Christmas book draw

That superb literary magazine, Slightly Foxed produces a special Christmas edition called The Christmas Fox. It is an ideal gift for oneself or a book-loving friend and there are three copies to be won on The Dabbler right now. All you have to do is identify the illustrator of Scrooge's third visitor and if you don't want to look it up, you can simply look very  closely at the signature on the picture!

I am being so helpful because, as mother of one of the editors of The Dabbler, I will have to buy my own copy or hope to receive it as a gift! The competition is open until 6th December and the prizes will be sent anywhere in the world. So, good luck everyone!

(Special note for AliB - I'm sure you would love one - just look at this year's title!)

Tell all your girlfriends

I just had an email from a doctor friend and she asked me to pass it on to all my friends. Well, I don't like sending group emails so I will pass it on here.

Interesting.... we do it instinctively but now I guess this is the theory behind it all.
They teach it at  Stanford
 "I just finished taking  an evening class at Stanford. The last lecture was on the mind-body  connection-the relationship between stress and disease. The speaker (head  of psychiatry at Stanford) said, among other things, that one of the best things  that a man could do for his health is to be married to a woman whereas for a  woman, one of the best things she could do for her health was to nurture her  relationships with her girlfriends. At first everyone laughed, but he was  serious.

Women connect with each other differently and  provide support systems that help each other to deal with stress and difficult  life experiences.  Physically this quality “girlfriend time" helps us to create  more serotonin-a neurotransmitter that helps combat depression and can create a general feeling of well being.  Women share feelings whereas men often form relationships around activities. They rarely sit down with a buddy and talk about how they feel about certain things or how their personal lives are going. Jobs? Yes. Sports? Yes. Cars? Yes. Fishing, hunting, golf?Yes.  But their feelings?-rarely.  Women do it all of the time. We  share from our souls with our sisters/mothers, and evidently that is very good for our health.  He said that spending time with a friend is just as important to our general health as jogging or working out at a gym.

There's a tendency to think that when we are "exercising" we  are doing something good for our bodies, but when we are hanging out with  friends, we are wasting our time and should be more productively engaged--not true. In fact, he said that failure to create and maintain quality personal relationships with other humans is as dangerous to our physical health as smoking! So every time you hang out to schmooze with a gal pal, just pat yourself on the back and congratulate yourself for doing something good for your  health! We are indeed very, very lucky. Sooooo let's toast to our friendship with our girlfriends. Evidently it's very good for our  health."

The helpful comments on the previous post about insomnia are evidence of just how much support women friends give to one another. My friend has adopted a new slogan "Gossip saves lives." Pass it on to your girlfriends too.

Sleepless in Devon

It is 02.57 and I've given up on trying to get to sleep. I suffer from periods of insomnia that may last for two or three nights and sometimes for several weeks; they end as unexpectedly as they begin.  Tonight, or rather this morning, I thought I would look up what other people have said about insomnia and discovered dozens of quotations. I'll post a few here and maybe I'll find an unexpected remedy!

A flock of sheep that leisurely pass by
One after one; the sound of rain, and bees
Murmuring; the fall of rivers, winds and seas,
Smooth fields, white sheets of water, and pure sky -
I've thought of all by turns, and still I lie
Sleepless...
~William Wordsworth, "To Sleep"

The worst thing in the world is to try to sleep and not to.  ~F. Scott Fitzgerald

Nothing cures insomnia like the realization that it's time to get up.  ~Author Unknown 

O sleep, O gentle sleep,
Nature's soft nurse, how have I frighted thee,
That thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down
And steep my sense in forgetfulness?
~William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I 

Even thus last night, and two nights more I lay,
And could not win thee, Sleep, by any stealth:
So do not let me wear to-night away.
Without thee what is all the morning's wealth?
Come, blessed barrier between day and day,
Dear mother of fresh thoughts and joyous health!
~William Wordsworth, "To Sleep"

Sleeplessness is a desert without vegetation or inhabitants.  ~Jessamyn West

I find sleeplessness frustrating and so cannot agree with this writer:

It's at night, when perhaps we should be dreaming, that the mind is most clear, that we are most able to hold all our life in the palm of our skull.  I don't know if anyone has ever pointed out that great attraction of insomnia before, but it is so; the night seems to release a little more of our vast backward inheritance of instincts and feelings; as with the dawn, a little honey is allowed to ooze between the lips of the sandwich, a little of the stuff of dreams to drip into the waking mind.  I wish I believed, as J. B. Priestley did, that consciousness continues after disembodiment or death, not forever, but for a long while.  Three score years and ten is such a stingy ration of time, when there is so much time around.  Perhaps that's why some of us are insomniacs; night is so precious that it would be pusillanimous to sleep all through it!  A "bad night" is not always a bad thing.

  ~Brian W. Aldiss

I'm far more in tune with Dorothy Parker:

How do people go to sleep?  I'm afraid I've lost the knack.  I might try busting myself smartly over the temple with the night-light.  I might repeat to myself, slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound; if I can remember any of the damn things. 

 

If anyone has a cure for insomnia, please let me know. Meanwhile I'm going back to bed to try again ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.

  

This month, I have been mostly .....

.... Sewing, knitting and entertaining. As usual, my good intentions to be prepared well in advance for Christmas have come to nothing. I have a pile of almost-finished projects and I wonder how many of them will be ready to wrap on Christmas Eve?

Here are some that I finished last week because they need to be sent off this month.

 A sweater for Millie, who has suddenly grown out of everything she has.

Advent calendar for Millie and Benjamin. 

My daughter is making little figures to put in the pockets. They 

will then be assembled into a Christmas nativity scene.

A Christmas stocking for Benjamin.

He wasn't around last year when I made stockings

for Millie and Charlotte.

A Flower Fairies bag, the first of six that I 

hope to get finished for Christmas.

There are two more sweaters ready to be sewn up (the part of knitting that I really don't like), another Advent calendar almost completed and a list of requests from friends and family that I will probably not get around to this year. It would be so much easier to buy gifts but I really enjoy looking at the finished product and hope that the recipient will appreciate the thought that went into it.

When I was a child, a homemade dress or sweater was a sign that your parents couldn't afford to buy from the shops but it seems to be quite different now. Hand crafted goods are highly desirable and, though mine are far from perfect, family and friends seem to like having something a little different.

The entertaining that I mentioned at the beginning refers to this house guest:

Paws

Paws is a border collie belonging to a friend, who leaves her with us whenever she needs to go away. Paws is really quite happy with us but if we don't respond to all of her demands for treats, she sits by the back door looking sulky in the hope that we will try to win her favour again. She is a great actress with an amazing ability to look sad. Don't be fooled, she only wants doggy chocs!

Broken promises and unwanted gifts

Last week I resolved to get back into blogging mode. That promise to myself lasted  for precisely two days before domestic issues intervened but here I am at the start of a new week and we'll see how things go.

The 'unwanted gifts' part of the heading sounds rather churlish but it refers to a situation that is the cause of great mirth in the Random household. We are blessed with really good neighbours, whose properties once formed part of ours - in the days before we moved here.  We live in the original farmhouse with a large portion  of the farmyard and the kitchen garden, while our neighbours on one side live in a converted linhay (barn) and on the other side, a bungalow built on what used to be an orchard. We are all very friendly and helpful but can go for quite long periods without seeing one another.

The neighbours in the bungalow run an excellent nursery for children from a few months to 4 years and on Friday the husband, John, came round to tell us that they were refurbishing the nursery and he had a baby's highchair he wanted us to have. I explained that we already had one but he insisted that with three grandchildren another  chair was sure to come in handy and before I could blink I was the grateful, if reluctant owner of two highchairs.

On Saturday, John was at the door again. "I'm sure you could use a storage unit for books and toys, it is in excellent condition but we don't need it any more." So here we are in our overfurnished, cluttered house with two highchairs and a storage unit.

On Sunday my husband went to the door, he was going to be much firmer than I had been. Now we have two highchairs, a storage unit and a child's desk!

This morning we have been waiting nervously for the knock on the door, expecting to see John with two infants under his arms - in great condition but surplus to requirements! I think we need a bigger shoe!

 

Apple In and Out .... and gone

My mother-in-law, Dorothy, has been living with us for almost two years. She will be 94  at the end of November and is physically quite well, if not very mobile but her memory is poor. At first it was just her short-term memory and we have learned to live with the fact that she does not retain information for more than a minute. Her long-term memory, though, was pretty sharp until a few months ago. She loved to talk about her childhood in Devon, her experiences in the second world war and her years in Zimbabwe (then called Rhodesia) with her young family.

The memories began to be muddled, so I made albums of her photographs, letters and newspaper clippings with clear labels of the names of people and places but I saw recently that she has crossed out some of my labels and written new, incorrect ones.  I find it rather sad to think that such a long life can be fading into an inaccurate blur but she seems to be quite happy with her misremembered stories.

Dorothy was never a good cook but she had a passion for traditional Devonshire food as made by her grandmother and great aunt. She learned how to make Devonshire clotted cream so that she could have a regular supply in Africa with her other culinary success, Devonshire Apple In and Out.  She would never give anyone the recipe for this and now she has forgotten it but I found it in a book of traditional Devonshire recipes and decided to make some to stir her fading memories.

It is a very simple pudding, originally made with suet and steamed for an hour or more but I adapted it to bake as a sponge pudding and it worked very well.

Devonshire Apple In and Out
6oz flour
4oz fat
4oz sugar
1 egg
1lb apples

Rub the fat into the flour then add the sugar and beat in the egg. Peel  the apples and slice them directly into the mixture in a buttered pudding dish.

Bake at 350F/180C for about 30 minutes.
 (If using suet, steam in a greased basin for 1hr 15mins.)

I used butter and brown sugar in mine and this is how it turned out:

My husband prepared his mother for an exciting surprise and I brought in a portion of the pudding, served with vanilla ice-cream. Dorothy's reaction? "Oh, how lovely. Ice-cream!"

In, out, gone.

Speechless

My trip to Bristol to visit my lovely granddaughter, Charlotte, unexpectedly extended into a visit to Oxfordshire to babysit Millie and Benjamin. Having three grandchildren under the age of three keeps me busy in the nicest ways: I get to visit the zoo and parks and farms; read wonderful children's books, old favourites and some excellent new ones; find endless inspiration for knitting and sewing projects and get lots of cuddles.

The only downside to being a grandma is  exposure to the incredibly virulent colds that toddlers get when they are cutting teeth and both Charlotte and Benjamin shared their germs with me in a most generous fashion. By the time I drove home on Friday I had lost my voice completely and it still hasn't returned. The funny thing is that until I start to speak I don't know that I'm speechless! My voice ranges from strangled squeaks and whistles to the lowest register of Fenella Fielding's but in no predictable sequence! I can now empathise with teenage boys.

 There are some benefits though, as I sit on the sofa sipping my hot lemon and honey I am catching up on a lot of reading and I'm hoping to get back into a regular blogposting routine. Watch this space!