Blackberry Bliss

It's come round to that happy time of year when there are berries for the picking in the hedgerows and fields. Of course it's not just blackberries, there are heavy sprays of elderberries like bouquets of shiny, jet beads, damsons with gaudy, yellow flesh hidden beneath indigo, bloomy skins and tiny blue-black sloes as well as flame-coloured rowan berries and little wild plums in sunset colours of pink and yellow and orange. But it's not these that get my heart singing; it's the clusters of shiny blackberries veering from purply-coal-black to wine-coloured and pale green on the same spray. And this year's largely miserable summer weather in the UK has suited them. Wild blackberries are often small and tight - deep on flavour but light on flesh and heavy on pips. With all the summer rain this year however, along with their usual intense flavour, they are large and plump and luscious and can give cultivated ones an easy run for their money.

Do you go blackberrying? And if so, what do you make with your haul? Blackberry and Apple Crumble? Bramble Jelly? Blackberry Gin?

I have several favourite blackberry recipes whose purple-stained pages open almost by themselves at this time of year.

The best of them, I think, is this recipe for Blackberry Ice Cream which I adapted from one given to me by the mother of a friend years ago. I suppose it isn't really an ice cream as it has no cream in it but it tastes like the best of the best gelati. It's simple, has a fabulous velvet texture and tastes vividly of the blackberries that have gone into it. It is also the most stunning crimson colour - serve it in green, pale blue, or white bowls to show it off to best effect. It's economical, even thrifty, to make partly because the ingredients aren't expensive (especially if you pick wild blackberries for free) and partly because it's so intense you don't need much of it to make a very satisfying finish to a meal.

What you need:
*1lb / 500g ripe blackberries, preferably wild ones but cultivated will do;
6 oz / 170 g sugar, ordinary white caster or granulated;
half a small lemon
1 cup / 250 ml full-fat plain natural yoghurt; I use homemade yoghurt made from whole milk but you can use thick Greek yoghurt or any other thick full-fat natural yoghurt you like; don't use low-fat yoghurt for this or you won't get the rounded velvetiness in the texture that's so special;

*If you have a bigger haul of fruit, just scale up the quantities of the other ingredients.

First soak your blackberries in a roomy bowl of cold water for half an hour or so in case there are any maggots lurking therein. Not wanting to drown, any maggots will make their way out of the fruit and can then - (sorry, I know I am heartless!) - be washed down the sink. Rinse the soaked blackberries under the cold tap (just in case there are any tenacious maggots that haven't received their marching orders!) and leave to drain in a colander.

Now place the fruit in a large non-reactive pan with the lemon juice and sugar. Stir gently and heat just until the juices start to run. This is important for the flavour of the finished ice. You don't want to overcook the berries but you do want all the juices to run freely so let it just come to a bubbling boil for a minute or so but no longer.

Remove from the heat and push the mixture with a wooden spoon through a scrupulously clean sieve into a jug. Be patient with this stage of the procedure - it pays not to give up too soon - you want as much of the blackberry flesh and juice as you can extract for the best flavour and texture. I sometimes whizz the blackberries in the food processor before sieving, to help the process along, but you don't have to. Discard the dryish mess of pips you are left with in the sieve once you are done.

Chill the blackberry purée. Once it is cold, stir in the yoghurt. Chill again. The mixture should be as cold as possible before churning.

You are now ready to churn your ice cream - it takes about 25 minutes in my ice cream churner but follow the instructions for churning in your make and model. Once churned to the consistency of softly whipped cream, decant into a pristine polythene box, label and store in the freezer until required. If it's frozen completely solid allow it half an hour in the fridge before trying to serve it.

If you don't have an ice cream churner, pour the mixture into a large, sturdy polythene box (again make sure it is scrupulously clean) and put in the freezer for an hour. Now whisk the mixture with a squeaky clean electric whisk and put back in the freezer for another hour. Repeat the process at least once more, possibly twice depending on how frozen the ice cream is at each stage.

Serve it exactly as it is - no adornments desired or extras needed - enjoy!

Blackberry bliss!

Threads of Connection Across Past and Present

It all began a while back with a comment from Liz of Carolina Knits on my post "And is there honey still for tea?". Liz, amongst other things, is both a virtuoso knitter and an Anglophile. She knits things I can only dream of making in my wildest (and most unrealistic) imaginings - elegant shawls, beaded gossamer wraps, complicated, colourful tea cosies, soft cowls and shrugs, lacy scarves, intricate gloves and beautifully draped cardigans, all drop as gracefully and easily from her needles as autumn leaves floating from maple trees in the Fall. She even spins and dyes her own yarn with blueberries. Have a read of her blog if you haven't already and you'll see what I mean!

Her comment related to the fact that my post, with its quotation from Rupert Brooke's poem, seemed to suggest that an England that one might have thought was long gone, although hankered after, was in fact, still alive and well. An England where church clocks still chime the hours and afternoon tea still happens and the landscape still looks recognisably similar to how it did in the past. And although of course in many ways Rupert Brooke's England isn't there any more, there are indeed ways in which it is.

While the kind of afternoon tea the poet envisaged on the lawns of Grantchester sloping down to the river, with tea served in fine bone china cups with saucers, accompanied by thin cucumber sandwiches, sponge cakes and honey, is not served every day in most 21st C English households, I for one, do stop for tea every afternoon, although it is usually just tea with a single piece of homemade cake or something similar, without the wafer thin sandwiches etc and the tea is in a large mug rather than a delicate china cup and saucer.

The ancient church clocks of villages up and down the country still mark the hours as they have done in many cases for centuries.  The clock in the church down the road here, for a start, has been doing so, since it was made and installed in the medieval tower, by a local clockmaker from Wantage, in 1575. Four hundred and thirty seven years (and counting) of uninterrupted ticking and chiming!

And although the English landscape looks drastically different in some respects from how it looked a hundred or more years ago, the pattern of country life and the seasons has a reassuring continuity about it. The mechanics of agriculture have changed almost out of all recognition but farmers are still not immune to the capriciousness of the weather. The age-old rhythm of seedtime and harvest still gives shape to the year in the countryside and with the reduced use of pesticides many of the wild flowers, birds and animals, that populated the landscape Rupert Brooke knew and loved, have made something of a come-back after a time when they were a bit thin on the ground. I have noticed in recent years, for example, that the larks I remember so well from my childhood, singing high above the fields, but which seemed to disappear in the nineteen eighties and nineties, are now back and in good voice. Scarlet poppies, blue cornflowers, pink corncockle and pale, mauvey-blue scabious again dot our cornfields with colour after a monochrome period in which they were largely exterminated; hedgerows more often than not, now get carefully relaid by conservation-minded landowners, instead of being replaced with fencing. What goes around, comes around.

Thinking about all this and my own nostalgic enjoyment of the past, made me want to send Liz a little parcel of English things as a sort of tangible reminder of what she was referring to in her comment. And what fun it was putting it together! It took a bit of time  - a book I wanted to send was out of print and took time to locate and I had some difficulty deciding what to include and what not - but eventually I had a little collection of nostalgic, quintessentially English echoes to send across the Atlantic and in due course a parcel arrived here from Liz with a collection of some similar, nostalgic American echoes. A wonderful Anglo-American swap made possible by the new and the old happily married together - ultra-modern 21st C blogging technology and a postal system now well over a hundred and fifty years old but still going strong.

I love the fact that although it is by its nature virtual, blogging makes possible these kinds of connections in real time with real people, near and far. And it is one of the great unexpected gifts of being part of this wonderful on-line community that real friendships and shared enthusiasms can and do cross over from virtual to physical reality.

And just as I wrote in my post on "Post" the other day, about my French great-great-great-grandmother sending little handmade items to her sister a hundred and sixty years ago, 21st C bloggers are doing exactly the same thing. In a delightfully nostalgic sense "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose" And real and happy friendships spring up as a result. One of the ills, it seems to me, of 21st C society and one of the things that is very different from the world inhabited by our forebears is, all too often, a lack of time and space to spend time with friends and make real connections with people. I see this a lot in my work. So much isolation and loneliness are out there. How wonderful that despite all that we haven't got right as a generation, we have managed to come up with an idea that counters some of that so effectively and in which nostalgia for a bygone, rather more connected, age comes so vividly alive.

As a result of this particular connection, for the last week or so, I have had my nose deep in the most wonderfully evocative book "Prairie School" by Lois Lenski about a country school in the prairies of Dakota in the last century. The book's charm is enhanced by delightful, black and white pencil drawings. Have a look! Aren't they just the most evocative illustrations?

It is nostalgic and beautifully engaging and although the weather has been quite hot here in the last ten days or so I have vividly felt the intense cold of the prairie winters the author describes and longed to cosy up to the warmth of  the ancient "Heatola" stove of the "teacherage", the little wood and corrugated iron building that housed both teacher and pupils, of the type common in the remoter districts of the prairies.

Thanks to Liz's generosity I have also had the chance to experiment with some quintessentially American "Peaches and Creme" yarn ...

... to make a Granny Square face flannel in wonderful sea-greens and blues that I want to bury my face in all the time, it's so soft!

And my crochet hooks also have a beautiful, new and proper home!

Thank you again to Liz and to all of you who read and comment here and with whom I have had the privilege to weave threads of connection in various ways. It is such a joy to be part of that virtual and tangible tapestry. May the warp and weft, of past and present, time now and time future, stretch far and wide and its colours catch the light for much time to come.

E x

The Felling of the Basil Forest

The basil forest in the greenhouse is threatening to break out. It has thrived under the sunny glass, protected from this summer's rain and lack of consistent warmth and by now is giving The Day Of The Triffids a run for its money.

I should really have done something about it earlier in the summer but I didn't get round to it. As you can see from my armful of the stuff in H's pic, some of it has already gone on to flower before I've got to it which I shouldn't really have let happen. Anyway today I felt action needed to be taken before, never mind the flowers, it turned into Jack's Beanstalk complete with an unpleasant giant at the top of it!

The main reason I grow my basil forest is to make pesto. Opinions vary as to whether it's worth making one's own pesto. You can of course buy very good commercially produced pesto, either long-life or fresh. I have to say though, that however good the commercial stuff is, homemade pesto leaves it standing. It's not difficult to make although you do need enough basil. The recipe I use, requires 4 oz of leaves and because they are so light that is a heck of a lot of basil. Especially when you bear in mind we are talking about just the leaves and the weight should not include the stalks as these make the finished pesto fibrous.

You also need garlic - a couple of cloves, peeled and smashed; (Yes, I am going to use that stone brought back from the beach to smash the peeled cloves! Works a treat and the other gizmo I use, a kind of bobbly ceramic dish I bought in a market in Provence, that you rub the garlic to a paste on, was locked in the dishwasher.)

some pine nuts, 2-3 tbsps preferably lightly toasted in a hot oven or under the grill; (Watch them though, they go from golden to black in the blink of an eye!)

some salt - coarse sea-salt for preference, about 2-3 tsps;

grated Parmesan cheese - about 3oz for this quantity of basil leaves;

and plenty of the best green extra-virgin olive oil you can lay your hands on. I don't know precisely how much because I pour it by eye - probably not less than a quarter of a pint, may be more even.

You also need ideally a food processor although traditional Italian mammas make pesto with a large pestle and mortar. Mrs T is lazy however and finds the food processor the best option. 

Weigh out the leaves and pile them into the bowl of the processor. Squash them down a bit to make room for your other ingredients. Add in your toasted pine nuts, smashed garlic, Parmesan and salt and pour in a good glug of your best olive oil. Whizz. You may well need to add a bit more oil - it takes quite a bit to achieve the beautiful thick green viscous sauce you are after. It should be the consistency of double cream, certainly no thicker. It tends to thicken up a bit anyway after it's made. 

And if you are worried about the amount of oil going in, remember that you are only going to need a teaspoonful or two of this per person for each serving of pasta, so in each plateful there will be barely a teaspoonful of oil. And this quantity of olive oil is only going to do you (and your hair) a power of good!

Once whizzed to the consistency you are after, the result should be stored in lidded glass jars in the fridge although I find it best to bring it to room temperature before using for best effect - you don't want it fridge cold when it hits pasta hot from the pan. 

You don't have to make the full quantity if you don't have enough basil - make it with just 2 oz of leaves and proportionately less of the other ingredients but much less than that and you'll find it won't blend properly. You need enough of the ingredients to engage the food processor blades fully. Don't be tempted to use a stick blender or anything that doesn't have a powerful puréeing action - it just doesn't work properly and you'll end up with an unsatisfactory, lumpy paste and probably a lot of oily mess to clear up that won't give you the sense of bien être that should accompany pesto-making. If you don't have a food processor I would go the traditional route of the old pestle and mortar although you may not be able to handle such big quantities unless your mortar is big.

It keeps surprisingly well, especially if you pour a little extra oil over the surface, certainly weeks rather than days. Not that it often lingers in this house for that long! 

I am sure I am biased but it always seems to me greener, more aromatic and more vividly intense than anything I can buy. 

It's fantastic of course in the classic combination with pasta - linguini is my favourite with it and as I say you need very little to flavour a whole plateful - it is seriously intense in flavour. But it also works a treat if you are making white bread rolls, with half a teaspoonful snuck into the centre of each shaped piece of dough and with the dough sealed around it before baking as usual. You might think it a waste to use homemade pesto in bread like this but take my word for it - it isn't! It also stretches the pesto if you haven't got a huge quantity and makes it sing for its supper, or rather, sing for your supper! And by the way the rolls freeze beautifully too.

This afternoon's basil-forest-felling has made two jars of the magic green stuff. Slightly alarmingly, the forest looks as Triffid-like as it did before! So, more is out there! Can't be bad news though! As its name implies, ("basileus" is the Greek for "king"), basil is the king of herbs...

... Vive Le Roi!

(along with his minions, in the form of a hot plateful of linguini and a glass of cold white wine!)

Dahlia Crochet Cushion

As you may recall, while I was away for my week by the sea, I began a second crocheted flower cushion. You can see the beginnings of it in my holiday window seat here. It grew much more quickly and easily than my first version (even allowing for my difficulties with keeping an accurate count of anything over ten stitches!) It's exactly the same delightful Lucy of Attic 24 pattern as before which you can find on Lucy's blog here but in very different colours from my first rosy one. Not early-summery, pale pinks and lavenders, deep rose and crimson reds with light gooseberry greens and pale blues for contrast this time, but more late-summer-nudging-into-autumn colours.

The colours of dahlias and chrysanthemums - deep burgundies, wine reds, tawny golds and burnt oranges lightened with some soft white peach, apricot and old rose. Not my normal palette at all but very much my mother's and as it is a birthday present for her next month that is as it should be. I am really pleased with the result and I hope my mother will be too. (She doesn't read this so I am not spoiling any surprises by showing you an advance peep by the way.) I can't believe how different it looks from my first version. Of course it's obviously the same pattern and everything but its mood is different, if I can put it like that, and actually I have really enjoyed working with these very different colours.

I don't want to abandon my normal palette entirely but it's been really good to spend time with a different one for a change and making something for somebody else (whose colours I know these are) has been enormously liberating - it's taken all the angst about whether a departure from my colour norm will jar horribly with my other makes and silenced that whispering voice in the back of my head that would otherwise have kept saying "These colours are not you, Mrs T!" It's freed me just to enjoy the colours for their own sake. Very liberating indeed. Anyone else find this?

And the really interesting thing is that I've found, on finishing the said cushion, and returning to my hooky basket to start something new, that although I naturally gravitate back to colours I loved before, I am seeing them slightly differently. Although the ground is the same it is also subtly different if you see what I mean and I find myself wondering more experimentally and less predictably about colour choices than before this project. Interesting. I'd be fascinated to know if anyone else has had a similar experience with colour especially with colour that they wouldn't normally think was "them".

And just to echo my finished cushion the dahlias are in flower most spectacularly in my garden.

I love dahlias - they are so opulent and flamboyant and they are also user-friendly to grow - you stick the tubers in the ground and let them get on with it. My kind of plant! They don't like severe cold and I think you are supposed to lift the tubers in the autumn and replant them in the spring to avoid losing them in a very harsh winter but mine, I'm afraid, were left to take their chances. They are so beautiful this year though, that perhaps I must take the extra trouble this autumn. The only snag with their wonderful rich pom-pom heads is that their deep, soft petals appear to be favoured to an extraordinary degree by earwigs chilling out on holiday. I do not like earwigs. They are not exactly harmful creatures but they do bite and are not easy to trap and remove. The jug of dahlias in the pic had to remain outside until all vacationing earwigs had checked out - much to their disgruntlement!

Post

Over the last few months I've been thinking a lot about post and I'm not talking here about what I am writing on my blog. I'm talking about real post! Nor am I talking about post that comes in the guise of real post but isn't - you know what I mean, those piles of junk mail and catalogues in horrible, polythene sleeves that clunk heavily and deceptively through the letterbox, treacherously raising expectations that something interesting has arrived but quickly giving way to disappointed realisation that it hasn't. No, I'm talking about real post that comes not in polythene or even workaday brown envelopes with translucent paper windows but in much more beguiling, windowless, handwritten envelopes. Post that goes or comes out of the blue. Not necessarily predictably, say at birthdays or Christmas but for no other reason than, well, just because.

Two people have alluded to real post of this kind on their blogs recently and opened interesting and intriguing avenues of thought. You may have read their posts yourselves already but if you haven't, have a look; one is Annie at Knitsofacto in her post here about letters written home from her great-great-great uncle while on military service in South Africa in the late 1870s. Letters all the more poignant for their expressed longing for the home he never arrived back to. The other is Judy at I read-I sewed-I crocheted in her post here in which she reflects on the red post boxes that are so distinctive a feature of the British landscape and many of which have been in use for well over a century. As Judy points out, these little red boxes have received into their dark interiors not just bills and official communications in their time, but all people's outpourings of the heart, their news and gossip, invitations and reminiscences and conversations, big and small, in the days before convenient, but evanescent, electronic and telephonic media took the place of snail mail. And at the height of the postal system's glory days in the late 19th / early 20th C you might reasonably expect to receive several deliveries of post a day - at least once in the early morning by breakfast and again some time in the afternoon.

Of course postal deliveries several times a day are a refinement that is long gone but nevertheless snail mail still works and childish though it may sound, I love using it - both to send and to receive. I particularly get a thrill at posting abroad, especially far away and love both the sophistication and simplicity of a system that means I can put an envelope (or even better a parcel) in the little old Victorian letterbox that is set in the wall down the road and know that in a week or so it will turn up in Texas say or North Carolina.

In fact I don't know whether I get more of a thrill from being the one doing the posting or the one receiving post when it comes! Not much in it probably!

When I arrived back from holiday last week I coincidentally and unrelatedly found three interesting pieces of snail mail waiting for me and I can't tell you what a lift to the spirits they were. All three were surprises and all three contained handwritten letters along with other delightful handmade contents. And my enormous delight at the contents was matched by my enormous delight at the letters. Different paper, different envelopes, different handwriting, different sentiments but the common thread was a tangible gesture of friendship and connection hard to beat. Don't get me wrong - I don't want to knock electronic communication - for a start all three unexpected pieces of snail mail were from people I've "met" through blogging; I use electronic communication all the time and mighty convenient it is too; I love writing this blog and being able to read others' blogs and contribute to the conversation that follows in the comments section whenever I can; but there is still something just so lovely about snail mail, especially the unexpected sort.

My parents are enthusiastic genealogists - many of my childhood holidays were spent poking around in ancient English churchyards trying to decipher crumbling inscriptions to locate long dead relatives in their final resting places, an activity which neither my sister nor I relished much, if at all. More interesting, for me anyway, are the hoard of photographs and letters that my parents have collected from all sides of the family, some of them going back to the beginning of the 19th C. My mother showed me a letter this week that I thought I would share with you as this post is about post. It's from the French side of my family written in 1852 from my great-great-great grandmother, Anaïs Préaud, to her sister Augustine. The letter is written on very thin paper about six inches square and Anaïs' six-year old daughter, Marie, my great-great grandmother, has written her own message to her aunt on the back.

As Ecclesiastes says profoundly truthfully (if a little cynically), "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun." (Ecclesiastes 1:9)

Just as we 21st C bloggers like to send one another little handmade surprises, the Victorians did too. A hundred and sixty years ago Anaïs was sending her sister, along with her letter, a little something she had made her. I'd love to know what she'd made but it was almost certainly needlework. She writes "Je t'envoie ci inclus un échantillon de mon savoir-faire. Je te prie de l'agréer comme un petit souvenir d'amitié. J'y ai travaillé avec un bien grand plaisir et je souhaite qu'il te plaise." "I enclose a sample of my skill. I hope you will accept it as a little token of affection. I very much enjoyed working on it and I hope you like it." She goes on to ask her sister for a fashion update on embroidery over "pagoda sleeves" and "musketeer collars" which she isn't sure she knows how to do.

On the reverse, little Marie has written in an exquisite hand, that I am very sure I could not have emulated when I was aged six, that she wishes her "lovely niece-spoiling aunt a happy year and good health" and she sends her "a big hug". She signs it off "la petite nièce bien obéissante avec toi, Marie Préaud" One wonders whether she was not always totally "obéissante" with her "petite mère" but saved "obéissance" up for her favourite niece-spoiling aunt!

A huge thank you again to my three bloggy friends for the entrancing surprises they sent me - I treasure them and the letters that accompanied them and perhaps one day, in the next century, I will have a great-great-great granddaughter who will find them among my things and wonder at the friendship that blogging unlocked in 2012.

Holidays, Hollyhocks and Dreams

Coming back from holiday is always slightly unsettling. It makes you look at your normal context and routines slightly differently. Things I hadn't noticed before I went away - like the two pairs of shoes completely caked in mud and waiting by the back door to be cleaned for a shameful seven months,  - seven months - how could I be so appallingly slatternly?! - are now glaringly obvious. Slightly unwelcome tasks that I like to put off, such as completing my tax return, which I felt before going away could be deferred almost indefinitely, suddenly seem no longer deferrable. Work of course hasn't stood still and even though I was only away for a week, all manner of things have been pressing for urgent attention, which adds to a sense of not being quite on top of life.

I am pleased to sleep again on my old familiar rosy pillows but there's no doubt that the period in the immediate aftermath of a holiday is a time when one questions some of the things that have drifted along without question before it.

Some of them settle back to drifting again and others remain wakeful and insistent and that's the interesting part. It's not always clear to begin with, what will settle and what won't.

Only time will tell. I found a slip of paper in a book the other day on which I'd copied out the following little poem. No idea where I found it or who wrote it but it's resonated this week.

"If you find a dream inside your heart

don't ever let it go

for dreams are the tiny seeds

from which beautiful tomorrows grow."

In the meantime the hollyhocks I pass every morning down the road are as glorious as they've been for the last six weeks or so and their consistent flowering reminds me that not all is in flux.

Every year they grow happily out of the crack at the base of the old, white, lime-washed wall beside the path. No one has planted them there - they grow all by themselves, self-seeded and self-supporting. They reach a good five, even six feet in height seemingly without need of soil or water. Their tall, sturdy stems produce an abundance of pale green, downy leaves and their satiny, papery flowers are just beautiful. The spreading petals have the colours and texture of old watered silk - pale rose-pink, magenta, and a slightly deeper, claret red. The powdery yellow stamens are loaded with pollen and surrounded by fine, pale, feathery filaments as soft as a caught breath. English cottage garden flowers at their best.

I have tried planting hollyhocks in the past without success but these seem to grow almost in defiance of deliberate cultivation.

There may be a lesson here about not trying too hard.

May be the dreams will do the same thing if I let them.

Time To Go Home

A bell pic seems fitting for a post calling "time" on my seaside sojourn. This one is made out of shells I found at Kimmeridge at the beginning of the week: limpet shells in varying sizes all with holes at the apex of the shell and a handful of top shells also with holes at their apex for the clapper. It doesn't ring of course although I like the idea that perhaps when I am not looking or listening, it sings a faint sea-peal of waves breaking and retreating and somewhere at the heart of that peal is the secret chuckle of sea water entering rock pools again as the tide turns in, as it faithfully will, day in day out, summer and winter, autumn and spring, whether I am there or not.

Anyway it's time to leave the sea  - I shall miss it a lot - to put holiday-mode on one side and to return to normal life.

Always difficult after a break. But one of the great joys of this blogging lark is that for the first time I feel my holiday is still there, waiting to be revisited and re-experienced in the posts of this week. Holidays are, by definition, not for ever, but half their benefit is looking forward to them, half is enjoying them and half again is looking back at them. And yes, I know that makes three halves! But somehow I don't want thirds, I want three halves here! And as you may already have gathered in these pages, Mrs T's relationship with mathematics is "interesting"!

There are of course things to go back to that are tedious and uninviting but there are also things I will be pleased to resume. And as the Chinese writer Lin Yutang once wrote, "No one realises how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow." I always try to think in my mind's eye of a list of things, some of them may be very little things, that, on returning home from however good a holiday, I will be pleased to encounter. Helps the transition from holiday to normality a lot I find.

Today's list includes in no particular order:
1 Replicating seaside ice cream cones at home (can't replicate the seaside but the cones, chocolate flakes and homemade ice cream are all possible)
2 Using the sea images and colours that have been floating in my head this last week to inspire a new piece of hooky (or possibly knitting, if kept very simple!)
3 Picking up the threads with friends and family again
4 Having been much more active this week than I am usually, keeping that up - I need to, as I'm far too sedentary, if I'm not careful, in my normal routine
5 H still has over a month of summer holiday left so doing some holidayish summery things at home
6 Having the refreshed and rebalanced perspective for work that being away always brings
7 Seeing my dahlias flower
8 Picking blackberries - the blackberry season is late this year because of all the bad weather earlier in the summer but come the end of the month, blackberry time will hopefully be here again which is good news for this household

Anyone else do this on the eve of returning home from holiday? I'd love to know what your list includes.

Finally I want to say a big thank you and send a hug to all those of you who have kept me company in the last week, reading and / or commenting here. It's been so lovely and has meant a lot to Mrs T to write her meanderings with your company. Normal and less meandery service will now be resumed (although not on a daily basis, I fear, once work gets a hold again!)

With love to you from the sea

 and Mrs T

Coast, Cairns and Ice Cream

The weather did not begin propitiously today - cold, windswept and rainy;

but what you start off with by the coast is not always what you end up with and by the end of the morning, a long bracing walk along the South West Coast Path in defiance of the weather, had diverted into a leisurely interlude on a sunny beach ...

... for a spot of heavy construction:

I do not think in a three-dimensional way and I do not think I would win any prizes for my method of construction which is haphazard and ill-thought through to say the least. Any building inspector's hair would stand on end at my shoddy attempts to shore up inadequate foundations and bad engineering with the unorthodox and surreptitious, (but judicious!) insertion of pebbles. (Needed to prop up my teetering edifice in the gaps where the building materials, er, didn't quite fit as I wanted them!) Despite its slightly rickety structure ("slightly", Mrs T?!) I liked the fact that I managed to incorporate an "eye" through which to view the sea beyond.

Lucky I photographed it promptly, as, due to its cowboy construction, it was not long before the roof caved in!

H on the other hand does think in a three dimensional way and built a construction that will probably survive a neap tide! Solid as the rock with which it is built and fortress-like in appearance - no contest but his was the winner.

As you can see, he also managed to find a couple of armed guards to see off any invaders attempting uninvited entry over the moat, who stand, sort of like Gog and Magog, at the foot of the drawbridge. I think, in their more fleshed-out days, one was a Horseshoe Crab and the other a Sea Louse. Shells of their former selves they may be, but they still look quite ferocious close up!

And just to complete the day's satisfactions - locally made, strawberry ice cream in a cone, eaten by the sea.

I can't think when I last had an ice cream cone beside the sea - mental note to self not to leave it such a long time again. One of life's truly great small pleasures.

Seaside Art

... or perhaps more accurately, the title of this should be "Messing About Making Sand Pies and Plaster of Paris Custard"!

It's rained today and is rather chilly so what better to do than make a quick trip to a cold and windy beach for a couple of buckets of sand and beating a hasty retreat (but not before one of of us (not me!) got soaked to the skin by larking about in the boisterous incoming waves) to mess about, making either what you may term "Seaside Art" or "Sand Pies with Plaster of Paris Custard"!

Whatever you call it, this is a lot of fun and you can do it while on holiday by the sea or when you've got home, even with a pile of shells collected on holidays from years ago that you have kept somewhere. I did this first with H when he was three on holiday in Anglesey and we still have the result hanging on the wall at home - it's a popular and perfectly manageable activity with very little ones but equally fun when your three-year-old is a teenager and supervises you rather than the other way round, as the following selected quotations illustrate: "What are you doing with that?" "Look at the mess you've made!" "For goodness' sake, put that camera down before you set it in plaster as well!" "No, I think you'd better let me do that!"

You need:

a selection of plastic trays of assorted shapes and sizes - old (cleaned) food trays or cream / yoghurt pots are great. Doesn't matter if they are a bit flimsy - a bit of flexibility in the plastic comes in handy for the unmoulding. They do need to be free from holes; if they aren't, line them carefully with cling film. Cling film also makes the moulds easier to turn out so if there isn't much flexibility in your container I would advise using it to line them with anyway. I should have done this with the little square containers you can see in the pic, as they were almost impossible to turn out.

sand - ideally finer sand than what I've used here but the coarse sand I used today has worked OK; enough to fill your containers not quite to the top. A child's seaside bucketful will be plenty for a number of containers;

an assortment of shells, small pretty pebbles, bits of sea glass if you are lucky enough to find it, even the odd pretty fragment of broken china;

thin string;

plaster of Paris (obtainable from art / craft shops);

an old plastic jug to mix the plaster in and an old balloon whisk or fork to whisk it up with;

cold water in another jug to mix;

plenty of running water on hand to rinse things as you go to avoid anything setting where you don't want it (!).

OK here's what you do:

Fill your plastic containers to within about half an inch of the top with sand. Smooth it and tap it as flat as you can. (I do like making sand pies!)

Now arrange your shells, pebbles etc on the top, upside down. Don't forget to turn each object apparently the wrong way up as the surface that you see of each placed object will be hidden in the plaster and the surface that you don't see, will be visible once you've unmoulded your "art". I find it helpful to arrange my design as I want it to look on the work surface and then turn each object over as I place it in the sand. You want to press each shell slightly into the sand so that you achieve a three-dimensional effect to your finished "piece".

Cut a piece of string for each container and tie into a loop with a double knot at one end. Place the knot ends carefully into the top of each container allowing the loop to hang over the side. This will make a handy loop to hang your art up by.

Once you you've done this, it's time to make up the plaster. (What fun this is!) Plaster of Paris is messy stuff(!) so wear an apron and if you are doing this with tinies, it's best probably for you to do this bit rather than allow little hands to do the mixing. Put some plaster of Paris powder into your old plastic jug and add enough water to make it the consistency of thick gloopy custard or thick double cream. Don't do what I did with one batch this afternoon and make it too thin, as, if it isn't thick enough, it flows too readily into crevices you'd rather were left free of it. Whisk the mixture well to avoid lumps and without delaying, pour carefully into the tops of your containers almost up to the rim. You may want to adjust the positioning of your string so that is stays roughly central once you've poured in the plaster.

Keeping the containers level tap the bases gently on the work surface, if necessary, to make sure the plaster is as level as possible but don't overdo it or you will disrupt your arrangement. Less is more here.

Leave the plaster to set undisturbed. It doesn't take long - about an hour or so.

Do not leave your jug and whisk undisturbed, or they too will set! Rinse straightaway under plenty of running cold water and they will clean up fine. You may need to mix up several batches of plaster if you are making a number of these. I find it's better to mix it in smallish quantities and repeat the process if necessary rather than trying to work with too much at a time. About a cup of plaster powder at a go works well. Rinse the jug and whisk each time before mixing a new batch though.

Now for the exciting bit! Unmoulding things is always exciting, in my book! Once the plaster is set, get a bucket or washing up bowl to catch the sand and turn your moulds carefully upside down over the empty container. Some of the sand will have adhered to the plaster that wasn't covered by shells etc and your shells and pebbles and any other bits of pieces should be set firmly in place. Now that the plaster has gone "off" it's safe to rinse under the cold tap to get rid of the excess sand, if it doesn't brush off easily with your fingers.

Prop or hang your "art" up and admire it and allow it to dry off completely!

As with my threaded shells the other day, you don't need perfect specimens, pretty sections of broken ones work just great and again you can make something evocative and attractive out of what may at first sight look unpromising. Just make sure that the broken or damaged side is the side that will be hidden in the plaster and no one will know they weren't perfect. Don't use anything too heavy though - no rocks! - or the weight of the finished object will be too great.

They make great bathroom decorations or you can hang them anywhere to remind you of the seaside.

Time to think about making supper - now is that flour or plaster of Paris?!

Could be interesting pastry in the quiche this evening!