052/100 days of aspirin

Back into town today, via the train, which does mean 15-20mins walking at each end of each trip. It took me a while, but I decided discretion was in order and put the moonboot back on, since I would be there in the lunchtime rush. Took it off in the hairdressers though (I did ask!) as it was aching to sit in it, not to mention hot. I need to think of somewhere to drive to this week, which is a bit further than the supermarket.

Pleased with my haircut, it's back in a style that makes me feel stylish, a bit funky, cuter and sexier (not that that is a consideration at the moment). I also joined a facebook group to keep goals on track until the end of the year. My goals are a mixture of SMART and not-so-smart at the moment, may need refining and spellling out... and then I am more likely to lose interest in them and go onto something new instead...

• get back to work after 9 weeks off with a broken leg, continue with physio & find a way to do yoga while travelling 
• embrace the role changes at work and define "was I successful" touchpoints to review daily 
• pick up that self-care daily review
• keep writing flash fiction & short stories; especially the WordCloud annual story competition
• keep knitting - a daily act of making something!

papersquare 005: Making soup

She was shelling broad beans, squeezing the pointy end until it pops and then sliding her thumb inside to pull the halves apart; cushiony foam and pale bean grubs inside. It must be thirty years ago since she'd done it last, maybe more?

Growing up, she'd later realised that it wasn't so much a wish to torture the kids with summertime chores that meant they had fruit trees, bushes and a vegetable garden. Hours of getting under the nets to pull the raspberries off their spiky white plugs, or topping and tailing the blackberries. It wasn't even a hippy ethos, her mother was about as far from being an earth mother as it was possible to be.  In the seventies, with their endless hot summers, inflation took bites out of anything you needed to buy from the shops; it was economic necessity that led to growing your own food.  Not that they were on the verge of starving, no, but if you wanted a plum crumble, or a gooseberry pie, well, you had to make it yourself because those things just weren't in the shops. With a family of gannets rather than children, a pie didn't see a second meal.

It was the third time she'd washed her big saucepan out today.  The first was after making stock; some instinct had her grab the reduced price chicken in the supermarket, only £2.58.  After roasting it and pulling the meat off for salads and curry, she'd boiled the bones up with garlic, onion, peppercorns and coriander.  Next, she'd boiled the assorted dried beans up, after soaking of course; and finally she'd made the soup, throwing in the newly-bared broad beans as an extra embellishment, baby plum tomatoes too.  She had learned that following the recipe exactly was not obligatory.  Thank goodness her mother's creativity had rubbed off on her. Toasted cubes of ciabatta bread for the topping.

The same recipe she was mostly following, they sold the soup in cartons in the supermarket.  That was on special offer, only one of your British pounds for a carton that gave you a generous bowlful. She'd made six bowlfuls, and it was touch and go if her ingredients cost more than six cartons.  So it wasn't about economic necessity, this urge to make and make over, she wasn't really sure what it was about.  It wasn't as though she had any other mouths to feed.  Making for the sake of making, creating a little bit of order maybe?  Home-making of the wishful kind - if you build it they will come?

Outside the sun had come out to mock her, it's not soup weather, stupid.  But today, there was something nice about making soup.

updates... roundups... letdowns...

I am just about keeping my head above water with write1sub1 - see the stats below ;)
In the last couple of weeks, although I have been writing less, I have had a couple of pieces accepted for later publication - look out for 'Foot and Mouth' in MuDJoB mid/late March, and 'liminal' in the May edition of negative suck.  Also, my poem 'the river tonight' was chosen as an editors pick at thepoetrycircle ;)

I am annoyed with myself that I could not get my head in the right place to meet a couple of deadlines - notably the >language>place carnival edition #4 to be hosted by Jean Morris at tasting rhubarb.  Also, I wanted to do something collaborative for Dorothee Lang's synergetic transformations at BluePrint Review, I just never got to the right mindstate.

oh well, onwards and upwards...

I am turning into my mother...

Now, this is not to say that I think this is a bad thing, but today I made some "out of date" cake.

Last weekend I meant to cook some date & walnut loaf, but was stymied by opening a pack of Biskin Gold to find out that it was, in fact, white.  And basically lard.  Apparently, what I need is the Biskin Blue which is yellow.

So this weekend, I was feeling smug that I'd remembered yesterday to buy some butter from Kaiser's, although they didn't have the Biskin Blue I picked up real butter instead.  I was in the middle of my "I belong here" wander through town, shopping for food, knick knacks and looking at the obvious tourists come to visit the market.

However, when I opened the packet this lunchtime, it was to find that I had bought Sauerrahmbutter, basically a butter made from sour cream.  And called me sensitive, but I could smell that it was different to "normal" butter or cooking margarine.  "Eben so," I decided to go ahead and make the cake - the worst that could happen is that it would taste awful and I would put it out in the garden to feed the birds, or in the bin or something.

I opened the cooking ingredients cupboard to find three packs of walnuts, the sell by date on the opened packet was December, so no problem there, it's not the end of the month yet.  The unopened packet of dates  said they should have been eaten by mid November, but it's dried fruit right?  A preserve?  Should be OK.  The eggs and milk had been hanging around a couple of days but that wasn't a problem.  I thought to disguise the potential sour milk taste of the butter with a sachet of vanilla sugar and some mixed spice.  I hate to think how old the spice is, but it moved here with me and it probably wasn't fresh when the removal van was packed.

So as I put the cake in the oven I thought "I am turning into my mother"; her experimental approach to cooking ingredients is a family joke, the story of Cheese and Peach loaf will get us all smirking in no time.  I know that turning out like her is nothing I should worry about, being quirky and original and experimental are all aspects of who she is and aspects I am happy to have picked up from the genetic shuffle and the longer experiment called "bringing up a child".

Also, the loaf actually turned out rather nice...

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MUM

xxx

A weak writing week

I haven't written much for a while; I've been following people at 6S and reading these & various other blogs avidly, commenting occasionally. I had a 5 day week at work (I know, it's amazing how fast I forgot this was normal) and work also extruded itself into the weekend.  I did manage to write a piece on what love means to me for submission & hopefully later publication/approval, but it's felt odd not to have published anything for a week to the blog or other website...
Minor turbulence this week when I found an ages old flame via facebook, I proposed friendship and he accepted.  I am not particularly surprised to see that he seems to be pursuing a life of status symbols; maybe the exotic young new wife is one of those or maybe there is genuine feeling there.  Now my surface is smoothing out again & the ripples in my composure quickly fade, it is a pleasant surprise to realise I don't much care.
But.. the lastest flame I had is still smouldering on after the event; he knows it and as long as I am not depressed about it he seems to be content that I still dance around that candle.  Sooner or later I will have to snuff it, but still it brings light and a tiny heat into my life.

The Other Woman

She wondered what the other woman was like, she thought it must be someone at work, he texted her when he thought she wasn't watching, when he went to the toilet he took his phone with him, and all the time it was unattended it was turned off and pin code protected, "So that we don't get bothered by work, love" he'd explained.
About five months ago there had been attentive tender love making, at the time she'd been lulled by it's nature into thinking he wanted the same things that she did; on a high she was almost swept away by the idea and allowed it to happen more often than usual.

But two weeks ago he'd come back from a work meeting abroad, with the end of his cock rubbed sore; claiming that he'd slept funny on a fake leather sofa that stuck to him. She'd asked several questions, wondering what he would tell her next, but didn't push too far; she didn't want to have things out in the open and have something said that couldn't be unsaid. Swallowing down the hurt, the realisation that time she'd cherished thinking they had the same goals was nothing more than guilt sex on his part, but the silver lining was that with it he'd given her the baby she so ached for, and swollen with proof of his "love" he would not leave her now.

But all the same, she wondered what the other woman was like.

So how inadequate am I really?

It was only last year, a fair way through my life that I realised the latest fact about another inadequacy of mine. Admittedly I had this thought while I was already upset at the course recent events had taken; to submerge my sorrows I wanted to drown in the words and stories of others, and so I made my way to the largest bookshop in the second largest city of my home country.  As I gazed at the hundreds of books in the Sci-Fi section (pleasingly, there was a separate section for Fantasy) there were so many authors who were new to me even though I had only been out of the country for 18 months, and I realised that I would never, never be able to read all the books in the world.
And I became intrigued, I do not know how many books there are in the world today, and I wondered how long ago it was, when it was still possible to read all the books in the world, assuming you could read every language, assuming you could access the manuscripts which may have been cherished and jealously guarded, or conversely, illegible through age or use.

So how inadequate should I feel not to be able to read everything? I reckon that if I lived and worked as now, I would get the estimated 3.5 billion books polished off in around 7.5 million years; and even if I devoted every moment to the task, it would still take me over a million years - one instance where my personal bug-bear of "trying harder" is not going to achieve the desired result either - this particular failure is only that as a human I am constrained to live my life on a human scale.