More baby-tv

Terry sent me a link on Thursday, with the subject ‘one to send to the childminder’; now M’s commented with the same link on my earlier post about Babs’ widening vocabulary. Apparently Australia is planning to restrict TV time for toddlers, in recognition of evidence that TV ain’t that great for the under-twos.

My continuing response, as I read?  “Aaaaargh.” I know it, I know it, I know it. It drives me crazy. I want to send it to the childminder, but I think that’s probably Not OK. I want to post it on facebook, but I think the people I’d like to read it will think I’m posting it pointedly at them (partly true) or would just write me off as a crank, back on my soap box. Which shouldn’t scare me; wouldn’t have scared me half my life ago – would probably have encouraged me.

A draft of the Australian government’s guidelines says that screen time for young children “may reduce the amount of time they have for active play, social contact with others and chances for language development”,

Well, so far, so obvious. But, it

may also “affect the development of a full range of eye movement [and] . . . reduce the length of time they can stay focused”. Jo Salmon, associate professor of epidemiology at Deakin University, was one of the researchers who informed the Australian government’s draft guidelines. “Children aged six to 30 months who are watching television have less developed vocabulary, display more aggressive behaviour and have poor attention spans,” she says.

Which I find pretty scary. I know Ben Goldacre would take all that with a pinch of salt ’til he had time to check out the study design and data analysis, but it’s pretty convincing on a common-sense basis, isn’t it?

The Australian government’s advice is supported by the recommendation of the American Academy of Pediatrics that under-twos are not exposed to any television time. Dr Dimitri Christakis at Seattle Children’s Research Institute found that for every extra hour watching DVDs, 8- to 16-month-olds learned six to eight fewer words than children who spent no time in front of the screen. Marie Evans Schmidt at the Centre for Media and Child Health found that even just having television on in the background while under threes play with their toys disrupted their attention span even when they appeared to pay little attention to it.

This last bit reiterates what I was told (among a group of new mothers) by a speech and language therapist at our local Children’s Centre when the babies were tiny. She told us that the radio or TV in the background interfered with young babies’ and toddlers’ concentration as they hadn’t yet developed an ability to filter; it was enough to keep my radio time limited when Babs was teeny, and now life feels so hectic absolutely all the time that I’m happy with no background noise a lot of the time, and I figure that can only be good for both of us.

I do think TV has it’s uses; as I said to DrG, I’d be like he and K and use the TV if I had more than one child and 5 days at home alone with them – I’m not going to pillory anyone for needing a way to take time out. And I look forward to Babs being big enough that we can all snuggle down on a rainy saturday afternoon and watch a family movie. But that’s going to require a >60 minute attention span, so I can argue I’m playing a long game.

Whatever; I don’t want to be smug and self-righteous about the issue of tv. I just worry about kids’ attention spans, and speech development, and cognitive development, and intellectual flexibility, and imaginations and capacity to entertain themselves. I have concerns about my own attention span, vocabularly and articulacy, and all the other things in that list – and more. I’m not sure government restrictions are the way forward, but certainly an open discussion about the issues, based on the evidence, and a responsible line from the TV producers and schedulers, and a more general understanding of the issues wouldn’t be misplaced. I’m not sure sending an article to the childminder is the best way to start that debate locally, mind.

Southern Cross Housewifery & Laundry Work – a letter from New Zealand

OK, so it was an email via a social networking site, with a jpeg attached, but still. It’s nice to evoke the old times. I’m increasingly nostalgic for an age of which I have no experience, and have only seen in photos.

Steve – lovely Steve, lasagne-helper and icing-mixer Steve – is on his honeymoon in New Zealand after a lovely, lovely wedding in Muswell Hill on a beautiful sunny October day a couple of weeks ago. And from his honeymoon, he sent me this, spotted in a museum I don’t know where.

Fantastically, it’s listed on Amazon; written by MA Blackmore and published in 1931; revised and re-published in 1949. But not available. There was one for sale on trademe.co.nz in a listing that’s still visible but which closed in 2006. And that’s all the google could tell me.

A couple of years ago for my birthday, Terry bought me A Plain Cookery Book for the Working Classes,  republished in 2007, having been first published in 1852 by the chief cook to Queen Victoria. Brilliant. It’s all sheep’s head broth and baked bullock’s heart, interspersed with more familiar and still-palatable things like bread and butter pudding and bacon and eggs.

I’m rather pleased we’ve moved on from heads and hooves and pluck*, and that the current recession (rather than the climate change imperative that should be encouraging our shift to simpler living) has seen people coming round to the idea that it’s not that hard to live more  in the 21st century majority world without really making any sacrifices:  more jumpers and less central heating; more local food and fewer food miles; more thrift and less waste. I’m just a bit dismayed that people are climbing over each other to publish books like economy gastronomy (by a twice Michelin-starred chef-restaurateur and a posh West Londoner chef-businesswoman) and the thrift book: live well and spend less (by a posh chick-lit novelist) when there have been gems around like these for the last century and a half; that we have to be reminded of it all all over again, not by our parents and grandparents, but by posh folk in big houses who are not so much capturing a zeitgeist as cynically harnessing opportunities to make yet more bloody money, with no sense of irony. With that, I shall fetch out the mangle to save on the spin cycle, and get out the darning.

*Pluck = “heart, liver, lights etc.”

Supper time – our repertoire of twelve. What’s yours?

I wrote in Chutney Peggy, in an off-the-cuff remark, that we have a repertoire of 12 pesce-veggie suppers, which just got me thinking that I wonder really how many things we have. So I’m gonna list them, and I want to know yours too. For inspiration, like.

1. We do a mean spag bol, just occasionally
2. Ditto a chilli, sporadically – winter, probably
3. Dhal
4. Salmon, mash and broccoli
5. Sausage, mash and gravy
6. Red thai curry, with veg and prawns, sometimes tofu
7. Lasagne, when there’s people coming
8. Pasta with mushrooms & walnuts
9. Pasta with grilled tomatoes and onions
10. Pasta with courgette, chili and garlic
11. Nigel Slater’s Greek baked fish on special occasions, or just evenings we want to make special – table, not lap
12. Greek baked feta, with ciabatta or baguette

Which really does come to twelve. Wow. Our other evening staples are burgers in bread (spicy bean burgers, in preference), and when there’s absolutely no time or inspiration, fish finger sarnies. And this summer, we’ve had falafel and pitta several times, and halloumi and pitta a few times. And there’s tuna-pasta bake, when there are no fresh veggies in. And salmon fish cakes, ditto. And fish pie, when we’re feeling flush and long for the comfort. And green frittatta, when we’ve bought spinach. Pre-baby, we used to have chakchouka or a proper fry-up quite often for weekend brunch. Post-baby it’s all gone Pete Tong, what with baby needing breakfast at 8.30 at the weekends, little tinker.

But that’s 20. Not bad, I reckon. Though we’ve had very few of them lately – well, few of the ones that require thought, consideration and skill. We can pretend that’s because it’s been summer, but possibly it’s because we’ve been lazy/tired/down with pig flu. You?

Toddler feeding, or How I bowed to peer pressure and stopped the boob

Babs will be 18 months old on Wednesday. Wow. As I lamented last week, she’s not my baby any more.

A couple of months ago, I looked around and noticed no-one I know is still breast-feeding. There are four mothers I met perinatally that I liked enough to keep in touch with 18 months later, and they all stopped at 6, 7, 8 and 15 months. My friend M, who breastfed her first until she became pregnant with her second (about 12 months), thought she’d continue longer this time, but a spell at her parents’ in Spain sin bébé when said baby was under one, meant she returned sadly to a bairn more interested in a bottle than her boob.

Babs, meanwhile, has been down to two feeds a day and no milk in between (save for breakfast) since about 9 months, when the health visitor advised me to cut out the milk to encourage my scrawny wee thing to eat. It didn’t work but it kind of stuck, and I’ve had to bite my lip as some of my circle and a simpleton have vexed and angstd about how awful it is that the nursery didn’t offer the milk again when it was refused and so poor baby might, missing one drink one day, just waft away and die; and wondered incessantly how much milk they should be giving mid morning and mid afternoon. (None?).

I’m sure without the HV’s advice I’d have been feeding Babs in the day far more, but when I went back to work when she was 10½ months I wouldn’t have found the time to express and she’d still have only been breastfed morning and evening most days anyway. By 12 months, when the 6 weeks of getting up at 5am to breastfeed and again at 6.45 to go to work began took its toll, a different health visitor told me I should stop – I had a responsibility to work to have a proper night’s sleep and function properly all day*. Sleep training took about two nights, and Babs has simply never given me any indication she misses the boob at night. She did, however, start asking for ‘boobie’ when she woke up and when we got ready for bed, and did concern me that now she could name it there might be problems when I wanted to stop.

But it’s a funny thing, working out when to stop. When breastfeeding’s as hard-won as it was for us (oh those hellish first weeks), it’s difficult to stop it just to switch to cows’ milk, which costs money, and resources, and keeps poor cows in calf until they’re knackered and useless and sent to the knacker’s. There is no real need to stop, especially as the way we did it was entirely private, away from potential opprobrium. Occasionally I’d have to miss the morning feed cos I’d drunk too much the night before, and as my glass of wine a night became two or sometimes three I was noticing I’d drop the morning feed quite often. But the evening was a nice opportunity to cuddle after a day apart, and to snuggle after we’d fought over tea, I didn’t really want to drop that.

My friend L breastfed her first until 2½. I have stopped at 17½ months. Babs started messing about, on and off, off and on, every evening, and bedtime was getting stressful. My longest-serving contemporary, who unlike me had never given formula, she’d always expressed, had stopped a couple of months earlier. Terry said I should stop; I’m not quite sure why. I felt a bit scathing when another mother at the children’s centre told me she was still night feeding at 18 months, and more scathing and a bit grossed out when a friend of a friend told me she was still feeding day and night at nearly 3. And I guess I find some motivations questionable: on a blog a woman’s justification for continuing feeding past two including providing a way for the kiddie to calm himself down when he gets overexcited/frightened/angry, being the easiest way to get him to take a nap during the day, and being a convenient way to keep him quiet, eg when she’s on the phone. Now, I know I’ve been blessed with a very good baby (and now a reasonable toddler), so I can’t imagine how stressful and difficult it might be for some, but these are things the kiddie needs to learn to do, and delaying that learning by giving the boob seems a bit counter-productive to me. Unlearning to use the boob to calm down, or keep occupied while mummy’s busy, or get to sleep must be much harder work than learning to manage those things from teeny. Indeed, her final reason is that ‘weaning would probably be hard work’. Sigh.

I do feel guilty, being critical like this; each to their own; whatever works for you. Some people no doubt think that I’m wrong, from either side of the fence. As always, it’s about balancing what works for mummy with what the child needs – really needs. I don’t want to be feeding past two; I don’t want Babs to be asking for it; that is about social norms, social pressure. And if J was still doing it, I think I’d feel more comfortable with carrying on. Because I also don’t really want to give it up. But part of that is about not wanting my baby to stop needing me, or snuggling with me, or – let’s face it – growing up.

* Harsh but fair, I thought. She had a real school-marm-y approach, and even peered over half-moon specs, but she had a fair point. Inevitably, the vexing mothers who seem to overreact to anything from a health/social care professional, thought it was outrageous that she suggest I… er… sleep-train the baby.

Jammy mummy

I think I possibly have a slightly obsessional nature (if only I could turn this to exercise…), so two weekends of chutney got me so fired up I thought I’d have a go at jam. Never ever tried it before, and although my mum and Grandma used to make it (and my mum still does, on occasion), I don’t even think I’ve witnessed its making.

I kind of suspected, short of not setting, not much could really go wrong, so when I found punnets of plums on special at the supermarket on saturday (how’s that for accidental alliteration!), I jumped at plum jam. The sugar aisle even had preserving sugar (who knew!), so I chucked them in my basket and skipped off home. As we flicked through the book later, T got in on it too, and we wandered down to the lovely Walthamstow marshes on Saturday afternoon to pick elderberries for elderberry jelly, and we’re going to try and make that too.

Of course, after two rounds of chutney making, we’ve run out of jars (apart from two huge ones), so I had to put a call out to my E17 ladies for jam jars. R was off at a wedding, B had recycled all hers, but J had 6 (‘with lids’) I could have, and she very kindly dropped them with her baby at the (shared) childminder on Monday.

The plums, meanwhile, said ‘ripen at home’ but remained rock hard for days, even while one began mouldering on Tuesday. So on Wednesday, I worked at home, and after getting two loads of washing out on the line (and doing a full morning’s work), I couldn’t contain it any longer, and I got started.

Good Housekeeping said the plums didn’t need stoning, and could go in whole, but I would halve and possibly stone them next time – they took much longer this way. It was a pretty interesting endeavour; you boil your plums in water, and watch them stew, then you add your sugar, and wonder if the plums will ever break down enough, and then you watch it boil, and you wonder if it will ever get from runny to jammy, and then you pot it, and you watch it boil in the hot, hot jar (aaargh!), and then you top up some of your jars, cos you realise you’ve got a bit left over (watch out for those hot lids), and you find that the cooler jam is much jammier than the hot stuff you poured in, and then you sit them on the windowsill to cool, and you pop in every so often to check the set, and you grow despondent, and wish for a jam thermometer, and then the next day you notice, they’ve set! It’s so exciting! It really was. Super ace.

So yesterday I bought strawberries, and sugar with added pectin, and a lemon, and today I’m going to have to buy some kilner jars, or decant every condiment in the fridge, and I’m making more! It’s really so exciting!

And I don’t even really like jam!

Plum Jam (makes about 6 jars)

1.3 kg (3lbs) plums

450 ml (3/4 pint) water

1.3 kg (3lbs) sugar

knob of butter (I know!)

And, if you’re using dessert plums, rather than a cooking variety, the juice of a large lemon.

Place the plums and water in a large, wide pan, and simmer gently for 30-4o minutes, until the fruit is soft and the pan contents well reduced. Remove from the heat and add the sugar, stirring until it’s dissolved, then add the knob of butter. Bring it to the boil and boil rapidly for 20 minutes or so, stirring frequently, until the setting point is reached. (ie, until a little on a cold saucer will wrinkle when pushed). Take the pan off the heat and remove the stones with a slotted spoon. Leave to cool for a few minutes (you don’t, apparently, want it boiling in the jars), then pot and cover. Voila! Then you just need to watch it like a hawk for 3-4 hours to see if it looks like it’s setting, and relax. Jammy!

Chutney Peggy

That’s like Chutney Mary, which, upon thinking about it, is probably not that universal a reference. (It’s an Indian restaurant in Chelsea, which I’ve never been to and only know about from my friend, universal chatterbox and serial repeater, Ange.)

Anyhoo, it’s September, there’s beetroot in the veg box and green tomatoes in the garden, so it’s chutney time.

We’ve had to cut the veg box down to once a fortnight, partly because we just physically can’t consume all the vegetables in our little family of 2 and a tiddler in a week, and partly because I can’t come up with stuff to make at the drop of a hat with things arriving spontaneously that I would usually actively seek out if or when I wanted them. Even though it’s been summer, there’s been a bit of a glut of meat-and-two-veg type veg for months – really, who wants a whole cabbage every week? And why are carrots in most boxes every week?* – and our reasonably varied, but still quite stuck-in-a-rut (well a repetoire of 12) pescetarian-vegetarian diet simply can’t sustain it. I put it down to things like we eat a more mediterranean diet at home; maybe it’s disorganisation, or lack of imagination – I’m sure some people squeal with glee when met with such a challenge – but at 7.45pm when I left work at 4.28pm and have only just stopped, and now have the washing up to do before I can start cooking supper, I don’t want the challenge, possess the imagination, or fathom when I could factor in being more proactively food-organised.

So anyway, while I love beetroot – roasted, pickled, grated, saladed – and even have a super pickled-beetroot-pot that was Grandma and Grandpa’s…

… if you’ve got nothing to have it roasted with, and don’t really know how to pickle it, and can’t quite fancy the washing and cleaning associated with it in the middle of the week, what can you do with it? That’s right – Chutney! Why can’t everything in life be this simple?

Yeah, right. But beetroot chutney couldn’t possibly just need beetroot, could it? No, it needs onions (easy enough, so far so obvious), and raisins (no problem), and apples (oh really?) and green tomatoes (oh dear). Well, as my mum said, when I told her I’d fudged it: “Well a recipe’s really only a guide…” Let’s hope so.

But, for your delectation, Beetroot Chutney:

225g (8oz) apples

225g (8oz) raw beetroot, scrubbed and chopped

225g (8oz) green tomatoes, chopped

225g (8oz) onions, peeled and finely chopped

1 garlic clove, peeled and crushed

1 tbsp ground ginger

1 tsp ground allspice

1 tsp salt

300ml (1/2 pint) distilled malt vinegar

175g (6oz) Demerara sugar

Peel, quarter, core and chop the apples. Pop them in a large pan with everything else and slowly bring to the boil, stirring. Simmer for 50-60 minutes until the vegetables are tender, stirring frequently. Increase the heat for the final 10 minutes to reduce the liquid and thicken the chutney. Allow to cool slightly, and spoon into sterilised jars, then cover and seal with vinegar-proof lids (Good Housekeeping says to do this once the jars are completely cold. Oops.

GH also says you can store for up to 3 months in a cool dark place (like, a cupboard), and refrigerate once opened, for up to 2 weeks. Personally, I reckon you can store it for a year and eat it over a couple of months. But that’s just me. (My family has an iron constitution; it might not work for everyone.)

So fired up was I by the beets, I decided I had to make the biggest hit of my last chutney madness, back in October 2006. Terry’s not allowed me to make chutney since, when I failed to ensure adequate ventilation, and stinked up his flat for possibly 3 months, if not more. Pear, Prune and Walnut Chutney. Again, ‘a recipe’s only really a guide’.

Pear, prune & walnut chutney:

4 large onions, chopped
1kg ripe but firm pears, peeled, cored and diced (I used just under a kilo, because that’s what we had)
250g Agen prunes, quartered (I opened a tin, they weren’t Agen, they were unspecified)
6cm piece root ginger, peeled and very finely chopped
250g dark muscovado sugar
400ml cider vinegar (I had about a tablespoonful, so I made up the quantity with malt. oops!)
200ml water (I used the apple juice from the prune tin, and made up the quantity with water)
150g walnut pieces (or near enough…)

It’s really so easy: you put all the ingredients in a heavy-based pan, and stir it over a medium heat until the sugar has dissolved. Once it comes to the boil, reduce the heat and simmer it for about 1½ hours, until it has thickened and reduced by about half. You then just pour it into sterilised jars (about 6) and the recipe (at www.waitrose.com, of course) says to seal with jam pot covers. I never do, I just pop on the lid.

Ooh, a quick note for the uninitiated: sterilised jars? I’m not sure, so I get them scrupulously clean with ecover washing up liquid and very hot water, rinse them out and stick them and their lids in the oven at about 180ºC for about 10 minutes. I have no idea if that will do, but T seemed to think it was not unreasonable.

*Carrots: They’re in the ‘Favourites’ box alongside the nation’s most-purchased veg, including things like broccolli, which I can believe, but do people really eat carrots every week, even if they buy them? What the hell do they do with them? (I’ve looked for carrot curry but was not convinced; I’ve looked up carrot chutney, but have yet to find…)

Heartsink: baby says ‘cbeebies’

I guess it was bound to happen eventually, but it’s all come together and I must be hormonal, because it’s making me so sad.

After a few weeks (it might have been a couple of months) of Babs seriously winding me up on the days I look after her alone (twice weekly til this week), she’s turned a corner, hit 17 and-a-half months and is having a seriously fantastic ‘word explosion’. It’s brilliant, uplifting and fascinating: every day, she picks up two or three new words; she’ll repeat a word from the sentence you’ve just said, roll it around, watch your mouth as you repeat it back to her, practice it once or twice, look properly interested, smile at your obvious pleasure, and move on. It’s amazing and hugely gratifying to watch. She’s been a pretty brilliant communicator for a while – pointing, asking, making sound effects, even when she lacked the language, but this is something else. Suddenly she’s less whingey, she’ll stop, listen and try when I interrupt a mini-tantrum and ask her to ‘talk to mummy’, and tell her to tell me what she wants; she’s happier, I’m happier, and we can properly respond to each other and she’s doing amazing things like telling us when she wants to go to bed, or to sleep.

But with all the great developments, there are inevitably the surprising, and even slightly alarming things. When I told her off for pouring her water on the table a week ago (it’s been a nightly occurrence for, ooh, about a year), she waggled her finger at me, and said ‘no… naughty Babs’, which damn-near broke my heart. Where did she get that from?! For a couple of weeks she’s been saying her name as though she’s addressing every observation and statement to herself, and just occasionally I’ve told her something she’s done is naughty – but I’m really careful not to tell her she’s naughty. Terry was with me, and we both felt equally crestfallen, and both immediately, sadly, worried that the childminder has been admonishing her like that. We angsted about it for the evening, but haven’t really mentioned it since, but something about it affected us both, and it’s really just made me, well, sad.

I guess there’s something about letting go, about coming to terms with their separateness from you… I don’t know. I do know I find London a lot scarier than I ever used to, and feel sad for Babs when people she smiles at or waves at or talks to in that completely hopeful, excited, expectant way don’t or choose not to notice or respond. (As an ex-scowler myself, I have to remember there are myriad reasons you might not want to look or respond, but she’s my baby! My perfect baby! Who’s learning the world is a cold, hard place one non-response at a time. It’s heart-breaking).

Suddenly, with the new explosion of language, the extent of the influence of the world outside our home and our care slips into view. She spies a small glass, smaller than the pints we use for water: “Juice!” Juice? When’s she ever had juice?! She goes nuts when she’s denied a crisp; when’s she had crisps?? [OK, no language there, pedants]. I make mum take back an ‘In the night garden’ branded toy, but allow in a Fimbles book from the charity shop on the basis that I think Fimbles are no longer in vogue, but the first time I see her pick it up, she beams and says ‘Fimbles!’ and it’s suddenly her favourite book, and today she leant in and kissed one of the characters as she flicked through it alone; everything else she wants us to read to her….

TV scares me, not least because of the way other people react to my not wanting Babs to watch it. I had a conversation with another mother recently, a teacher (though a recently qualified, young for her age, weirdly naive Londoner teacher), who knocked me sideways with the argument (which began and ended here) that ‘TV’s good for their imagination’. We were in the home of another mother, and both of them know and have known for a year how I feel about TV (unnecessary, exploited by capitalism, eerily entrancing of babies), but when the Night Garden toys were dug out of a toybox, the other mother named the toys and sang their songs to my baby, reinforcing the twice (in my care) she’s seen and heard them. When a book came out later and was violently fought over by 3 seventeen month olds, I had to really bite my tongue, and when later still we talked about TV and I simplified my reasons to not wanting Babs begging me for every branded item as we walk around the supermarket, I was told, like I was stupid or something, that ‘You don’t have to get them for her!’. No trace of irony. Nowhere. It makes me want to scream.

So when the childminder raised her rate by 25% last week, swiftly followed by my finding a half sucked boiled sweet lolly on the buggy when I came early to collect Babs, waking her up with the doorbell at 4.45pm and having a hell of a time getting her to sleep at 7.30 that night, and I then found out from our friend that when she picked her daughter up one day ‘they were all on the sofa watching Timmy Time’, it all felt like a bit too much.

Someone else’s Facebook status update, in response to the anti-BBC Murdoch speech at Edinburgh last week, suggested that any parent with pre-school kiddlies simply could not do without CBeebies…. I commented, but sounded like a pedantic ass, so I deleted it. Tonight his update says his baby’s favourite book is the Next catalogue – she squeals with delight at the Night Garden and Dora Explorer items. I wearily, sadly, rest my case.

On Friday, with BBC6 Music on the radio, Babs tuned in to the ‘BBC news’ announcement, and squeaked ‘CBeebies!’. Horrified, I corrected her: ‘BBC’.

She’s not my baby anymore. She’s a toddler; she’s becoming hersef. She’s interacting with the world and taking on what she wants to take on; she’s exploring and experimenting and growing. She’s an absolute delight, a treasure, and a precious, precious thing. But if I thought that turning my life and my home over to a baby, her needs, demands and schedule was a hard lesson in accepting I can’t control everything, I was just being blisteringly naive. She belongs to the world now, not to me.

But I can hear her twittering away to herself in bed, talking to her toys and and talking to herself, and by golly, it’s the loveliest sound.

Disgusted, E17: Hounding Harriet Harman – what year is it again?

I simply couldn’t put it better myself: Ruth Sunderland in the Observer.

radiation vacation

Last week we had the second leg of our summer holiday. After a week in the beautiful county of my miserable youth, a week in the county of Terry’s glorious birth and reasonably happy childhood and adolescence, Cumbria.

Travelling through Cumbria from the south east where we entered from Lancaster, through the twee nose-to-tail traffic-jammed Lake District towns, and round the fells to the grim, declining former mining and manufacturing towns of the north west, before you meet the sight of the Sellafield radiation station dominating the horizon and the coastline, you don’t get a sense that you could possibly have a happy adolescence. But Terry and his family are laid back, and born and bred, and (Sellafield) factory folk, so I’ll take his word for it.

Anyway, for me, having Sellafield (‘It’s not Sellafield, it’s Calder Hall’; ‘Well where’s Sellafield then?’; ‘It’s the bit next door’; ‘Well it’s all on the same site. Let’s call it Sellafield’) on the doorstep was a little disquieting, but I bit my tongue as I was driven round Seascale (‘a company town’), and bit it a bit harder when it turned out we weren’t going to the beautiful beach at Drigg I’d been told about, but instead were taking my precious tiny daughter to splash about in the sea beneath the nuclear power plant (‘It’s not a nuclear power plant, it’s a re-processing plant’; ‘But they used to make power, right?’; ‘Yes, but they stopped in 2003′; ‘But it was a power plant? So we’ll call it a power plant’).

Terry’s father, who unlike my own family is neither very direct nor at all directive, allowed us to travel to said beach with the baby in only the clothes she was wearing and wellies, which had to be stripped from her within minutes as she stumbled and filled a wellie with water (boots and wet socks off), fell down in a rock pool (thrusting wellies at father – trousers and only nappy off), then sat down and splashed like a happy wee fishie (top off; damn, no sunscreen). ‘Who here has had kids before?’ I only half-joked.

Unlike many of the surrounding villages, Terry’s village is beautiful, was clearly very wealthy at points, and in his youth still had 3 working farms. (It still smells like it has working farms. But maybe that’s the smell of uranium.) We saw his first school, the outside of the two pubs (Terry’s not very direct either, at least with his family, so I didn’t get to see the inside, though i badgered him), and the lovely playground, flanked by a bubbling brook. But beyond the village, Seascale and a trip over the fells to see Terry’s brilliant, bonkers aunt in Barrow in Furness*, we didn’t see much Cumbria. Well, I mean we saw it, but we didn’t get to feel it. I didn’t interact with the landscape, and it’s all a bit big, and dark, and looming for me, which I think it might not be if I’d felt within it. As we travelled back to London, through North Yorkshire, green, lush, stone-walled, hilly, tree-y – interesting – Terry observed that I prefer ‘twee’ England. He might be right. (I’m thinking pinnies, and jam, and cream teas and baking). That fits better with me than dark, isolated, looming-hills England. Which may have fit better with my miserable adolescence.

Anyway, after a few days with Terry’s kind, gentle, generous and welcoming but infuriatingly reticent father, I had a much needed dose of direct Quince company as we stopped in on my great Aunt in Cleveland, who made me laugh out loud several times and didn’t stop yammering the two hours we were there. Poor Auntie’s fridge freezer had broken so she was in a pickle and quite apologetic, so we busied about and made ourselves at home and tried to help out and I felt totally awash with love for my grandpa’s sister who I wished then lived closer, yet whom I’ve seen only once since I was a child. (Tears, real tears, pricking me now).

Babs had a lovely second holiday, with doting grandfather and besotted step-grandmother, and she learnt some new words with the sheep in the field behind T’s father’s house (‘Sheep! Baa!’), which she repeated over and over every evening and all the way home in the car, and every night when she’s been put to bed since. She had fun at her granddad’s, and got over the frustration of not being able to go to the swings every time she spotted the snap of herself on a swing, by swinging her hips back and forth and saying ‘wheee!’ And Terry’s auntie S and my auntie J made a terrible fuss of her, and looked out books and toys for her, and auntie S sent her home with some fairies and a Christmas cracker necklace that she really loves.

And that was it. Summer is over. Back to work, fantasies of chutney making, jam put off til next year, and thinking about Christmas.

*Barrow in Furness: I was quite excited as it had a mythical status when I was little, on account of the Chewits advert Godzilla-style monster eating everything in sight including ‘Barrow in Furness Klaxtaphone’ – which later turned out to be a mishearing of ‘bus depot’. I wanted to get a photo, but we were on Babs’ schedule – no time. Oh, and apparently there isn’t one now.

15-minute domestic goddess

I badgered Terry for Nigella’s early classic, ‘How to be a Domestic Goddess’ for my birthday, and sweetly, he obliged.

When DrG moved to the country this summer, having recently ventured back into the kitchen after a decade-long absence (I’ll scan the polaroids of our (very successful) 1999 bread-making experiments), it was easy to buy stuff for the kiddiwinks – they had their first garden (a huge patch of green bordered on 3 sides by fields) and the whole of the summer to play in it – but less easy to decide what to get the adults. I wanted to get something bakey, but without rifling through someone’s kitchen on the pretext of getting a glass of water the last time you visited before you even had the germ of this idea, it’s hard to know how much bakeware they have already and therefore might want/need/appreciate. So I shunned the bun tins and novelty silicone and thought I might tempt out the domestic goddess in DrG with the beautifully photographed and often very simple recipes from Nigella.

MrsG, who is clearly very well brought up, sent us a lovely thank you note and a beautiful drawing from the boys, which is now up in the kitchen, and that turned me on to perusing my Nigella, which I’ve never really found the time to look at. (I’m a bit like this with books; to possess the book is to possess the knowledge potential… yet I often don’t get round to realising that potential. Shamefully.)

Anyhoo, I like chocolate, and I like biscuits, and I’d made banana bread  and I wanted something simple, and Terry had agreed to make our family ginger biscuits (after a recent success – and he doesn’t like baking) but was being very slooow in the limited baby naptime we had to Get Things Done, so I had a flick and came up with the best (i.e. quickest, fewest ingredients, no-chocolate-required) chocolate recipe I’ve seen on my regular flicks through books and waitrose recipe search: Granny Boyd’s biscuits.

300g self-raising flour
30g cocoa powder
250g unsalted butter
125g caster sugar

Preheat the oven to 170C/ gas mark 3.

Sieve together the flour and cocoa powder ( I do this as I’m measuring them; quicker), and set aside.
Cream the butter and sugar until pale and soft, then mix in the flour and cocoa until the dough forms. Nigella says it might look like it needs liquid, but bear with it; I used a hand mixer and it worked absolutely fine.
Roll into walnut-sized balls and arrange on a greased baking sheet, with a bit of space between them so they can spread. Flatten the balls with the back of a fork.
Bake at 170C/gas mark 3 for 5 mins, then lower the temperature to 150C/gas mark 2 and bake for 10-15mins more. Mine took almost exactly 20 minutes, and came out as Nigella suggested, firm on top, but not hard.

Nigella thinks they’re a ‘chic accompaniment to a tub of good quality vanilla ice cream’. Well, whatever floats your boat. I don’t like biscuits with ice cream – though these are melty and soft, so I can see the appeal – but they worked very well warm because we couldn’t wait, and were quite delicious with a cup of tea, and they kept pretty well for almost a week. I might add a little more cocoa next time, and vanilla extract.

And as a bit of a completer-finisher, not to mention a law-abiding soul, and a socialised academic, here’s the reference: Lawson, N (2003) How to be a domestic goddess: baking and the art of comfort cooking. London: Chatto & Windus