Has beans.

We finally have lovely purple "Blauhilde" beans on the allotment. No idea what they taste like, but they look lovely.




As a result of last week's mixture of sunshine and showers we also have courgettes - rather a lot of them -


and (owing to a bumper crop of blackfly on the broad beans) ladybirds.

Learning Curve.

This week P has finally mastered the art of catching fish with the little wooden fishing rod in the magnetic fishing game his grandparents gave him. This produced rapturous applause from both his doting parents, and he now spends every spare minute picking up the fish (and occasional other metallic objects) one by one with the magnet on the end of the string and then clapping himself.

Unfortunately, however, not all his new skills are quite so entertaining, at least for us.

Last week he learned to climb the stairs. After weeks of only wanting to walk up them like an adult (and hence trying to raise his foot nearly to shoulder height trying to get it onto the next step) he suddenly realised he could crawl up them, and that was that. Unfortunately his approach to getting down again is still to walk blithely off the top and hope for the best, so this new discovery means ever greater vigilance on our parts, to make sure he doesn't get the opportunity.

This week he learned to climb other things. Primarily the changing box in the bathroom (from which he seems to think he can get onto the toilet lid and hence probably out of the window), and our bed. The latter wouldn't be too much of a problem if it wasn't for the fact that, once there, he has learned to stand up and bounce up and down on the mattress - a fine game until he bounces off the end and onto the floor head-first.

And then, to cap it all he has learned how to turn switches on and off. Mostly off. Mostly the switch on the socket where I have the hoover plugged in when I am using it. Apparently nothing is as hilarious as watching me sprint from one end of the room to the other and frantically try to hoover a couple of inches of floor before the thing dies again. Hours of fun!

Hanging about.

After a year of having this lovely swing (given to P by my sister) and lamenting the fact that we didn't have a tree in the back garden to hang it from, we suddenly twigged (if you'll pardon the pun) this week that there is the perfect tree right opposite the front door.


Problem solved!

Orange Squash (FO)

About 200 years ago I accepted a small commission from my sister to knit a pumpkin-shaped hat for the offspring of a friend of hers, expected this summer. I don't usually agree to commissions, but this seemed like such a dinky little project that I thought it would be the work of but a moment.

However, what with one thing and another there hasn't been much time for knitting in the evenings recently (one thing being that, now I'm back at work, as soon as P is in bed C and I have a list of chores as long as your arm to get through in preparation for the next day, and the other being that P's erratic sleeping means that, once we finally get to sit down, I can only keep my eyes open for about 10 minutes). So the hat became my train-knitting project, and given that I only commute into work two days a week now, and the commute is barely 15 minutes long, it managed to take me almost a month to complete.



However, completed it finally is, and only awaiting the addition of some matching booties, which no doubt will take me just as long.



In spite of its slow germination, this squash is doing rather better than any of my others this year. In a fit of optimism I bought a packet of six varieties of edible and ornamental squash with the intention of letting them roam free on the allotment and fill up otherwise empty space (being in Geneva during key sowing time has meant that we are a bit depleted on the veg front this year). I planted one of each sort, confident that they grow quickly and take up a lot of space. Only three of them germinated and two of those were immediately demolished by slugs the minute I put them outside to harden off. The remaining plant (and of course I have no idea which sort it is - no doubt the dullest, ugliest, and most inedible of the selection) is now cowering sadly in the end of a raised bed, looking distinctly as though it is thinking of throwing in the towel and following its compatriots to the great vegetable garden in the sky.

But despite this, and the patchiness of the potatoes (which couldn't be planted until we got back from Geneva and, as a result, were the dregs of the garden centre remaindered bucket), and despite the fact that the current warm weather requires us to carry something between a quarter and half a metric tonne of water almost every night, the allotment is redeeming itself for us at the moment by supplying us with about half a punnet of fresh strawberries every day or two, and the promise of broad beans in a week or so. And there's something very pleasing about wandering back from the allotment in the evening sun with P toddling alongside munching on homegrown strawberries and happily turning his clothes a soggy shade of pink.

Full circle.

Well, as ever, it has been some time since my last post, and many things have happened in the meantime, most of which I vowed to chronicle on here, some of which even made it as far as my ever growing collection of half-written draft posts, but none of which actually made it as far as getting published. Such is life these days.

First there was Christmas, when P discovered the delights of wrapping-paper

encountered his first snow

and received the traditional present of two front teeth. These chose New Year's Eve to make their entrance, so everyone saw the dawn on the first day of 2010, though not for the reasons we might have hoped.

And then, suddenly, it was the end of January and we were packing up the car ready to move to Geneva for two months while C applied himself in person to bringing about the end of the world.

Over the years I've visited Geneva a fair few times and always found it to be a very pleasant place, if a trifle pricey, so the idea of living there for a little while was not unappealing. Unfortunately however, all my visits had been in the summer months, whereas we were to be there in February and March, and I soon realised that I had rather unrealistic expectations of life at that time of year. I had pictured us strolling by the lake and walking in the botanical gardens or playing in the park. But while it is certainly possible to stroll by Lac Leman in February, the wind makes it really rather obvious that there's not much between you and the Alps. And that's when it's not raining.

We did, of course, have a few nice days (especially towards the end of the stay), and a few trips out and about, all of which I singularly failed to post about. There was a little jaunt to Nyon on the lake (admittedly slightly spoiled by the fact that C left the changing bag on the train in the morning and so a substantial proportion of the day was spent in a large supermarket trying to replace all the things that we needed from it).*


There was a much more successful trip to Lausanne, an amazing place built on slopes so precipitous that you occasionally have the impression of walking through an M.C. Escher drawing (this did rather give me palpitations when pushing P about in the pram in case either of us tripped up and let go!).


And there was a ride on the Télépherique du Saleve which, though really rather chilly at the top (and a week too early in the season for the cafe to be open) gave us the chance to see a great many mad people throwing themselves off the side of a sheer cliff, which was distinctly entertaining.


On the whole however, while C was off doing exciting physics, P and I spent rather more time than either of us really liked sitting in our apartment in a 60s concrete tower-block watching the rain/sleet/snow on the windows. However, this gave P plenty of time to practice getting about the place.

So, while we arrived with a baby who could sit up and shuffle a few feet if he really put his mind to it, we left with a crawling, cruising toddler with a fascination for opening cupboards and drawers and a pathological dislike of finding them full of neatly stacked or folded things.

This transformation was accelerated by the fact that the furniture in the Geneva flat was the perfect height and layout to encourage cruising. By the end of the first week he was shuffling up and down one side of the coffee table. A week later he'd gained enough confidence to make it across to the sofa, and by the middle of the stay I heard someone knocking on the front door and came out of the kitchen to find that it was P, who had made his way round the table, down one sofa, then down the other, along the arm, across the wall, and was trying to escape.


Finally, about a week before we left it suddenly seemed to occur to him that if he actually applied himself to mastering this crawling business he would be able to get to the furniture in order to pull himself up and walk. And that was the end of any sort of peace and quiet in our house.

As a result, the trip back from Geneva was a rather different kettle of fish to the trip out. When we stopped in Dijon overnight and tried to take P to the hotel restaurant for dinner, we were somewhat dismayed to find a distinctly posh-looking establishment, sporting long, crisp, cream, cotton tablecloths, and silver cutlery. Confronted with such an exciting environment and not content with merely smearing as much food as possible all over us and the table, P set out to terrorize the other diners as well, crawling under the tables to grab their ankles, trying to walk from table to table by holding onto the aforementioned tablecloths, and endeavouring to scale the stems of the wine coolers. Eventually we bolted our dinner and took him back upstairs to eat fruit sitting on the floor of the ensuite bathroom - that being the only place he could make as much mess as he liked with impunity.


Arriving home was similarly something of a culture shock. P's newly acquired mobility, and a penchant for opening any accessible cupboard and carrying off the contents as booty**, meant that we spent the first two or three weeks hastily removing or hiding electrical cables, reorganizing drawers, and fitting stairgates and cupboard locks.

But before long we got used to the new reality and learned not to leave anything important (or wet) on any surface lower than three feet, even if we did eventually end up replacing half the furniture so as to be able to put things like the TV and stereo out of reach. And now we suddenly find we've come full circle. In the last few weeks P has had his first birthday and started going to nursery, and I have started back at work where I am frantically trying to clear the cobwebs off my brain with so far only limited success.


And once again I find myself vowing to return to blogging on a more regular basis though since the new reality is even more hectic than the old one, we shall see!

* I tend to find it does not bode well for a visit to somewhere if the first words spoken on arrival are "oh, shit!"
** During the first week home, I was presented with a constant stream of objects abstracted from forgotten drawers and cupboards around the house. A single day's haul consisted of a novelty rugby ball, a green yoyo with an exceptionally long string, some worry beads, a raw onion, and a (mercifully unopened) packet of hayfever tablets, all (apart, I hope, from the onion) snaffled from his father's bedside cabinet.

Who killed cock robin?

For my mum and me, one of the particular thrills of visiting "The House", especially in the spring or autumn, is seeing what is growing. Over the years my mum has patiently worked away at our little bit of hillside, terracing, composting, and planting, so that we now have something which might actually be called a garden.* Admittedly, as with so much else, this is something of a three-steps-forward; two-steps-back undertaking, since anything planted in the spring is lucky to survive the heat of summer, and about 80% of what survives the summer gets trampled by builders over the winter.**


However, in spite of this, mum's efforts are finally beginning to bear fruit, in many cases literally. Alongside oleander and rosemary we now have quite well-established orange, lemon, apricot, peach, and plum trees. The plum in particular can be quite prolific. One year it was so heavily laden with fruit the branches were in danger of breaking, and my mum and sister spent virtually the whole of their visit making plum jam and a variety of plum-based dishes in a vain attempt not to let it go to waste. Unfortunately the all-plum diet gave everyone a raging case of the squirts the very day that the man came to knock down and rebuild the wall of the bathroom. Never has a builder been invited - nay implored - to take so many tea-breaks.


Anyway, since in the summer everything is so arid, it's lovely to have the chance to spot some of the bulbs and other plants that you would otherwise never know were there, and also to hear birdsong rather than the incessant scraping of cicadas. This year when we went everywhere was carpeted with cyclamen, autumn crocus, and arums. There were ferns sprouting out of hitherto barren corners, the rosemary in the garden seemed to be attracting an enormous number of butterflies and the trees were full of small birds, especially robins.


Unfortunately, however, autumn is also the time of the year when pretty much every able-bodied male on the island dons camouflage, grabs a gun, and heads for the hills to murder any unsuspecting wee birdie rash enough to call in for a bit of a sit down on its long journey south. So, every morning at sunrise the valley echoed to the sound of gunfire and we were repeatedly warned by friends and neighbours that, if we must persist in this peculiar habit of walking places for fun, we should be sure to wear bright clothing and talk loudly so as to avoid being mistaken for something which could be made into soup.

It came as little surprise then, when one day, walking along the road after having had lunch by the sea, my dad came across the sorry little corpse of one of the robins. It didn't appear to have been shot, but had quite possibly been startled by gunfire and died of fright. For reasons best known to himself he picked it up, wrapped it in a hanky, and gave it to my mum to put in her handbag.***

The same day we went to visit the local olive press. This is a long, low, concrete building by the side of the road. It has been there as long as I can remember and never seems to have changed in 30-odd years, but because I'd never been there at the right time of year I'd never seen it in action. This time there were sacks of olives piled up at the front and the place was a hive of activity as numerous men stood around chatting, sipping wine, and "supervising", and one small boy (someone's nephew apparently) ferried endless bags of olives up the ramp and tipped them into a hopper at one end of a long and complicated piece of machinery.


Having been shown around the machine itself we were invited to taste some of the freshly processed oil. A rather raffish-looking man with a huge handlebar mustache seized the top part of P's pram - only just giving me chance to detach it from the wheels - and lifted it up into the press, and we were all ushered inside to a table by the end of the machine on which was a bowl of bright green oil, and a loaf of brown bread. Having handed both mum and me a huge hunk of bread absolutely dripping with oil, mustache-man then turned back to the table and, with a flourish like a conjurer doing a magic trick, whisked aside a napkin to reveal a dead fish.

Quite what sort of fish it had once been was hard to tell - mackerel possibly. It was certainly oily and had apparently been salted and smoked whole, entrails and all. Mercifully, as he handed me
a slice the innards fell out onto the floor saving me from having to decide what to do with them. Although I am generally quite a fan of both salty things and oily fish, I have no hesitation in pronouncing it to be one of the most revolting things I've ever eaten. Fortunately my mum happened to have bag containing leftovers from lunch that we were taking home for the cat, so the fish surreptitiously disappeared into that.


However, at that point P - disconcerted by the noise of the machinery and the large number of strange shouty people - began to look a bit tearful. This gave me a bit of a dilemma as I had olive oil and fish oil running down both arms as far as the elbow and my hankies, muslins, etc. were all in the pram outside. Mum started rifling in her handbag in search of her handkerchief, but suddenly realized -thankfully before she produced it in public - that it contained a dead robin. This realization reduced both of us to fits of giggles, but at least that had the effect of distracting P from his woes. I was just beginning to think I would have to wipe my hands on the baby when someone kindly produced some napkins from somewhere and we were able to restore ourselves to some degree of cleanliness and make our excuses.

The robin was taken home and given a decent burial.


*Previously we had what was no doubt a wild flower meadow in the spring, but in the summer was a forest of hideous spikes. Three sorts always seemed to predominate: the tall ones with the 2-inch spikes that slashed at your legs as you passed; the ones with the little balls of spikes that get inside your clothing and can't be got out, so that even after you think you've extracted them some of the thorns are still left; and the round flat ones, with spikes all the way along the edge, especially adapted for getting into sandals.
**Of the eight stock plants my aunt gave us last spring, only one was still alive when we got there this autumn, the others having made the mistake of trying to grow in a flowerbed occupying a handy position for dumping bags of sand.
*** This habit of collecting dead animals seems to be a peculiarity of the men in our family. I fondly recall being stopped at customs on one occasion so that the official could investigate a suspicious-looking box, which on inspection proved to contain the discarded skins of a snake and a cicada, three sea-shells, an interesting pebble, and a flattened, desiccated frog that one of my brothers had scraped up off a road somewhere.

A place in the sun.

A couple of months ago C announced that he was going to have to work away from home for a week at the end of October, so rather than staying at home on our own P and I decided to go and stay with my parents. However, as luck would have it, they were spending the week in question at our "place" in Greece, rather than in Manchester, so our week away turned out to be a bit more adventurous than originally envisaged.

"The House" as it is universally (and somewhat ironically) known amongst our family is essentially a shed with ideas above its station. It started life as a field that my parents bought when they were first married. In the early days, when I was very small, we used just to spend our summers camping there on the side of the hill, surrounded by thistles, drawing our drinking water from the well at the top of the hill, and washing our clothes in the river at the bottom. Then, some time in the early 80s, my dad decided to construct some permanent form of sunshade, and so began his 25+ year love-affair with cement.

Over the years walls and roofs have come and gone and "The House" has gradually evolved into something resembling a dwelling. But until recently all the work was done by us, and since no one in the family is a qualified builder, plumber, joiner, etc. this meant progress was slow to say the least. For one thing we only ever got to work on it in the summer holidays, and for another bits sometimes fell down again or got eaten by things in the intervening period. Most of my summer holidays as a child and young adult involved camping in a building site and taking part in entertaining holiday activities such as building walls, climbing on the roof in search of cracked tiles, or having competitions with my sister as to who could carry the most cement-blocks. On one notable occasion, the truck delivering the two tonnes of sand my dad had ordered failed to make it up the steep unmade road, and so, in the absence of a donkey, my mum and I spent the whole holiday taking it in turns to be harnessed to a wheelbarrow until we had finally hauled the whole lot up the hill.

Until relatively recently we had no electricity and no running water and even once the latter was acquired the only way to heat it was by boiling a kettle on the gas stove. Returning from swimming and trailing up the 1 in 3 hill in 35 degree heat to be rewarded by an ice-cold shower in freezing water which had spent the night in a concrete tank became something of a holiday ritual, and the locals must have known when we were in residence by the screams echoing across the valley.


So, previously the idea of taking a small baby there in late October would have worried me.* But mercifully, in recent years, with retirement beckoning, my dad has finally come round to the idea that he should get someone who knows what they're doing to help him and so, largely thanks to M., a German builder living in Greece, "The House" has suddenly become a great deal more habitable and is now beginning finally to live up to its name. M. is remarkable for his painstaking attention to detail (which drives my dad - who is of the ply-wood and gaffer tape school of DIY** - round the bend, but does mean that what he builds stays up) and also for the fact that, although he speaks both English and Greek well enough to run a business, whatever language he is speaking he remains steadfastly faithful to his mother tongue when it comes to conjunctions.***

Assisting M. has been a progression of incredibly hard working (mostly Albanian) odd-job men, the latest of whom (another M.) is a mild-mannered, barrel-chested chap, capable of strolling up the forty or so steps from the gate carrying a 50kg bag of cement on his shoulder as if it were just a large, rather dusty pillow. Progress has also been massively expedited by the invention of the mobile phone which allows us to ring up and order stuff without having to trek down to the local shop to borrow their telephone or pass messages with random people who happen to be passing the builders' merchant. It also allows people to ring us, which is both useful, and has the added bonus of providing us with entertainment as several times a day we are treated to the sight of my dad scampering about the place accompanied by a tinny rendition of "The Flight of the Bumblebee", frantically trying to find his mobile.

Anyway, the upshot is that we now have a roof which contains neither holes nor termites (no longer do we lie in bed at night listening to the faint but ominous sound of munching, neither do we have to leap out of bed at the first patter of raindrops to gather all our possessions together on a table in middle of the floor and then sit huddled together in the one dry patch surrounded by buckets). The bathroom finally has a wall and a door (for several years it had one or the other, but not both), and the fireplace and wood-burning stove send the heat into the house and the smoke out of it, and not the other way around. Add to this a proper solar water heater (installed in the nick of time the morning we arrived) to replace the ad hoc one built by my brother last year and it has finally become possible to be relatively comfortable there at other times of the year than the height of summer (provided there are at least a couple of hours of sunshine during the day). Ok, it still lacks a few of the finer luxuries, like floor tiles and furniture, but P and the rest of us were able to spend a thoroughly comfortable week (relatively speaking) enjoying a bit of late autumn sunshine.

to be continued (hopefully)...

* Although my parents would be quick to point out that it never did any of us any harm.
** As witnessed by the fact that nearly 30 years after we started the project we're still concerned with minor details like flooring and plumbing.
*** For instance, "These are good rawl-plugs you bring from England, aber unfortunately it is a Greek wall".