the weind

...a web journal from the north

stormy weather, allegedly

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We’re supposed to get hit by the tail end of Storm Jonas (when did we start naming winter storms?) today, and here in the generally rainy and windy northwest, we’re anticipating the worst of it. We aren’t due to get snow, alas, just more of the rain that’s been tormenting the north for the last month or so. And yet, nothing’s really happening so far, leaving me with a conundrum — do I hurry up and get dressed, and go out to get stuff done, and hope to beat the rain home, or do I resign myself to getting wet no matter what, and stay here until I’m damn good and ready to go out? The text on the Beeb’s weather page is promising watery doom, but the little cloud graphics are all merely grey, with no raindrops, so I am uncertain.

Given that I’m waiting on a load of laundry, and about halfway through a cup of coffee, probably nothing is going to be decided in the next fifteen minutes. So here’s a picture of our cat I took with my iPhone last night. Phil may be the fancy camera wizard chez nous, but I am the quick-and-dirty iPhone snap queen:

The owl and the pussycat
The owl and the pussycat

A noble beast, albeit kind of a stupid and slightly defective one. That manky-looking pink and beige thing in the lower left is his “raft,” and placed directly under the dining room radiator as it is, he spends quite a lot of time there this time of year. I don’t dare do more than just try to hoover up the matted fur off it, from time to time, because he will freak out and abandon anything or any place he’s previously loved if it changes in any substantial way. (See the basket in our bedroom window I ruined for him forever by a.) putting up new curtains, and b.) exchanging the nasty old fleece blankie for a soft and clean new one, as proof.) So just throwing the grimy old thing away and buying a new one is out. Still, he did better than usual as a photographic subject, by continuing to look directly at me while I took his picture, instead of moving or looking away.

We spent last night hanging around the house waiting for the quasi-nephew to show up and collect a bunch of kitchen and dining stuff I boxed up for him to take to his first flat. It is so very weird to be one of the older, more established, relatives who does the giving away, instead of the receiving, I can tell you that. It feels like most of my adult life has been spent surrounded by the hand-me-downs of kindly older relatives, and to find myself in the opposite position is kind of disorienting. But nice! I’m glad to carry on participating in the cycle in my new role! I gave him our old dishes and pasta bowls, a couple of cooking pots, and a pair of skillets, a set of water/wine goblets, and some other random bits and bobs, all of which are in great shape, but were going unused, as I have my late paternal grandmother’s addiction to dishes and serving ware, meaning every few years I just want new ones — I will never be a pricy bone china person because of this — and recently I’ve hit critical mass on swopping out many of my older pots and pans for enamelled cast-iron ones. Most of what I like to cook really needs heavy-bottomed pans, and while buying an entire set of Le Creuset in one go is probably on par with buying a freaking compact car, if you’re a TK Maxx/thrift shop shark like I am, you can slowly accumulate a collection of great stuff over time. It helps to not be overly concerned with everything being the same colour, which I am not. It also helps to not be hung up on every single piece being OMGLECREUSET, which I also am not. My latest acquisition, the jumbo dutch oven I used to cook the chili in yesterday’s post, is something I picked up at Sainsbury’s for fifteen quid, in the post-holiday clearance.

Anyway, for dinner, while I waited, I hacked together a nice salad out of about 100 grams of salmon leftover from Sunday’s starter, along with half of an avocado from same:

Leftover salad
Leftover salad

It’s pretty similar to the one I made for Sunday dinner, which was, roughly, Nigella’s salmon, avocado and pumpkin seed salad. I add cucumbers and radishes to practically every salad I make, as they’re one of the small number of salad fruits/veg that you can pretty reliably count on being decent year-round. Also, I like them. My tomatoes I buy year-round, and resign myself to slowly and patiently ripening, accepting the occasional failure as the price of eating fresh tomatoes in winter. I know, I know, I know: this makes me a terrible excuse for a seasonal eater/locovore, but I can’t help myself. I need salad. I need it daily, or I just do not Feel Right. At least I don’t buy bags of salad and then end up throwing them away when they turn to slime, uneaten, which is evidently one of the most common ways food is wasted here in the UK. There is little that can send me into a spiral of shame and self-loathing like wasting food, something I do only very, very rarely, so I console myself with that, when I am buying non-seasonal produce. Also consoling in this regard is the compost heap. I am not wasting food, I tell myself, as I chuck another failed tomato into it, I am making more England.

And there’s the spin cycle complete. Time to get moving.

well, that’s a wrap

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The holidays are DONE, thank god, or will be, as soon as I take down the decorations and tidy up the house. Right now, I’m just having a cup of coffee and roasting an aubergine, after roasting a bunch of peppers, and prior to slow-roasting some cherry tomatoes with za’atar. Phil’s back on the road for work, poor guy, and although I miss having him around already, I do feel a sense of relief about having nobody but myself to feed for a couple of days. (See above, roasted fruits and veggies.)

I am knackered. It was a busybusybusy holiday season, and for the last three weeks or so, I have mostly been working flat-out. Other than being tired, I am full of the new year’s vigour, and eager to get on with my various house-related projects, to get back to running, after a long break (two injuries in quick succession knocked me out of a promising start last year), and to branch out into some new interests, mainly artistic. While I’m pretty sick of cooking right now, and will enjoy a couple of days of salads and poached eggs, and all the vegetables, all the time, my interest in cooking in general has been rejuvenated. I am also feeling good about this blog, and will start tearing into plans for that. Phil’s been reading up on photography, I am looking into styling, and as once upon a time, I was a graphic designer, maybe it’s time for me to get back into that, because while I like a pretty spare and simple blog format, this one is flat-out amateurish.

All this, and as far as I know, nobody is reading, which is OK with me! I’ve journaled all my life, and don’t need an audience, although if one develops, or you’re reading this, feel free to say hello.

…and then I took a break from writing, tore down all the Xmas stuff, gave the house a lick-and-a-promise, went out, paid bills, had my hair cut (big change; several inches off the ends, and a fringe cut into it!), bought the flowers I’ve been promising myself as soon as I’d de-Xmas’d the house, bought more vegetables, came home, ate roasted vegetables, and a salad as big as the Ritz. So my day was plenty busy, but the point is, I didn’t have to rush.

I lucked into a really good hair stylist at Andrew Collinge on Castle Street in Liverpool. I’d been there once before, and the woman who worked on my hair that time was good, but dammit all if I could remember her name, so I ended up just going with the stylist who was available, and I liked him a lot! I usually suck at making small talk with hair stylists, which may be why I can go years without getting a real cut, but once I’d decided on the fringe, I knew I was committing to frequent trims, and getting on so well with the guy was a relief. So now I have a hair guy, yay!

Assuming, of course, he doesn’t move on in the next six-to-eight weeks, and I don’t go back to my previous method of fringe maintenance — the nail scissors. To be fair, I’ve had a fringe for more of my life than not, despite a couple of long spells of fringelessness, and I can do a decent-enough job of maintaining it myself, but as a grown-up ladyperson, really, I need to get over it and just get pro cuts more frequently. God knows my beat-up ends were an ongoing disaster, and even though I am loath to cut even a few centimetres off my hair, it just looks so much better when the ratty bits are gone. Bonus: I asked him how my natural colour was holding up, and if he saw much grey, and he just laughed and said he saw no grey at all. None. Given how old I’ve been feeling I look of late, that was heartening. And a fringe is better than Botox, as far as I’m concerned. Once the fringe settles down, that is, and quits trying to split along my old part.

It felt pretty good, after letting my self-care go all to hell during the Tapastravaganza, to do something like that for myself. The sheer luxury of having somebody else wash my hair almost made me giddy, to the point where I am thinking a wash-and-blow-out at our local Andrew Collinge Graduates place might be a nice treat every once in a while. Next up, on the self-care list: getting my eyebrows done, and buying some new make-up, instead of continuing to scrape the bottoms of my old containers. I have scaled way back on my make-up use as I get older, not because I don’t give a damn anymore, but because I find what is evidently the new standard (serious contouring, false eyelashes, terrifyingly defined brows, thick, heavy, eye shadow and liner) utterly intimidating. I am incredibly angular, something I discovered after losing a lot of weight, and the last thing I need is fucking contouring.

I am unused to this new face of mine. The softness is gone, I look my age, and there are all those hollows and planes I frankly don’t really know how to work with. Having the fringe back, though, made me somewhat more recognisable to myself. I remember that fringe; that fringe was omnipresent until my late 20s, came back in my early 30s, disappeared again in the mid-30s, came back in my late 30s and the first couple of years of my 40s, then went away for six years. I’ve only had short hair for a few brief periods in my life, and it felt weird, and I went back to long as fast as I could grow it out again, and now, as the slide into proper middle-age continues, I don’t give a shit what anybody says; I like it long, and anybody who thinks it’s inappropriate can kiss my ass.

The new hair must make me look younger, though, because I got checked out more today than I have in a while. Either that, or I was just feeling confident and sassy enough to draw more attention than usual. Good to know I’m not quite invisible yet, at least not all the time.

Cast irony.

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I followed up on slaying the stair cupboard disaster zone by seriously cleaning and decluttering the pantry, which happens to be the room from which one accesses the cupboard. It then leads on to Phil’s home office/man cave/the place where the filing cabinet and printers live, and which I intend to tackle in the very near future, although probably not tomorrow, since my rubbish bin is dangerously close to full from the work I’ve done this week, and I’ll need to wait until it gets emptied next week to continue the purge. So nothing that can’t be donated is leaving the house outside of regular rubbish until then.

Anyway, I got rid of a bunch of crap, and put everything back in order, and I was very pleased with myself, and headed out to do a bit of shopping. Yes, yes, I know, decluttering doesn’t work if you keep bringing in new things to replace the old things you didn’t want, but in my defence, I was only planning on window shopping for Christmas, and picking up a few bits I legitimately needed. Mostly, I just wanted to get out of the house.

So, as if often the case, when I am just wandering about in the shopping district, I ended up in TK Maxx, and really, I should know better, but I love that place. It is my crack den, and no, I’m not going to put down the pipe. Phil and I joke that you could drop me in any city where there might plausibly be a TK Maxx, and I could find it within ten minutes of starting to search. (Proven in Chester, York, Manchester, Leeds and Edinburgh, for the record. London doesn’t count, because I lived there, and had to specifically haul my ass out to Wood Green from where we lived in Camden Town.) I refer to this as “locating the Mothership,” when I go out for my first reconnaissance in a new city.

So there I was, aimlessly wandering through the housewares department, and I say aimlessly, but there’s been a lot of Nordic Ware pans in there of late, and I once made the grave error of passing up a shortbread pan, and as I am planning on making shortbread for Xmas presents this year, I was hoping against hope there would be another one, but no joy on that account today. Nonetheless, there are few things I enjoy more than browsing through kitchenware, so it’s never a wasted trip, particularly when I bend down to look at something on the bottom shelf, and see, jammed way in the back of the shelf above, a tagine. Specifically, a tagine with a cast-iron base. Which I immediately dragged out of hiding — oooof, it was heavy — and internally cheered, when I saw it was a mere snip at £39.95. I have been wanting a tagine for a very long time, but because I lacked an oven big enough to fit a stoneware one into, it was going to have to be stovetop-friendly, and basically, I choked on the Le Creuset price point, and just used either a Dutch oven or a crock pot when I wanted to make a tagine. Which is frequently. And I craved that Le Creuset tagine, and was considering asking for it for Xmas, although Phil would’ve informed me he’s not the kind of man who buys his wife cooking pots for Xmas, for fuck’s sake, just buy the damn thing yourself, and eventually, I probably would have, but only after agonising about it a lot longer. With the imminent arrival of the new oven, I probably would’ve settled for a basic oven-only stoneware one, and no, I don’t believe you can just use a simmer ring and not have it crack. My luck does not run that way.

After I paid for it, and the cashier helped me wrestle the box into a bag, and I was dragging it home, it struck me: Immediately after getting rid of a bunch of stuff that was just cluttering up my limited storage space, I went out and bought what may be the ultimate white elephant of the middle-class British kitchen: a tagine. (This, obviously, does not apply to the kitchens of North African people, middle-class and otherwise, who might be living in the UK.)  I will actually use mine, and that cast-iron base will get plenty of non-tagine use as well — helloooooo cornbread! — but all the same, my reclaimed storage space just disappeared within hours of its reclamation. It’s a good thing I didn’t find that scone pan.

Decluttering redux.

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I don’t know what’s come over me, but this morning I actually went after the biggest rat’s nest in this house — the dark, scary, under-stairs cupboard — and vanquished it. And then I gave my quasi-nephew twenty quid to make all of the broken appliances and random rubbish vanish from my life, and it felt good. It felt great! I may not end up with the perfectly tasteful, carefully curated, Kinfolk-style house of my dreams, but it’s still getting better, you know? Freeing up space in that cupboard (uh, there were broken-down moving boxes from twelve years ago, which should give you some idea of how bad it was) gave me room to put away the dozens of electronics and camera gear boxes Mr. Packrat insists must be kept forever and ever, and that cleared out some room in the conservatory, so I’m one small step closer to living in a house that doesn’t make me want to tear my hair out when I look around me.

I would like to note I do not live in a hoarder house with dead cats in the freezer and precariously-tilting corridors carved from yellowing newspapers and magazines, not at all. I just live in an old Edwardian villa without a lot of built-in storage space, so stuff’s gotta go somewhere else, when there are no closets and limited cupboard space, and that somewhere else always seems to be in my immediate line of sight, alas.

Sometimes I fantasise that kindly elves sneak a big skip onto my driveway, fill it to the brim with all the things I know in my heart I don’t want, and then take it away and anonymously distribute the useable goods to truly deserving organisations and individuals. Or they’d just set that shit on fire someplace else, and I’d never know about it. I’m flexible. This is what my fantasy life has come to, and I’m OK with that, because wouldn’t that be amazing? To be set free from the stuff  you don’t want or need, without having to feel bad about the ugly dishes your late mother-in-law gave you effectively blinking out of existence without you having to knowingly ship them off to Oxfam yourself? Or the stuff you wonder what the hell you were thinking when you actually paid money for it all by yourself?

Well, no elves will come, and if they did, at this moment, I’d probably ask them to please organise and put away all of the baking moulds, cake pans, enamelware, pie dishes, and cookie sheets currently stacked all over my kitchen. I pulled them all out in a fit of anticipatory glee, and now I have to figure out how to get them back in the cupboards, only this time, not just jammed in there, in danger of avalanching out and taking off a toe whenever I open the door, but in some sort of logical order that will make it possible for me to find what I need when I need it. Which I will soon, because Boxing Day is now 24 hours closer than it was when I wrote about it yesterday, and holy crap, I really have to feed 20 people and make a bunch of gifts, and I have just over a month to do it.

Buried Treasures

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So I’ve been digging out the crap caches, and while most of the stuff I’m finding is crap, some of it’s actually valuable or at least entertaining. Whilst digging through an enormous wooden bowl of cruft, I found a laser cat toy I bought a couple of years ago, when I found it in the pet Christmas present display at Sainsbury’s, and which Flash found intermittently entertaining until it disappeared into the cruft bowl. Surprisingly, the battery is still working, and so I spent about ten minutes exercising old fatboy with the red dot. Until he figured out the exciting red dot was coming from the shiny silver thing in my hand, at which point he ran up and started rubbing his cheek pads against it. (I was sitting on the floor.) I was shocked that he appeared to have figured it out. Cognition seems to have happened, and I’m really not sure what to make of it.

Understand: this cat is stupid. Oh god, is he stupid. He has a certain degree of craftiness to his stupidity; he is, after all, a cat, and he’s got enough going on between his fuzzy ears to keep us attending to his needs and humouring his little quirks. I suppose it’s unfair of me to categorise him as stupid, since he is, in fact, exactly as smart as he needs to be, which isn’t very, since the kibble is going to keep coming and the used litter is going to keep going, and being a cat, he isn’t going to work any harder than he needs to, once those needs are met.

Then, of course, we come to the (very) small fortune in change I found in the same bowl, and the bottoms of departing handbags and pockets of off-season coats, along with the change dumped into various baskets and boxes for what reason I cannot tell you, other than to say money is valuable, and thus, small amounts of it wind up in nominally safe places until they can be consolidated into a large enough quantity to be taken in and fed to the coin machine. Yes, it’s kind of a rip off, but I’ll pay a smallish commission to spare myself having to roll coins to take to the bank.

Once again, I unearthed my sole surviving pair of Fat Pants, which I keep as a memento morbid obesity, and pull out on these periodic purges, to gape at their size, because holy shit. Holy shit. I knew I was that fat — my eyes certainly weren’t bigger than my stomach, but they worked well enough to let me know I was extremely fat — but graphic proof is still stunning. Brrrr.

So I offloaded a bunch of stuff, including things Phil has shrunk out of (yay, Phil!) and things that have no use, and found some good stuff that got buried under the useless stuff in the process, so it’s all good. How we came to own the three unused electric toothbrushes I found while cleaning out the bathroom cabinets is a mystery to me, since I didn’t buy them, but I’m assuming they were gifts from my late mother-in-law. I think we’re set on those for quite some time. I emptied and moved my biggest chest of drawers to vacuum behind it, and found the beautiful silver and garnet ring I bought in Edinburgh a couple of years ago, which, outside of a bit of tarnish, is as lovely as ever.

I don’t feel like I’m anywhere near done with this project — the dreaded understair cupboard remains, for example, and Oh God the Books — but I think I’m falling into a habit of spending an hour or so decluttering every morning, and it helps me feel like I will eventually get to where I want to be, which is in a house where I don’t feel oppressed by its contents.

June 2018
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