Oh, My Days!

 Stir Up Sunday today, and I’m on the Pudding Mission first thing this morning. Trying out a new recipe from medieval times using spelt flour... Just leaving it to soak for a few hours, then 5 hours of steaming later today.  When we moved here 4 and a half years ago (already?! Where did that time go??) we inherited a woodshed with a resident toad. In honour of Aunt Ada Doom, a character in my favourite author’s ‘Cold Comfort’ novels, I named him/her/they/it Something Nasty. Aunt Ada Doom took to her bed and ruled Cold Comfort from her bedroom claiming to have been traumatised by seeing ‘something nasty in the woodshed’, you see, so she couldn’t possibly do anything other than have everyone else run around after her whilst she forever recovered in her room. Nice trick if you can pull it off. I don’t know if the ‘something nasty’ she saw was a toad, but it amused me to name our toad thus. I sometimes think I ought to change the spelling of the toad’s name - maybe to ‘Sumtingnast...

  It had to happen, of course. Once you’ve trained to be a teacher, the knowledge stays in your blood, circulating like one of those irritating earworm songs that embeds itself in your brain and REALLY gets on your nerves. No matter how much you attempt to put distance between the ‘I WAS a teacher’ and the ‘Now I’m living a life of calm reflection and blissful sanity’ the urge to stand in front of a class and spout wisdom will eventually overwhelm until you are sucked back into the frenzy, because you are a FOOL to yourself.  Yup, I’m going back to teaching. BUT... It’s NOT what you think! Oh no, diddly no no!  I’ve been asked if I would like to step forward and deliver some arts and crafts sessions. The learning objectives will focus on mindfulness, companionship, tea and cake. The class will be no more than 5. Mostly adults. Possibly children of small sizes. In a delightful and relaxed setting. How does that sound, Mrs Hunt? Would you like to run such classes? Would I??...

 I’ve been caught up in the grip of an urge to give the house a jolly good ‘Autumn Clean’ which is a bit like a Spring Clean but with more spiders and sneezing. I started on Saturday and have been a-scrubbin’, a-dustin’, a-sweepin’ and a-polishin’ ever since. I’m almost done to my satisfaction and have only sworn once which was this morning when I tackled the TV corner and was almost strangled by the plethora of cables and wires that lay therein. I shall ask His Lordship Malarkey if they really are ALL necessary... Yesterday, I was up on a stool, turfing out and re-organising the contents of what I call ‘the Baking Cupboard.’ It’s located above the built in oven and the top shelves require me to stand on a stool in order to reach them. Anyway, there’s nothing quite like a good delve into a baking cupboard so I unloaded the contents, threw out a couple of things that had ‘Best before’ dates in 2017 - cornflour and semolina - and as I dismounted the stool in order to get myself a soa...

 Had a bit of a birthday today! In celebration of being 55, I bought myself a tutu... I apologise for modelling it whilst wearing my comfy slippers, as opposed to my ballet slippers, but I was very excited to be the proud owner of a tutu since, well....forever, that I just went into immediate twirl mode and sod the aesthetics of anything else.  Andy and I went on a road trip yesterday. It was a bit of a last minute decision, based on my being irrationally upset by the announcement on Saturday of another stretch of lockdown. I hate that word - lockdown. It’s definition is ‘to keep prisoners behind bars’ so whoever selected it to use in what is basically a quarantine situation made a stupid choice. I also have problems accepting these things when I can’t fathom the rationality of such a decision. But I shall express no more of my opinions. Best to keep them to myself.  Anyway, the urge to visit my beloveds became too overwhelming to ignore, so yesterday we got in the car an...