Just back in from painting a nice clear cross on the front door. C is in the states all week and he’s poorly too – all the bonus points he gets for combining illness with jetlag and having to work are removed by the lovely peaceful clean-cool-sheets-ness of a hotel. I have a stinking cold and feel very sorry for myself (I have run out of lemsips and am housebound, too); Maggie is not at all well. I picked her up from school yesterday all pale, hot and teary (am slightly miffed as she’d been up coughing a lot the previous nght so I had specifically gone in to say that I thought she was mostly ok but she might not be and if not, they should ring me as soon as and I’d go and get her). She took to her bed and slept from 6 last night – 10 this morning, just waking for extra doses of medicine and drinks of water and cries. She’s been up and down today but was back in bed again by 6 this evening and I honestly can’t see her going back to school tomorrow.

Which is a disaster, as tomorrow evening she has her last ever playdate with her bestfriendinthewholeworldever, who is leaving the country this weekend. We are braced for grief.

Tamsin is perky and bright (it was her turn last week, when she was sick all over me and the bed on two consecutive nights) which is not ideal as I cannot find the energy to do fun toddler stuff. Much cbeebies has been watched today, but I really will have to think of something for tomorrow (even if that involves wrapping her up and shutting her out in the frosty garden for half an hour).

We saw the Mighty Boosh at the weekend: was entertaining but not hilariously laugh-out-loud funny, which was a bit disappointing. Cameron and Maggie enjoyed the Mold panto far more.

(Sorry Karen, I know you are fed up of Christmas already – but people have Asked, so there.)

The recipe for these lovely Jewel Biscuits is taken almost un-fiddled-with from the lovely Scheherezade Goldsmith’s lovely Christmas book (subtitle: how to have a really lovely jolly eco Christmas; chapter 1: first acquire an enormous amount of money and several hundred acres of Herefordshire. Add staff to do the menial stuff while you footer about with felt and oranges, and find friends of the sort to appreciate a galvanised bucket of salt as a present.)

Ahem.

Cream 100g butter and 275g caster sugar. Add 1/2 tsp vanilla extract and 2 large eggs, then sift in 525g plain flour, 2 tsp baking powder, 2 tsp ground cinnamon and a pinch of salt. Mix it all up with a slosh of milk until it is nice and doughy, then wrap in clingfilm and rest in the fridge for 30 minutes or so (NB Sheherezade does not specify clingfilm as it is not very eco. Use whatever you like.)

Preheat the oven to 190C. Roll out the dough on a nice floury surface, to about 1/2 cm thick. Cut shapes – I did a Christmas tree, a star and a bell – and use a smaller cutter (or the lid of a  screw-cap wine bottle) to make holes. Fill the holes with crushed hardboiled sweets* (S says they should be organic; I used Foxes). You could sprinkle some caster sugar over now, for a glittery effect, but I found I preferred a snowy dusting of icing sugar once they were cooled. Don’t forget to make a hole if you want to hang them – and you really do, else you can’t appreciate the stained-glass centres. Put in the oven on baking sheets covered in baking parchment, about 10 minutes: move the entire bit of parchment onto the cooling rack and leave until completely cold. Icing sugar; ribbon (cellophane bag for school fete).

Oh, and the book says this makes 12 cookies…mine were reasonably large (palm-sized trees and stars; slightly smaller bells), certainly as big as you would want, and I got about 30, plus another 15 toddler-sized plain stars when I ran out of sweets.

*My entire kitchen is covered in minute shards of hardboiled sweet. Ignore at your peril Sheherezade’s top tip of putting them in a (clean, recycled) plastic bag before bashing with a rolling pin: the individual plastic wrappers Do Not Do. Or, as I found rather late in the process, if you get your hole the right sort of size – say the size of the wine-bottle top – you don’t have to crush at all, just bung an intact sweety in. They melt just the same.

I bought Green Parent magazine today, for the first time (I think – I buy magazines at random and might have had it once before, a long time ago). The title looks like it might be my sort of thing, though I knew deep down I probably wasn’t going to like it – but it was a craft issue and Maggie and I are getting quite into craft. After a fashion, given that I have no skill, but we enjoy trying. We made salt dough autumn leaves last month! (Which are still half-finished and on the side in the kitchen: maybe we’ll get them done for next autumn.) I was right – I don’t like it much: it is smug. I could manage it assuming we were home-schooling anti-vaxers, because the clue is there in the title. I probably don’t need an article written in Very Simple Words about how to be friends with normals (!) without offending them, poor ignorant creatures. What I am mostly irritated about is the fact that I am now going to have to write to them: one of their recipes is for coconut ice (this in a magazine that suggests one might not be friends with somebody who eats sausages*). Coconut ice made with condensed milk. I need explain no further to my dedicated reader who hangs on my every word, but for those of you who were perhaps not paying such close attention, I have tried (failed) previously to source condensed milk that is not made by (boo, hiss) Nestle. It just can’t be done. Now, I looooooove condensed milk: it is one of the few products that makes me snap schminciples and buy anyway (the other two being the kitkat and the rolo). But a magazine that is oh-so-ethical such as this should really not be pushing it, don’t you think? I imagine a large proportion of their readership will be boycotting. Must write a letter.

Speaking of bandwagon-jumping crafts, I fear I might be gearing up to knit something. I’ve been holding out for ages simply because everybody in the entire world has taken up knitting. (I knitted a cushion cover when we were in Japan but that is the only thing I have done in the nearly 20 years since I was a girl guide knitting teddy bears.)  I have recently acquired my granny’s cast-off** needles, a big bag of old wool, and today in Oxfam a book of basic knitting techniques fell into my hands.Help!

*I have no idea. Am insufficiently green, clearly.
**Geddit? Ha ha ha.

Maggie is a very lovely big sister and came home from school yesterday with a card she had made for Tamsin. Unfortunately she also brought a Lurgy, so all birthday activities have been called off in favour of sitting for an hour in the doctor’s waiting room at lunchtime (then for half an hour in with the doctor – luckily we were the last appointment – as we discussed cider-making, pig-slaughtering, local vs organic, and the keeping of chickens. And allotments. And lurgies.) Still, Tamsin doesn’t seem to have minded. I suppose a day at home playing with one’s new toys and big sister is probably preferable, at two, to trawling round Liverpool in the rain: I am disappointed though. (And I had intended taking advantage of my mum and dad being here to hit Ikea tomorrow, which I won’t now be able to do.)

You may remember me previously bemoaning my inability to make a good flapjack. They taste good (great, even) but never fail to fall to bits – or they are so hard as to extract teeth. When Mia came to visit she and Maggie made flapjacks that were very tasty and nearly stayed together, kick-starting my quest again. They were good, but definitely towards the thin and chewy end of the flapjack scale (for reference: 3 oz butter, 3 oz brown sugar, 4 oz oats and 10 min at 180 C* I think, perhaps Mia will correct me if I am wrong. She blamed their slight crumbliness on me having the wrong sort of sugar.) What I really want is thicker and chewier, and last night I made it! (Hoorah, I hear you cry.) As follows:

Melt 8 oz butter and stir in 8 oz brown sugar (soft rather than demerara). Beat in an egg then add some nutmeg, 10 0z porridge oats and 4 oz sultanas. Push into greased (and lined) tin and bake for an hour at 150 C.

I know you are dying to know the secret and I believe it is this, as explained by Mia: no golden syrup (and the egg probably helps). I am going to revisit my delicious yet intractable apple flapjack recipe later,  and see if I can persuade it to stick together.

*One hundred and eighty what? Elephants?

Like Pewari, you may have noticed I’ve not been here much. I’m going to share my drivel too, to get back into it (don’t feel you have to read). We’ve just been Very Busy lately, but not the sort of busy that makes for blogging – visitors, school stuff, kiddy stuff. Y’know. Karen, Pete and Bernard came, which was nice, and then Mia did, which was nice too. Tamsin’s birthday is later this week so I’ll be back with photos then (though there are a couple from this weekend here). I had a night out with some School-Gate Mums, which was not at all scary once I got there (but very alcohol-fuelled) and Maggie’s new bestfriendinthewholeworldever, from her class, is moving to sodding Ireland at the end of the month, which is something of a disaster.

That’s my girl.

Poor me.

Cameron left for Japan* at 7 am on Saturday: I was left to shiver achily under a blanket on the sofa while the children trashed the house. (I am still full of cold and yet to find the energy to pick up all the bits from every single jigsaw we own and sort them into the appropriate boxes: it is a good job Cameron is still away as he doesn’t tolerate bits on the floor terribly well.)

Tamsin fell off a bridgey thing at Tumbletots on Monday and smacked her head on the floor. I am hoping that is her third thing and she will be ok now: she is such an urchin with hacked hair, pointy teeth and a bruise. She does have a whole lovely new winter wardrobe though, as I got a bit carried away at Mothercare.

On the very bright and exciting side: Maggie brought home her very first reading book last week and (mostly) read it to me! Am very proud.

*so I was already sulking.

Just back from the dentist: T fell flat on her face in the kitchen this morning and chipped her front two teeth. Poor wee mite. (Seems quite cheery now and is doing her very best with some bread even though they must hurt.) Dentist says they don’t have to be taken out (phew), chances are the second teeth underneath shouldn’t be damaged (phew) but they might go greyish or even black. And to give her calpol (ha ha ha perhaps she’d like to come and do it – it is easier to give pills to a cat).

We had planned to go to the village toddler group for the second time this morning, but are now going to have a nice quiet day at home instead. I went once when we moved here, with M, but she was too old really. Then we were Very Brave last week and tried it again (mother and toddler groups can be quite scary, if you are a wuss like me. I mean, they are not actually scary. But full of women who know each other and don’t know you.) It was fine! Better than that, it was nice. Only about 14 mums and babies, crumpets for the little ones to eat, and a nice old lady came at the end to play the piano for songs.

While I am here (I don’t seem to be, much, at the moment), let me recommend a lovely holiday cottage in the Peak District: Harthill Hall. There were 23 of us and we stayed in the Manor House (trampoline, games room with wii, hot tub) but there are smaller cottages for smaller groups. We bagsied the master bedroom with an enormous 4-poster and a claw-footed bath int he middle of the room; it had a small anteroom (cupboard) with a tiny bed in, just right for M who thought she was a princess in a castle. Most people walked but we just stayed put: the children bounced for almost the entire weekend and I read a book!

Well, that was a rotten day. People said M would be testing the boundaries when she started schhol and I thought I was prepared for it, if a little unclear what exactly they meant.

Today, she cut off Tamsin’s hair. Then started on her own.

I am so sad; I love little T in bunches and now it will be months before she can have them again. It looks absolutely dreadful (here).

Obviously we didn’t go to the zoo, as we had planned. Cameron has gone to Germany (he was going anyway, he hasn’t gone there in a huff or anything) and I’m just feeling really low tonight. With an enormous to-do list for the week looming over me. No chocolate in the house either.