurance company; turning off all the water (and consequently heating) for the day; finally getting an emergency plumber out - who had to work in the loft by torchlight - who confirmed that the water tank and pipes weren't leaking (despite there being a gaping hole in the ceiling directly underneath the tank); it became apparent that there was a hole in the roof.   Thank God for the very sweet plumber clambering around in the loft to work out why I had a leak.  And thank goodness he told me to put the water back on - so I could have heating.   (Although I still haven't turned the electric back on upstairs - my house is very fragrant at the moment as the upstairs has been lit by candlelight for a few weeks!)

After pretty much all day sobbing like a girl, I finally had an answer - although that wasn't actually the end of the issue as the insurance company announced (after an hour hanging on the 'phone to them the following day) they would not cover this damage.  However, following weather checks, it turned out we had experienced 55 mile per hour winds for three days running, so actually I WAS covered by insurance.  

It's a good outcome though - the scaffolders are coming tomorrow and the builders will be here all week to replace damaged roof tiles and replace 4 square metres of roofing felt, insulation and ceiling!   Just before the winter really kicks in and temperatures plummet - it's already very draughty in the house so I'm just glad the work's getting done very quickly.   And of course I get a week off work - bonus!   The builders told me that I didn't need to take any time off, but I feel that I need to stay here to make sure Finn doesn't try to get up on the scaffolding to help! 

Anyway, at the end of a very trying - and emotional - day, the only thing that made things better were cake and tea.  So I now have a new motto too - when everything is going pear shaped, make a cake and things will instantly be better!

Challenge

Ten years ago, four of us – Sarah, Mark, Andy and myself (The Bimblers) – walked sixty miles along the South Downs from Portsmouth to Brighton in aid of Oxfam and the Gurkhas.   This walk was carried out over twenty-nine hours – straight through – with head torches and a support crew.  On crossing the finishing line, I declared I would never do anything so stupid again.

Five years ago, four of us – Rachel, Tristan, Steve and myself (Tears for Beers) – walked sixty miles along the Pennine Way and Dales Way in North Yorkshire in aid of Oxfam.  This walk was done in twenty-nine hours and fourteen minutes – straight through – with head torches and a support crew.   I said at the time I was NEVER doing this again.

So, here we are again ..... but this time I have elected to be part of a support crew rather than walking.  I am part of The Nancies team – and we are raising money by walking (Amanda and Shannon) and driving (me, Finn, Auntie Ann and Richard) sixty miles from London to Brighton in aid of the Beating Bowel Cancer charity.   This dreadful disease has touched our family a lot – Mum and Auntie Joyce have beat it, our Auntie June wasn’t so lucky, and now cousin Jim is having treatment.  

I did toy with the idea of walking this, but having experienced good and bad support crews in the past, I thought I could be better employed giving in to the girls' diva-like expectations.   I just remember how much it hurt, especially the last time, and the only thing that got me through was the support of walkers and crew equally ..... and an awful lot of drugs!  I'm still going out on all the training walks - in fact, I'm organising them for the girls - and advising on equipment, clothing, etc.   I know I'll miss walking when the time comes, but this feels like the right thing to do.

So our first training walk was a short one - only six miles, but I'm breaking them in gently!   We walked from Aylsham to Reepham on the Marriots Way, a pleasant flat, straight walk to get them used to terrain, mud, cold and timings.   We've arranged two training walks a week up until March when we start three training walks per week.   We may even fit in the odd boot camp if we can!

I must admit the best part of walking for me is when we stop!   So we adjourned to the tea rooms at Reepham station at the end for sausage rolls, cake and hot chocolate.  Brilliant!   And then home for shower, jim jams and a little snooze on the sofa.  Perfect Sunday if you ask me!

Coat

Last winter I bought myself a coat - I have lots of coats but I wanted something workmanlike for my walk to and from the office.   I have a waterproof and fleece combination which I tend to wear all the time, but that should really be for "proper" walking - given that the pockets are full of fleece gloves and poo bags!   I wasn't really sure about the coat - it's beige, a colour I normally wouldn't countenance.  However, it was in the sale and too good an offer to refuse really.   That said, it's been hanging up for a year now in my hallway and still had the labels inside - the shame!   To make me want to wear it and love it, some drastic action needed to be taken.  

That drastic action meant dying the coat - I bought a dark bottle green colour and 500g of salt - I'm still not really sure why I needed that, but the instructions were quite insistent.   If the coat had been 100 per cent cotton, then the colour would have come out as true as that shown on the box, but because it was a polycotton mix, the colour would come out lighter.  

It was quite a convoluted process.  Firstly, I had to wash the coat on a normal 40 degree cycle.   Then I had to dye the coat with the Dylon and salt on a 40 degree cotton cycle which took twice as long.  Once that was done, I had to wash the coat again with a washing tablet on another two hour cycle.  And when that was done, I could take the coat out of the machine and hang it up to dry.  I still had to run the machine again - this time empty with a normal 40 degree cycle, just to make sure there was no dye left in the machine to colour any other laundy I might be washing! 

I'm so thrilled with how the coat has turned out - it really was worth it.  And now I'm looking in my wardrobe and airing cupboard to see if there's anything else I can transform!

Norton Dog

Between Christmas and New Year, I had a jaunt down into Suffolk to meet my friends Ed and Ruth and their two girls, Katherine - nearly seven - and Jessica - four ish.  I'm terrible at remembering ages, although I'm very good at remembering birthdays!   It is especially important that I remember these two young ladies' birthdays, as Katherine is my god-daughter and I need to take things like this very seriously indeed!   Ed and Ruth live in Fareham in Hampshire so we don't meet up as often as we should - it's such a fag to get in and out of East Anglia.  However, Ed's parents live in Cambridgeshire so the clan were up here for Christmas and we arranged to meet up on their way home.

I have been brainwashing Ruth for years now - with Strictly Come Dancing and knitting!   I quite often get a lovely text to say what she's making while watching the dancing.  Ed, of course, is delighted!  This started years ago when Ed and Ruth came to say, and in fact Ruth was pregnant with Katherine.  We had done a spot of sightseeing around Norwich and then I made them watch Strictly in the evening - poor Ed has been stuck with it ever since!   Ruth even brought some of her handiwork with her - a rather handsome corgi!

After a very nice lunch at the Norton Dog, we headed off to the village park and playground to try and wear Katherine, Jessica and Jakey - their Gordon Setter - out before the journey home.

I'm especially excited to hear their news that they are hoping to move up to Cambridgeshire - Ruth is busy applying for jobs and has had a couple of interviews, and they are hoping to move up before September when Jessica will start school.  I can't wait for them to get up here - it means we will hopefully meet up more than the once a year which we currently manage!   Fingers crossed!

Croshering!

When we were growing up, both our Nans were very industrious and busy, knitting and croshering clothes and blankets.   And back then - forty-odd years ago - there's no way that either of them would have spoken the word "crochet".  That was far too French!   So, when they were working, they were "croshering" and when they'd finished something, it would have been "croshered".   And I still find it really hard, not to say it the way they did.  

But part of me is sort of ashamed of it, as if I'm being really ignorant - I know perfectly well how to pronounce it, I just choose not to!   Of course, until April of 2013, I never had to speak the word at all, but now I'm an afficionado, I say it all the time!

That's not to say I've given up on knitting completely of course - that will never happen.  I was commissioned back in November to make a baby blanket - so I experimented with something new.  My old favourite wave blanket design, but in a random colour way rather than structured stripes.  Looks pretty good I reckon!

Covent Garden

On one of my pre-Christmas jaunts to deliver presents, I met Mary in Covent Garden.  It felt very grown up having a trip to London on my own - merely for shopping and lunching.   Mary and I had decided to meet in the London Transport Museum as they do the best hot chocolate ever!  It had been so long since we'd both been though, that the museum has changed all around and the cafe wasn't where we expected to be.   That said, the hot chocolate was still fab!

Baking

Maybe it's because it's Christmas time.  Maybe it's because it's cold and wet and I just needed some comfort food.  Whatever it is, I have found a renewed love of baking.  I have even gone as far as investing in some ceramic beans for blind baking - although after the first disaster with them, they have been relegated to the back of the "cake making" drawer in my kitchen.  Perhaps I should give them another go before I give up on them altogether?

I found a delicious sounding recipe for a Christmas quiche - spinach, feta cheese, strong cheese, cranberries and pine nuts - yum!   This sounded so good that it necessitated aforementioned trip to Lakeland to buy beans - like I need an excuse to go to Lakeland!   Probably my most favourite shop in Norwich - certainly the shop where I spend most of my time!   And also a trip up into the loft as I was sure I had seen some quiche/ flan dishes up there while I was having an enormous clear out to make way for the much-anticipated craft room.  Which, incidentally, was supposed to be up and running last Easter.  Hey ho.  Overall, I was very pleased with my first attempt at pastry making - it wasn't the prettiest pastry in the world, although it had a very unusual patchwork bottom - but at least it wasn't a soggy bottom, so at least I got that right.  I usually have ready rolled frozen pastry in the freezer, but am attempting an economy drive now - ready made stuff is pretty expensive, but I always have flour, eggs and butter in which would work out much cheaper.   It tasted delicious anyway, so I can see I will be making more of these - with my own pastry or ready rolled remains to be seen.

Because a lot of my friends and family are scattered around, I don't always see them very often during the year, so try to make the extra effort at Christmas, to deliver presents rather than post them.  So quite a lot of my baking has been distributed around East Anglia - as far as Essex - on my visits. 

I've made cranberry and almond biscuits - very nice, although I'm not sure I should have put the cranberries into the mixer as they all got cut up very finely - they might have been better going in whole?   It made the biscuits a very red colour, when perhaps I should have mixed them in afterwards once all the other ingredients were mixed.   Strictly speaking, I could probably have not used the mixer at all, but Tescos had run out of ground almonds for weeks now, so I bought flaked and then ground them myself in the mixer.  Once that job was done, it was really easy to throw everything else in on top of them.   I will mix another batch by hand to see if they're any better.  

I had a go at a traybake also - although there was no actual baking involved!   It wasn't fudge either.  It's quite difficult to describe.   These were made with melted white chocolate, microwaved marshmallows - which made a dreadful mess everywhere! - pistachio nuts and cranberries again.   (Pretty much everything I've made in the past few weeks has had an element of cranberries in it!)  These fudge/ traybake goodies were amazing - although very sweet.  You wouldn't need much of them.

I also made the Tunis cake - this is something I remember from childhood, but you can't buy them any more.  So for the past three or four years, I've made this for the family.  I don't eat fruit cake, so this ensures I get some cake too over the festive season!  It's a very dense cake of ground almonds and lemon which you cook for a long time at a very low heat.  Once baked and cooled down, you make an icing of dark chocolate and then stick some marzipan fruit on the top.  I managed to find some Amaretto soaked marzipan fruit for the cake last year, but couldn't find any this year, which was a bit disappointing.   Again, you don't need much of this as it's so dense and the chocolate is very rich. 

Another family tradition now is my Christmas muffins which I make on Christmas morning and which are still warm by the time I get to Mum and Dad's at lunchtime.   They are made with cranberries - quelle surprise! - and orange and nutmeg.   Just evokes all those lovely Christmassy smells.  

I actually forgot the topping this year, but I don't think anyone noticed!  They are supposed to have a topping of demerara sugar with a little cinnamon mixed in to make them a little crunchy and sweet. 

So, I'm having a little break from baking now - I've eaten far too much over the festive period - and am back on soup and toast for a while to compensate.   I'm sure it won't be long before I start again though - on my never-ending quest to become a proper domestic goddess!