Melodramatic. That's the word I've been looking for. That book I mentioned in January (I was still reading it early in March, and finding it hard going) strikes me as melodramatic. I wonder if that's why I wasn't really enjoying it. There are occasional nice bits, usually about people outside the author's immediate circle. Perhaps there is less scope for melodrama and pretentious attention-seeking when it's about someone else. Trouble is, I was just nearing the end of April in this author's year of do-goodery and I wasn't sure I wanted to be bothered with the remaining two thirds. Sorry, Judith. You said my first criticism was strong. I expect this is even worse.
So then I pulled out Four Seasons North by Billie Wright, and I started enjoying that straight away. There's a simplicity about it and about the descriptions she gives. And what she and Sam do in their daily lives in the Arctic is interesting in its own right without any need for pretentiousness or melodrama – such as the account of how they mark out a landing strip on the frozen lake by chipping small holes into the ice, inserting branches of spruce into each one, and watching the water freeze again within minutes to hold the fronds upright. "To arctic pilots it can only mean a safe landing strip, and that, in all these endless miles of isolated wilds, someone lives here at Koviashuvik."
This kind of calm description of hard work in a place where only human ingenuity stands between dying and living for another day (and I haven't even mentioned the grizzlies yet), puts into a ridiculous perspective flapping about whether ordinary everyday being decent to other human beings 'counts' as good or not. The stripping away of fuss when dealing with problems that most of us will never encounter is, to me, impressive, and it makes for good reading.
Mr Toad has got himself a new bike, by accident. The Toadlet has grown out of the bike she had but is not yet quite tall enough for an adult-sized frame. So I suppose the online seller of the new bike must have got his size chart wrong. Hey ho! Mr Toad always hated his current bike anyhow. The new one is a touring/off road hybrid (No! No! interposes Mr Toad: a hybrid is different; this is a cyclo-cross. Righto, says I) as there are some nice off road tracks near us. So the Toadlet needs to be taken to a bike shop to 'try a bike on' in the... er... usual way to get one to fit ;-)
The first half of March was remarkably dry for western Scotland. Spring often is the driest time of year. The pond level fell substantially and is still low at the end of the month as I write. My top count of frogs was twenty-four and the piles of frogspawn grew larger by the day. Then I saw a heron in the pond. The spawn is still there but I didn't seen any frogs for a few days, so assumed that they'd either skidaddled or got recycled into heron. Then I counted twelve frogs and the heron carried on visiting; sometimes I saw it jabbing away at the bank of the pond. It could have been eating frogspawn, but the jabbing wasn't really where the spawn was, so I wondered if it was trying to dig frogs out of the mud, or other delicious morsels. Comments from heron experts welcome!
We are growing mushrooms in a cardboard box in the living room. Apparently they were supposed to be in an environment whose temperature didn't vary out of the range 17–25º C. We're not sure we achieved that. Sometimes the room may well have been below 17º, especially at night. Never above 25º – no danger of that! Then Mr Toad moved the box, still unopened, to the wash-house, where it definitely goes below 17º, probably every single day. The baby mushrooms were not to be given too much of a shock. Now it is back in the sitting-room, opened, and some white mouldy-looking stuff is visible. I'm always coming across fungi in the garden but the only time I've seen similar mouldy-looking stuff is in my wormery. The worms died.
My food experiments this month have included an apricot and poppy seed wreath (and ground walnuts, but don't tell Mr T; he doesn't like walnuts 'as walnuts' but he liked the bread) to be eaten with baked Camembert cheese. Utterly scrumptious! Great party food as a change from standard fondue.
The next experiment was chucking an apple into some lentil soup I was making. Each batch is different because, other than using the same basic stock – made from boiling some water in the Le Creuset casserole dish in which I oven-cook sausages, initially done to get the sticky meat juices off the pan, but then I thought "why waste it?" – and some lentils and onions, what else goes in depends on what is kicking around in the fridge that needs using up. I found three-quarters of a peeled apple wrapped in cling film, so I chopped it up and chucked it in the soup along with some carrots, some celery, and some mushrooms. Good soup, and you wouldn't know there was apple in it unless I told you.
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Howie's quilt. Took a lot longer than anticipated because I got carried away with the quilting on the turquoise, which I drew on freehand.
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Now working on a seaside quilt for Manny and a scrap-patchwork Thing for a friend. She can use it as a table runner or a wall-hanging. Picture when finished!
Hope this idea to clean plastic off the oceans works:
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