The things you see when you're out without your gun

(post title taken from The Untouchables)

What a day I have had! I have thought long and hard about how to represent it to you. I did not have my camera, and I have been to one end of the world and back with nothing to show for it.

Finally I decided to represent it all to you in drawings, done with the Little Lattes' finest pencil crayons. Did I mention what a stunning artist I am?

When I set off this morning for a work day involving lots of driving, the weather was grey. Drizzly. Cold. Wet. My first trip was an hour-long motorway drive through the Cumbrian mountains; a wonderful drive on a clear day.


The Cumbrian mountains are not so hot on a drizzly wet cold day.

I have made this trip many times before, and I know how often it rains there. I also know that these pesky Cumbrian mountains block out any radio reception. So I popped into the library and borrowed an audio book to cheer the journey up a bit.

And off I went, listening to Cormac McCarthy's The Road, the story of a man and his young son trying to stay alive in a post-apocalyptic America, where biting cold and starving hunger are among the very least of their problems.

I would like to present the book - so far - to you in my arresting pictoral style.

Thankfully, the day began to brighten. My next destination was the coast, and by the time I reached it the sun had broken through and the sky was clear. I had two places to visit which were at either end of the seafront, so I parked at one end and walked.

It was beautiful. The sea was blue, the mountains on the other side of the Bay were visible in the distance, and a small child and her mother were on the beach, exploring the edges of the water for probably the first time this year. It seemed possible that Spring was on its way, and trips to the beach were once more becoming an option.


I used to walk this path before the Little Lattes were born, usually on Sunday mornings. The ocean and the Bay were fascinating and ever-changing - but it was best to keep my eye on the far horizon. To look back at the seafront shops was disheartening - boarded up shopfronts, or tacky shops selling all manner of depressing items. But now, with the restoration of the town's finest hotel, some pockets of hope have started to spring up along the seafront - coffee shops you'd want to go in, shops selling attractive items you might want to buy.

To round off this impressive World Tour - from rainy mountains, through a burnt-out future America, to sunny seaside, I went for a blast of complete Englishness with a scone at the Brief Encounter Tearooms - a scone so delicious that it could have been made by a fairy handmaiden to Enid Blyton.

Enough with the drawings.

I was here.

Good habits

Last year I walked every day. It was important because I was Getting Back to Health.

But then I got back to health, I got busy, and I got out of the habit.

Spring is coming up around me and I feel sluggish and wintry. It's time to get back out there again.

Here I am, blinking in the light

I've finished The Big Book. And like Mr Coffee, who read it before me, I am a bit lost and alone now that it is over.

I've reviewed it here - I've been getting to grips with Goodreads, which seems a brilliant place to keep my list of books read. The only problem with it is that one blogger - who shall remain nameless, of course, because I am a polite and discreet kind of a person - one particular blogger, who likes pastries and beer and walking small dogs, reads like some kind of book-cataloguing machine. Every day brings more updates from her books-read list - in fact one day I popped out to fetch the milk from the doorstep and when I got back she had read 141 more books.

So if any of you are on Goodreads please look me up. Unless you read too much it will make me feel inadequate, that is.

How to avoid a midlife crisis

For one reason or another, I have been having a minor midlife crisis this week.

Maybe it was meeting a girl I knew at school and being shocked to see that she was now a middle-aged lady.

Maybe it was visiting a playgroup run by my mother's old schoolfriend, where the Little Lattes appeared like giants next to the other children, and I had more in common with the older ladies who were running the tea urn than with the fresh-faced young mothers.

Maybe it was going to the Eldest Latte's school disco and finding out that 9 year olds knew all the words to rock songs I had never even heard.

Either way, I needed a way to feel better about myself.

So I made a new cake.


After all, there was a time when I couldn't bake. Imagine that! All those joyless years are over now. I have mastered lemon drizzle; I have mastered chocolate. Coffee and walnut is a doddle to me.

Today I made honey cake. Because I am young and experimental. Because I am spontaneous and not too elderly to learn exciting new skills.

See the years fall away from me with every bite.

Thumbs up. Very high up, in fact.

I would like to present to you the train-wreckery that is the Littlest Latte's new mitten, taken from Aneeta Patel's Knitty Gritty beginners' knitting book.

(This is just one mitten for demonstration purposes. Obviously there are two. I am not DIM or anything. Also, I know it looks like something dead I found in the sea)

As you can see, the mitten is a little well provided for in the thumb department. And this is after I modified the pattern, after knitting the specified 6cm (which would have provided well for even my thumb) and then looking at it, thinking "really?" and unravelling it again.



The mitten was knitted after a whole winter of the Littlest Latte refusing to wear mittens, and running around with tiny raw hands barking: "I like cold!" Littlest got to choose the wool. It was meant to convince her that mittens were a good thing.

"It's a bit long," she said this morning, wiggling the thumb bit suspiciously. There is A LOT of thumb bit to wiggle suspiciously.

"I'll wear it when you have made the flowers, mummy," she said, and skipped off to pre-school with her cold little hands, happy in the knowledge that her mother would be fruitlessly knitting woollen flowers this morning FOR A PAIR OF MITTENS THAT NO-ONE IN THEIR RIGHT MINDS WOULD WEAR.

Thanks for letting me get that off my chest.

More bad memories unearthed by knitting

The Grandmother was so delighted to be going to a wool shop with her daughter and the Littlest Latte that she went a bit insane.

"Oooh look at that! And that! And that!" exclaimed The Grandmother happily, buying me patterns for items I had never thought of knitting.

"I could knit you one of these," I said wickedly. This is exactly the type of hat my mother likes - warming for the ears, colourful, and embarrassing.



(See how the little girl is staring into space, trying to find a mental place where she can ignore what she is wearing on her head?)

"Yes! Yes please!" replied The Grandmother.

So this would be the right time to tell you my First Date story, where I went into Dewsbury with a bloke named Simon to have a coffee and look at the shops.

(Anyone who has ever been to Dewsbury will be able to confirm that it is Not Paris.)

As we strode awkwardly along the bookshelves in Smiths (the romance!), I saw a telltale woolly sight on the other side of the shelves.

It was a snood.

It was cerise.

It stopped, dead, and moved a little from side to side in panic. Then it plunged out of sight.

If it had been attached to a person, for example, say, my mother, you might have imagined that it had realised it was not meant to be so close to The Date of the Century and had hidden behind the bookshelves, with its owner moving quickly away with her knees bent so as not to be detected.

The date did not go well. But the snood story has lived on as one of those family stories that you have to be a blood relation to ever understand.

Let's knit my mother a hat. And then maybe put the pattern away for another day, maybe eight, maybe ten years in the future, when I can put the hat to use on any dates the Little Lattes might plan.

King Arthur, I just can't let you go

Mr Coffee and I used to be very precious about books. When we left our parents' town in 1996, we hired a van and packed it practically solely with books and black socks.

(Mr Coffee came into my life with a hell of a lot of black socks. There were a lot of socks in the flat we shared to start with; on dropping by his mother's house to say goodbye, she presented him with another bin-bag full that he had never taken with him.)

But after a while it became obvious that this book-collecting couldn't continue. A drama graduate and an English graduate, both working in literature, meant a house so stuffed full of books that we could hardly fit the children in it.

I now sell some of my pre-read books on Greenmetropolis, a second-hand book recycling site. This week, however, I hit a stumbling block. Someone wanted to buy my copy of Malory's Works, the collection of stories of Arthurian legend.


It's a huge book. It's written in Middle English. ("And than he gaff hym suche a buffette uppon the helme that he felle on his kneis, and so suddeynly Bewmaynes pulde hym on the grounde grovelynge." And on and on in this vein for over 700 pages.) The spine has yellowed. I studied it in my first year at university, which is mumble mumble years ago now.

And seeing it again, and thinking of parting with it, brought back a love of Arthurian legends which has lasted all those mumble mumble years. I love the legends, their magical possibility, the codes of honour, the powerful madwomen in the woods.

I even loved the sex scene in 1981's Excalibur, where Uther Pendragon clanked back and forth in full armour.

I love the fact that I can sit down with my children on Saturday nights and watch some extremely pretty young men mess about with the legends completely in Merlin.


(If I fancied it, I could be pedantic about how much they have mangled the story. Of course Merlin and Arthur weren't the same age. Of course Uther Pendragon wasn't a former librarian.)

So I'm very sorry, poor book-buyer, but this one is no longer for sale. I feel a need to prove to myself I can read Middle English again.

I feel a need to get lost in the woods.

Have you seen this cat?

Mainly this week I've been having more fun than I thought was possible whilst working, and being involved in a really fun storytelling project featuring a series of 'lost cat ' posters around one of our historic buildings, which is currently being renovated. Visit beanphoto for more details.

You can read the stories by visiting the blogs of Charlie and Fern, and get involved online in their search for ZigZag, the lost cat.

And you can also read more of the writer David Gaffney's stories on his website here.

Don't make me go back there

The Grandmother is trapped. Trapped in Yorkshire, which turned into Narnia overnight. (My mother is probably at this moment in conversation with a faun, asking him if he isn't cold with nothing on his torso and imploring him to wear at least a jumper and a hat that properly covers his ears.)

So instead of spending an interesting day on an external training course learning about digital marketing, I am without childcare. I really wanted to go on the course. But after what happened yesterday, it is all okay.

Yesterday I spent 3 hours driving to somewhere one hour away, with the Little Lattes constantly howling in the back seat because they had dropped their doughnut/cheeseburger/ sugary drink. (It was a good day for child nutrition.) It did not take so long because it snowed; the snow disappeared within an hour of falling. I was in the car so long because I was lost, lost, more lost than anyone in the entire world.

So lost that even though I parked outside a WHSmiths in a retail park to take some deep breaths, I was too hysterical to think of buying a map.

So lost that Mr Coffee sat in his office in front of Googlemaps holding the phone away from his ear so as not to have his eardrums punctured by my mad-lady voice wailing: "Don't tell me to look for the big roundabout! There are hundreds of big roundabouts! Everywhere I go, BIG ROUNDABOUTS! BIG ROUNDABOUTS! BIG &&*£ING ROUNDABOUTS!!"

So lost that when I eventually found the place, I could not even negotiate a multi-storey car park, driving around it in a circle at least five times whilst screaming at the Eldest Latte: "The SIGNS! They LIE! THEY LIE!!!!"

Eventually I abandoned the car on a double yellow line. At an angle. Thank heavens for the Eldest Latte's blue disabled parking badge. I arrived for the appointment a full hour and a half late, and looking kind of shaky and unhinged.

In a cruel twist of irony, this all happened at the exact time of the week that I am normally doing a yoga class.

At one point I drove past the very office that I was supposed to be in today, learning about digital marketing. You can appreciate therefore that however fascinating the subject, I don't want to go back there again. Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.

Hard work for the birds

I saw a robin today. (Above, with camera shake.) The second one this winter; and the second time it has snowed.

I don't think it's a coincidence. I think it says a lot about the work ethic of a robin.

There's the robin sitting in his little hut, having his bacon sandwich, when he sees the first snowflakes.

"B*gger me, it's snowing," he says to himself. "I'm a robin. I'd better get out there."

So the robin climbs out of his overalls, puts on his red breast, goes out in the snow and works it. He knows the best branches, he pouts for the camera, he gives it all he's got.

And then when it's over he goes back into his hut, stamps the slush off his workboots, brews himself a cup of builder's tea and sits down and reads the paper.

I'm telling you. I know all about robins.