Archive | July, 2023

Time for a wild strawberry

13 Jul

On 14 September 2021 I wrote:

We’re back!

I started the next design today. It’s not the one I’d been planning, but sometimes you just have to go with what feels right at the time. And it’s time for a wild strawberry.

It’s not really… we picked the last of them a few weeks ago. This is the season for brambles. And joy of joys, for Victoria plums. The edges of our garden are wilder and more unkempt than ever this year, and I’ve harvested more than 3lbs of brambles from our wild edges and hedges. Five years ago mum gave us a plum tree. We’ve only ever had 2 plums from it before. We’ve harvested 26lbs so far this year! That makes a lot of crumble!

Anyway… most people have completed their 100 days for 2021. I’ve loved seeing so much creativity, and such a supportive community. And I’m more than happy to be continuing mine at my own pace.

Wild Scottish Strawberries are the most lovely treat for a small child. There is something about their teeny tininess that makes them perfect for small hands. I remember picking them as a child, probably eating more than were put in the bowl, but that is part of the point isn’t it?

This design was created by my nephew Max, who is now a grown up, but as a child he also loved to pick those wild strawberries. When you first start picking wild strawberries you think there aren’t going to be many at all, certainly not enough to make A Thing. And then slowly as you wander around the edges of the garden, lifting up the big green leaves to find more teeny bright red fruit, you realise that if you hadn’t eaten so many at the start, there would be plenty to macerate with a wee bit of vanilla sugar and a splash of balsamic vinegar, to then add to a bowl of lush Greek yoghurt or spoon over vanilla ice cream.

Anyway, you are in for a treat with this embroidery design, it is one of my favourites.

It’s odd writing this blog post nearly two years on from when I wrote that first opener, about the wild strawberry design.

I see that back then I had just had a lovely visit with Mum – I reported that she was in good fettle, which is good enough for me.

But more than that, I had told her that she was my favourite Mum (perhaps for the first time?). She looked at me, paused, and then said ‘I am your only Mum’.

I told her that there were lots of other Mums in the word, and I was so happy and lucky that she is mine. She liked this. I then told her about my friend, J, who did not have a good relationship with her Mum. Mum looked puzzled at this, looked down at my hand and stroked it with hers. It was such a beautifully tender moment.

Mum no longer always had the words to express herself, but she could let me know that she cared, that she loved me. And that was enough. It’s still enough.

***

Can I ask you a small favour? Could you please click here and vote for me, Lois Wolffe. The Smock has been shortlisted for an Award and it would mean the world to me if you voted for it.

Mostly on this blog I write about trying to care for Mum as she developed dementia, which nearly broke me on a number of occasions. Gentle meditative stitching her old Fisherman’s Smock probably saved me as I let everything go to concentrate on those tiny stitches. If you want to read more about my relationship with Mum and her dementia, then you could start here at Taking smock of the Situation.

Finally, if this has moved you, I would really appreciate it if you made a donation towards Alzheimer Scotland. They’re doing stuff that makes living with this more bearable for so many people. Thank you, thank you, a thousand thank yous.

***

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Not boycotting

10 Jul

On 6 September 2021 I wrote

Cape logo. To celebrate Mum’s life in South Africa.

When I was young, South Africa still had apartheid. Nelson Mandela was still imprisoned. Steve Biko died from injuries sustained while in police custody. South African goods were boycotted by many in this country. But Mum always looked out for the Cape logo, and we had apples from the Cape in our fruit bowl. At Christmas a whole wooden crate of South African peaches would arrive by freight from Gran and Grandpa in South Africa. Mum’s childhood was on a South African fruit farm, and she wanted to continue to support those farms. I remember a sense of unease, but ate those delicious apples and peaches.

Bonus pictures today are of Mum in the 1950s at her flat in London, on South Kinnerton Street. She lived there when she worked for Aquascutum, working up the designs for their chief designer. One day she was invited out to lunch (at Claridge’s I think) by an elderly distant cousin. Mum wore a gorgeous tweed coat. But the cousin insisted that one does not wear tweed for lunch in London and made Mum change into a tatty old black coat. Different times, eh?

The other annual gift we used to receive each year, just before Christmas I think, was a bunch of flowers. As I think about it now, it seems such a miracle – this long cardboard box would arrive, just the perfect length to be used as a box for storing knitting needles once it was emptied of the contents.

And the contents were stems of something that resembled long asparagus. Mum would carefully remove each stem from the box, check it over, cut off the bottom half inch and then pop it into a big crystal glass vase. A couple of days later the asparagus had transformed into creamy white blossoms of chincherinchees, which we always pronounced chinkericheese. Back in the early 70s they were such an exotic to have in the house, especially around Christmas, when mostly all you could get was a poinsettia in a pot and some sprigs of holly.

I’ve started moving some stuff to Mum’s house, in anticipation of us moving there later this year … I thought I had been clever and had only moved things I wouldn’t need in the meantime – but now that I want to take a picture of the old chincerinchees box still full of knitting needles, I realise it’s 100 miles away so you’ll have to wait for that picture. I have already regretted taking the jeely pan down there, and also the crate of Jamieson’s Spindrift Shetland wool, which is just the perfect thing for knitting colourwork, and is essential in my 100 Days Project for 2023.

My idea for this year’s 100 Days Project was to play with colour in knitting, to get more confident in choosing my own colours and making designs. The first third of the 100 days has involved making a cowl out of what I call Carrick Shore Colours – though once I got half way around I realised that I was about to run out of the paler toned background colours (Dewdrop and Granite, if you’re interested) so the second half uses the darker tones of Blue Lovat and Wren for the background shades – this turns out to be a happy solution to running out of the pale colours – it gave me the opportunity to play with different colourways, and also the cowl now has a light and a dark half, which might work sartorially?

I am on the last day of that first cowl, and realise I need to quickly decide if I am going to make another cowl, or Other Things. I have a feeling it might be Other Things. We’ll see. After all, it can be Other Things for a while and then another cowl for the final month or so.

***

Can I ask you a small favour? Could you please click here and vote for me, Lois Wolffe. The Smock has been shortlisted for an Award and it would mean the world to me if you voted for it.

Mostly on this blog I write about trying to care for Mum as she developed dementia, which nearly broke me on a number of occasions. Gentle meditative stitching her old Fisherman’s Smock probably saved me as I let everything go to concentrate on those tiny stitches. If you want to read more about my relationship with Mum and her dementia, then you could start here at Taking smock of the Situation.

Finally, if this has moved you, I would really appreciate it if you made a donation towards Alzheimer Scotland. They’re doing stuff that makes living with this more bearable for so many people. Thank you, thank you, a thousand thank yous.

***

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Spitting plum stones

6 Jul

On 4 September 2021 I wrote

Today I discover that being precise and neat is harder than it looks. So this will forever be an impression of the CAPE logo.

In other fruit news, the Victoria Plum tree which mum gave us 5 years ago has this year decided to bear fruit. And oh so much fruit. I picked 1lbs a couple of days ago and 5lbs today but the tree doesn’t look like I’ve picked anything at all.

On the phone I reminded mum when she and her big sister Jen were children they rode the wee ponies through their orchard and would put their hands up and just pick the plums off the trees. And then they would see how far they could spit the stones. Mum liked to think of me now spitting plum stones.

Earlier this year when we had decided that we would put the house on the market and move to Galloway, I had sort of assumed that we would have moved or be in the process of moving over the summer, and certainly gone by the time any fruit are ready to harvest. In my head I had written off a 2023 fruit harvest.

Things don’t always go to plan do they? For reasons various it looks like we may still be here in the early Autumn when the fruit is ripe – we’ll certainly harvest blackcurrants again this year, and the red and white currants that made such teeny tiny quantities of jelly last year (and stupidly I haven’t opened those jars yet, believing them to be so rare and precious that they should be kept for another day).

The apple trees have hardly any fruit this year, which isn’t surprising after two heavily laden years (also they really need pruning). Those trees were gifted to us from Mum, soon after I moved in here – they are a Cambusnethan pippin and a Galloway Pippin, and they produce good, slightly tart apples which work as eaters or cookers. The Victoria plum similarly is taking a year off this year – I wonder if there was something about the time they blossomed this year? There wasn’t a frost to kill off the fruit, but perhaps the pollinators weren’t about?

In amongst this barren orchard are the two pear trees, which haven’t produced much fruit in recent years… but this year, oh my! So many pears! I have a lovely recipe for Spiced Pears, which involves slow cooking some pears in a mixture of sugar and spices and vinegar and wine (if I remember correctly) until the fruit is entirely infused with the flavours and the liquid has boiled down to a syrup – they are equally good served with cold meat, or drizzled on top of the best vanilla ice cream. I still have the remnants of a jar made several years ago (possibly pre pandemic) and honestly, those goo-ey soft fruit are ambrosial nectar.

Mum slept through my whole visit the other day, for a couple of hours, until the very end when she opened her eyes and smiled her big gappy smile at me. But her eyes twinkled and she knew it was me, her favourite daughter. Her eyes used to be green as gooseberries (according to her Aunt Janey). Now, they are slightly rheumy, and the green has faded to a soft grey-ish green – a bit like gooseberries do if you overcook them.

***

Can I ask you a small favour? Could you please click here and vote for me, Lois Wolffe. The Smock has been shortlisted for an Award and it would mean the world to me if you voted for it.

Mostly on this blog I write about trying to care for Mum as she developed dementia, which nearly broke me on a number of occasions. Gentle meditative stitching her old Fisherman’s Smock probably saved me as I let everything go to concentrate on those tiny stitches. If you want to read more about my relationship with Mum and her dementia, then you could start here at Taking smock of the Situation.

Finally, if this has moved you, I would really appreciate it if you made a donation towards Alzheimer Scotland. They’re doing stuff that makes living with this more bearable for so many people. Thank you, thank you, a thousand thank yous.

***

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Under The Stairs

1 Jul

On 1 September 2021 I also wrote

This is meant to be a quick wee emblem.. but I’m beginning to think it might take a while.

Mum has saved stickers from fresh fruit over the years, and stuck them to the back of the door under the stairs. There are actually no stairs in Mum’s house, but the larder was under the stairs in my childhood home, so the larder is still called UnderThe Stairs.

Under The Stairs in our childhood home was a magical place for me.

There was a rough stone floor, and thick shelves, which in memory were made of stone, but perhaps they were concrete blocks? I’ll never know. And everything under there was cool to the touch.

When I call it Under The Stairs you might be imagining a small space with a low ceiling. While one part of this space was just like that, most of it was a fairly a long thin room with long deep shelves on either side, leading to a tiny wee window at the far end. That window was covered in mesh, allowing a free flow of air into the space.

For some reason this was where we were going to go if we got the three minute warning of a nuclear bomb… I’m not now convinced it would have protected us from any fallout, with that old mesh over the window. How odd to think that one of the things I was definitely aware of as a child was where we would hide if there was an imminent nuclear bomb; and even odder that I don’t recall there being any anxiety about this knowledge (or the fact that our safe place clearly wasn’t that safe).

Anyway, what things were kept in there?

It was effectively an overflow fridge, though never quite as cold as the fridge. We didn’t keep the actual Must Be Kept Cold things in there (so no cartons of milk, or butter and generally no fresh meat or fish). But always, always leftovers, dishes of tasty leftovers, ready to be re-purposed into some other meal. Mince made into cottage pie, vegetables added to a soup, roast lamb diced up and mixed with gravy and some curry powder to make ‘curry’. The 70s were another galaxy weren’t they?

Tins had their own shelf. There was a rack of vegetables just by the door as you went in, and frequently there would be a brace of pheasants hanging, by their necks from a hook just to the right as you went in, with a newspaper on the floor underneath to catch any drips of blood. There was a pile of tupperware-esque containers and their not-quite-fitting lids; there was the huge jeely pan, brought out once or twice a year to make marmalade and then again before Hogmanay to make the most enormous vat of Pea Soup from split peas, to feed the revellers at some unholy hour of the morning when it became clear that no-one was leaving any time soon, but we all needed something else to keep us going through till breakfast time. There was the fish kettle, brought out only once or twice in my memory to poach a whole salmon; candles, torches, a tilly lamp and an old railway signal lamp in case of black outs, which were a regular feature of my early childhood (Mum, of course, made what must have been a nuisance and a frustration to her, into a fun game for us kids). There were cans and cans of dog and cat food, each one more stinky than the other. And there were spaces for us to hide in if we were playing hide and seek.

No wonder I wasn’t afraid of a nuclear bomb – hiding in here for a while was just fine.

I was living in London when Mum and Dad moved house and I didn’t visit them till some weeks after they had moved. But from the first moment I stepped into Mum’s kitchen in that unfamiliar house and opened the door to Under The Stairs, I knew EXACTLY where everything lived. The trays would be stacked beside that chair next to the fridge, the jars of jams and chutneys on the shelf to the left Under the Stairs, and the candles up on that shelf on the right. Bottles of wine would probably be on the rack on the floor on the right, with the old square tin full of shoe cleaning stuff sitting on top of it. Everything had its place, and when Mum became increasingly blind, and then unable to remember where things were, somehow her muscle memory compensated and helped her to put her hand on just what she was looking for, keeping her independent for far longer than perhaps was wise.

***

Mostly on this blog I write about trying to care for Mum as she developed dementia, which nearly broke me on a number of occasions. Gentle meditative stitching her old Fisherman’s Smock probably saved me, giving me a focus and forcing me to carve out time when I could let everything go and just concentrate on those tiny stitches. The Smock Project is up for an Award, and it would make my heart sing if you took a moment to click through here to vote for it. It will take you but seconds to do it.

If you want to read more about my relationship with Mum and her dementia, then you could start here at Taking smock of the Situation. Or just dip in. After all, if I’ve learned anything this last few years it’s that chronology and time are less important than we might believe.

Finally, if it’s not too much to ask (I know, it is, apologies) I would really appreciate it if you could make a donation towards Alzheimer Scotland. They’re doing stuff that makes living with this more bearable for so many people. Thank you, thank you, a thousand thank yous.

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