May your embers still glow in the morning

here's a lot of poetry on my favourite blogs at the moment. Elspeth Thompson's blog features "Twenty blessings" in her New Years post. The last line in particular:

May your embers still glow in the morning

resonates having spent the Christmas period with a coal stove as the 'central' heating - central because the stove stands in the middle of Dan's living room. Dan lit the fire every morning, a task much quicker and warmer if the embers still glowed. I was a chicken and stayed in bed till it thawed out a little.

nd Kate Davies at needled had Wallace Stevens’ "The Snow Man", which I enjoyed a lot. I think I must always have had a mind of winter, I've been trying to go north for as long as I can remember. I'm not even sure why. It's very fortunate I have a Dan who can take me as far north as you could want to go without getting in a boat. Going to Durness during the big snow was so exciting and beautiful, it felt like some magic other world to me. Beach, ice, snow covered dunes, cliffs, frozen lochs and snow covered mountains as a backdrop - it was almost too much all in one place. With any luck, if our resolutions come to pass, we will be spending a lot more time there soon enough.

'm going to keep with the poetry theme that's around me now. Dan gave me this Ted Hughes poem to read while we were sat next to the fire one evening, because it reminds him of his house.

Wind
This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as
The coal-house door. Once I looked up -
Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes
The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,

The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,
At any second to bang and vanish with a flap;
The wind flung a magpie away and a black-
Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house

Rang like some fine green goblet in the note
That any second would shatter it. Now deep
In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip
Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,

Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,
And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,
Seeing the window tremble to come in,
Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.

Christmas and New Year

appy New Year blog! The period before Christmas was fraught and then followed by radio silence as we went on our Yuletide journey the length of the UK and back again. No t'interweb at the final destination, or mobile phone signal for that matter, so communication with the outside world was cut to a minimum (hurray!). To abbreviate the Christmas epic I've composed a photo essay of sorts that covers most of the bases. It starts with a map of our journey:

he journey North: point A, Home, 21/12; point B, My Dad's new house, 21-23/12; point C, Assorted Uncles, Aunts, cousins and a Grandma belonging to Dan, 23/12; point D, a kind friends house in glasgow where we stayed the night, 23-24/12; point F, the final destination, 24/12-02/01. The journey South (through snow): point E, fish and chips in Ullapool (very important), 02/01; point D, back to glasgow to stay in the kind friends house while they were actually there, putting up with us despite their jet lag, 02-03/01; point I, my brother, his wife and the teeny tiny baby who made it home from the hospital on the 27th (hurray!), 03/01; finally - point A, Home again!, 03/01. 1445 miles (According to Google)

The wedding that my Ishbel was knitted for was grand


and the wedding also featured a handsome man in a kilt


start of the road trip: my Dad's two donkeys in the snow


traveling north




The view on our Christmas Day walk down to the loch






Balnakeil beach


furious Christmas knitting in action


Cat in the snow (yes they came with us...!)


the first moments of the New Year, a full moon and snow. We walked out to try and set off chinese lanterns, but the wind was too strong. The ethereal light was worth it anyway.


playing on the beach








the view down the hill to Ullapool (and fish and chips)




home again, with our new tankards to celebrate

mince pies

spent last night making mince meat and mince pies. I should have made the mince meat weeks ago but a lack of brandy in the house meant it got deferred to the last possible moment. I prefer it to bought still anyway, even without maturation.

have honed my mince pie making skills over the years, using my Grandmother's mince meat recipe (with vegetable suet instead of beef suet - there's too many conflicting religious and personal dietary requirements in my acquaintance to make them anything other than vegetarian) and my Mum's short-crust pastry, the way she taught me. Having both of their most used cookbooks out is a warm if slightly emotional feeling. Neither of them are with me anymore. As well as that it's Christmas, so all those associated family memories are at the surface.

he tools of baking are precious to. I always use the tart tin my Mum used to use to make me jam tarts on Sundays (which I ate with top-of-the-milk), because I didn't like apple pie when I was small...

... and my favourite mixing bowl, which was a Christmas present from Dan several years ago now, has also been incorporated into the ritual.

So after my spell of baking I read this post on Milkmoon about the Grandmother memory, so perhaps it's a seasonal thing. Doing things I know they did every year too, makes them feel a bit closer for a little while. These objects are some of the most precious things I own.

December in the garden

t was a relief to know I wasn't the only one battling over-enthusiastic autumn bulb buying in December. I'd had this whole plan for the front garden that involved a barely field with alliums and cow parsley poking through - and then I changed my mind. Really the earth would be better put to vegetables as it was this year, because the patch out the back is not very big at all. I'd already bought the alliums though: 50 drumstick, 10 Christophii, 15 purple sensation and 10 mount everest. Managed to get them in the borders without digging up too many of the tulips I planted two months ago and forgot about.

Other finds: surprisingly successful fushia's planted last year without much thought

The first ever catkins to appear on my contorted hazel (long story...)

And most precious of all, some very healthy looking (hibernating) tree peony seedlings

let the yule tide ring

hristmas decs went up round here last weekend. A tad early, but we're going away from the 22nd onwards so we wanted to enjoy the house all pretty-fied for a couple of weeks. I was never allowed to decorate the old family home until at least the 23rd at the earliest when I was little (and not so little) and I can never contain myself to wait that long now I make my own rules. Decorations are a mish mash of handmade, things Dan and I have bought since being together and the odd inherited. The tree is decorated in a true British Imperialist style, but no tinsel. We are not a tinsel household.

his was all achieved with several Gin & Tonics and accompanied by our best Christmas music CD, a bit extravagant perhaps, but I like the Christmas Spirit(s).

'm sure Kirsty wouldn't agree with our lack of tinsel given last nights episode, but I've always done a homemade christmas and I happen to think mines a lot better than hers. I've been watching her run of shows because they're the only thing craft related on telly at all, but I'm finding her increasingly irritating/patronising with every episode. I spent hours making great bowers of evergreens to hang over the mantelpiece every year, but nobody ever told me how - it was just something I did. Maybe I find this programme patronising because I'm not the target audience, but if I'm not, who is?

Karen O

eedless to say Karen O and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were awesome, visually as well as sonically. Not seen them live before, so was slightly blown away by the Christian Joy costumes. Various head dresses and capes and the famous leather jacket. This all in one PVC catsuit thing kept reminding me of the Faun from Pan's Labyrinth though... not sure why...

he only place you can buy Christian Joy is on etsy - Awesome :) My favourite piece of the night though was this crazy sheet thing. It was three panels, the red/blue zig zags on either side and green jagged bursts on the back panel (which I can't find a shot of anywhere). It basically looked like just a flat sheet of printed fabric with two vertical slits in between the red and green vertical panels for your arms. It looked like such fun to wear though... I want one.

ther interesting things to keep in mind include the V&A pattern references. There's gonna be a whole series of them I think, these are just the first. As much as the whole set is lovely, I especially like the fifties pattern set. Not entirely sure what I'd ever use them for if I had them, not being a designer or anything, but they're still cool...