Back from Brittany

I've just returned from a trip to my home in Brittany.
During seven days we enjoyed:
1 dinner with the whole commune
1 firework party
4 aperitif sessions with friends
1 aperitif session at my home
1 dinner with friends
1 kayak session off the pink granite coast
3 days at the beach

That makes my 54th crossing with Brittany Ferries and so, to celebrate, we had Commodore Cabin on the return journey, which I will write about soon.
There will also be tour guide posts about our adventures.
When I have finished the laundry and preparations for returning to work.

Hope your summers are all sweet X

Van Morrison at Hampton Court Palace

One of the important lessons that I learned from my last O.U. module was that the human brain is flexible, ever-changing and programmed readily to absorb new ideas and new experiences and to weave them into its neural pathways like bright strands of threads in an ever-expanding tapestry.

That's if we take the time and make the effort...
Work, work can consume us and well, while one's work should be a passion, it should never be a monogamous relationship, we should devote as much, if not more, time and energy to exploring, adventuring and to gathering new experiences as possible.  We should flirt with fun.

The Ragazzo and I pursued this notion recently.
I do not see enough of my son. He's busy with his music studies in London, playing with bands, attending festivals, being a young man. It takes a little ingenuity sometimes to entice him to spend time with his mother. Sometimes I have to resort to irresistible lures.

Van Morrison at Hampton Court Palace.

It wasn't my first time.
Years ago I took my BF's widower to Hampton Court Palace to see Van Morrison. We both desperately needed some fun after Jeannie's death, it was a perfect solution, we laughed for the first time in weeks, we even danced in an aisle. Van Morrison's Brown Eyed Girl will do that for you.

We could have arrived early and enjoyed a picnic on the grass. Many others were doing so when we walked through the palace in search of a drink and a slice of pizza for The Ragazzo. There were Posh Picnics. I really do not feel comfortable with posh-anythings, too pretentious, too look-at-me-I-am-special, too much of too muchness, the credit crunch has taught me to live modestly and the tickets had already cost £140.  We queued for a latte and a brownie, it was 8:15, we were to be the last served, strict orders, no serving after 8:15, they told the smartly-dressed man from a Posh Picnickers' tent nearby, no coffee for you, you are too late. He looked disappointed. So we ordered four extra coffees for his Posh Picnicker's party. He was taken-aback, but happy. It was an evening for good deeds and being nice, our second, we'd already given a hitch-hiker a lift to the motorway on the way into the city.

We had good seats. Unable to chose the precise ones I had spent a long time playing games with the booking website until the system had chanced-upon the ones that I wanted, end of a row, in the middle of the raised stand, not too far forward, not too far back. Perfect.
 

Van Morrison sang and played for an hour and a half. Many people got up and shuffled off to the toilets somewhere down on the left of the stage, lots of champagne in those Posh Picnics, or too many glasses of beer at the bar-tent perhaps. We laughed as they emerged and were obliged to wait until the stewards had rounded-up a certain-sized group before permitting them to return to their seats like sheep going through a gate. We didn't leave our seats. Our eyes barely left the stage. We were mesmerised and entranced, carried away by the music which was so melodic it felt like a musical mental massage.

And by the splendour of Hampton Court Palace. Those bricks, I whispered to The Ragazzo, were all hand-made, their size and contours unique to the craftsmen who fashioned them... Those chimneys, with their beautiful patterns, you don't see them often, why don't people have twisted chimneys now?

  
But mostly we just sat and smiled and let the music fill our souls. Mother and son...

There was no Brown Eyed Girl this time. We were disappointed. We love Brown Eyed Girl, it's the one song that I am obliged, by some primeval stirrings within me, to dance to. But there had been many songs, and there had been Moondance and we had had a wonderful time.

And we were not shepherded out as soon as the show was over and the applause had died down and people were drifting away. We were permitted to linger, to wander through the deliciously-night-scented rose garden in search of toilets decked with lights like a fairy grotto, to stand and gaze at the palace and wonder how it would have been centuries ago.

Did Anne Boleyn walk in the gardens with her brother and her musician and did she look up at the windows where a king's eyes watched her with suspicion, and did she feel a twinge in her pretty neck? Did Jane Seymour cast modest eyes to the grass when an adulterous monarch came upon her walking with her friends? Henry VIII would have liked Van Morrison, we decided. And he would have had a Posh Picnic of princely proportions!

And so we left, agreeing to return in the daylight to spend a day exploring Hampton Court Palace. We'd been before of course, but The Ragazzo had been a boy and now he was a man and we would both see it through fresh eyes.

And we drove the sixty-something miles home to the Doll's House.
Mother and son and a Van Morrison CD playing Brown Eyed Girl...

Making hay....

It has been a while...

Spring has blossomed into early summer
The swallows have returned to skim across the green
Butterflies flit from flower to flower
Fuzzy bumble bees buzz among the bushes
The planet continues on its path

Work is as demanding as ever with changes thrust upon us, the insecurities of out-sourcing half of our tasks to India, colleagues leaving to seek better career paths, new managers to get to know, a new role to embrace.

The only certainty is that nothing is certain.
That we have as much control as a feather floating on a breeze.

I have submitted my last assignment for my Art of English module and, all being well, my last assignment for my O.U. studies. Which means that I should soon be granted a BA (Hons) Modern Language Studies. There will be no more O.U. studies, the fees are now beyond my modest budget and, anyway, I feel I have reached my destination, at least where that path is concerned.

It's been a long, rocky road to this arrival point.
Through child-rearing, a husband hostile to my ambitions, the departure of said-husband and single-motherhood, returning to a career, working myself to a burn-out, fleeing to France and returning to carve out a new career.
A long and rocky road and one on which I have sometimes stumbled, frequently fallen, but finally finished, crawling on bloodied knees towards the end.

But it is over and now I can relax and take more time to wander aimlessly on the village green.
To pause to admire a red kite circling overhead.
To stop to smell the flowers.
To make hay when the sun shines between the showers.

Except that I have been making not hay but elderflower vodka.
Spurred on by the success of last year's cherry vodka, every sip of which transported me back to the sunny days of that summer and to the pleasure I found in collecting those cherries and turning them into a rich, red, fragrant and leg-wobblingly potent drink, I decided to try this year with elderflowers.

  

It's ridiculously easy, no magic involved. Just flowers, lemon rind, sugar and vodka.

  
So after an early walk to collect the blossoms while the dew was still upon them...
And, of course, pausing to admire the irises that grow with their feet in the pond...

Here you have it...

Elderflower vodka ready to go into a dark place for a few weeks before being bottled and enjoyed with a spritz of fizzy water and a few lemony ice-cubes. 

Making hay

Making elderflower vodka 

Carpe diem 

  

 

Chasing my tail

Good people, I have been absent for weeks...
I'm working hard, too hard probably
I'm finishing my degree in Modern Language Studies...
I'm studying a couple of free online courses with Southampton University...
I'm editing my novel, Flies in the Ointment, and writing a new adult novel...
I'm studying Swedish and practising  my French

Busy, busy,busy

I've just returned from the first of the year's trips to Brittany to clean the house, supervise the gardener, catch up with my Breton Tribe and stock up on cheap, fizzy, white wine
I was last to board in Portsmouth so fourth off the ferry in St Malo
First to board in St Malo so last off in Portsmouth - swings and roundabouts, I prefer the latter

I'll be picking up this blog during the coming week when I hope, finally, to have something interesting to say
Perhaps....

The Christmas Desk...

And yes, of course there's a picture from Brittany on one of my three desktops.

Making marmalade...

 
A re-post from my old blog, now moth-balled. Written in early spring of 2012. 

Marmalade fruit preserve made from the juice and peel of citrus fruits and water. The benchmark citrus fruit for marmalade production in Britain is the Seville orange thus called because it was originally only grown in Spain; it is higher in pectin than most oranges and therefore gives a good set. The peel has a distinctive bitter taste which it imparts to the marmalade. Marmalade can be made from lemons, limes, grapefruits, mandarins and sweet oranges or any combination thereof.Wikipedia

During my working week, and often at the weekends, I spend a great deal of time engaged in mental activity of the most intense complexity. I kid you not, much of the time even I do not understand what I am thinking and I often sit back and wonder what kind of weird and wonderful world this is in which I now find myself.

So much mental activity is not good for a person. Indeed I firmly believe that we homo sapiens are insufficiently evolved to cope with the technology that we have developed and are frantically running to catch up with ourselves.

Certainly the internet is changing us physiologically, recent studies suggest that our brains are changing, our 'soft-wiring' is altering as we spend more and more time in the 'wired-world.' Purely personally I find my attention span shrinking as my desire for instant-information gratification is expanding.

So it was time to spend some time in physical, real-world activities that do not require much brain power and yesterday I came across a post devoted to marmalade over at the blog 'my french country home' which I read daily (despite the ads) and decided that marmalade would be just the thing for a Saturday away from the office...

Marmalade is ridiculously easy to make. Actually much of that which we are offered on the shelves of the supermarkets ready-made, is easy to make, tastes much, much better and is free of nasty chemicals and I, for one, am slowly becoming a devotee of home-made.

For marmalade organic fruit is not just a luxury but a necessity. I will refrain from writing about the pesticides and waxes to which citrus fruit are 'treated' as they grow from flower to fruit but since marmalade is made from the peel and pith and pips as well as the fruit itself, all that you want in your pan is pure fruit and sunshine.

I like my marmalade with thin slivers of peel, they give it a pleasantly crunchy texture that goes perfectly with well-toasted, lavishly-buttered, brown bread, so I sliced but you could chop or dice if that is your choice.

However you prepare the fruit, the scents of citrus that are released as your knife slices through the peel are wonderful, especially on an early-spring morning when summer seems elusive and far away and the risk of rain is ever present.

Once sliced the fruit is popped into a pan, covered with water and left to soak. Overnight is best but mine only had a few hours because I wanted to make the marmalade in time for Sunday breakfast.

Time for a walk with the dog...

The only disadvantage to living in The Doll's House is the lack of a decent garden. The plot at the back of the house is too small and mean to be called a garden and I tend to ignore it, save for hanging my washing there. Well, few things in life are perfect, I make up for this by enjoying other people's gardens, albeit by way of secret glimpses through fences and hedges and the odd surreptitious and rather guilty photograph taken when no-one is looking.

Happily, the green is right on my doorstep and is a perfectly lovely garden for the dog and me. And it has the added bonus of a regular supply of nice people and their dogs so we pause, and exchange greetings and sometimes I walk alongside them while my dog plays with their dogs. I am quite fond of my 'other dogs' some of whom kiss my nose if I bend down low enough, it reminds me that if I were in France it is the men who would be kissing me and not the dogs but I don't mind, a kiss is a kiss...

Back to the kitchen...

The pips from the fruit must be tied in little muslin bags and added to the pan because the pectin in them helps the marmalade to set. I have no muslin, I am not so organised, a strip from an old, clean net curtain suffices. And then the fruit and water is boiled for a couple of hours and the citrus scents now seep into all of the rooms of the small house and are as lovely as an expensive pot-pourri but better somehow. And while that is all going on in the kitchen time can be spent on other things, in my case, my French studies and an intense session with past tenses that lasted for four hours and left me reeling.

After the initial boiling sugar is added. The same weight of sugar as fruit which realisation made me pause and wonder how I would know because the fruit was now in the water and had been boiled, until common sense returned to nudge me and politely suggest that I weigh another orange, lemon and grapefruit from the bowl on the cupboard. D'oh...

And then another hour of bubbling in the pan and frequent admiring glances as the whole lot becomes soft and syrupy and much dipping in of the tip of a wooden spoon because the taste is absolutely divine.

And then the bottling...

Did I say that marmalade is easy to make?

Alas, something fundamental went wrong with my marmalade. I suspect insufficient pips. I had thought as I sliced the fruit that it was distinctly lacking in the pip-department, and was a little worried but hoped that using sugar with added pectin would be enough.

It wasn't. My marmalade is runny.

I am not despondent. I shall pour some onto my Sunday-morning toast regardless because the taste is so very lovely and the rest, the other two jars, I will use to add to sponge-puddings and tarts and cakes, a kind of sharp syrupy kiss.

And one day in the week, when my head is too stuffed-full of complex computer code and the latest bank Trojan trickery, I shall return home to spend a sane and peaceful evening making Marmalade Mark II.

A little gift of sunshine and citrus from this Oxfordshire village...

November means...

NaNoWriMo

Last year I produced the best part of my first novel during November.
Flies in the Ointment is now actively seeking an agent which process is, I am learning, rather like speed-dating. No, I have never tried speed-dating and never will but I'm pretty sure that's how it feels to try to find an agent who will love my novel.

This November I am working on a second novel.
It's not the sequel to 'Flies', that's already in my head, this is a rather dark, quite erotic, often crazy story set, as are all my books, in Brittany, France. I'm not accustomed to writing such explicit stuff and I'm just grateful that neither of my parents will ever read it. I did ask myself, 'Can I really write explicit sex scenes? What will people think of me?' And then I remembered that the novel also contains sadism and a death, so I can safely say it's all fictional, and spare my blushes.

So this is why I am not blogging much...
Two novels and my final O.U course, and in between I have to fit in the Day Job

Be back in December