Energy

I've managed to get quite tired and run down recently, so yesterday I gave myself a break. I spent most of the day lying in bed reading this blog, which is my official new favourite. In it, an impossibly cute and elfin woman buys hideous second-hand dresses, transforms them into impossibly quirky little outfits, and then sets out on a series of impossibly stylish nights out in art galleries and bars.

It is just about the perfect blog to read as you sit in bed in your middle age, patting a stomach entirely made of different types of cake, whilst wearing a huge brown fleece poncho bought in a charity shop and not altered a bit. Unless you count cutting the price tag off.

When I saw the poncho I thought how lovely it would be for camping. I imagined folding it up neatly until it was time to pack up the sleeping bags in summer. I have not taken it off.  I do not look in the least bit elfin in it. I resemble a large, misshapen easy chair that someone has attempted to cover with a blanket.

I was obviously thinking a lot about summer and camping this week as I borrowed a camping cookbook from the library. My holiday cuisine is mainly based around emptying jars of sauce onto packets of gnocchi. In this book, people in wellington boots dig large pits in the ground in order to bake whole roast ducks which are decorated with slices of orange.

It's not comforting, when you barely have the energy to get dressed and put some oven chips on a tray, to know that elsewhere people are refashioning clothes and going to bars and cooking ducks in pits. It only brings home the importance of rebooting the Happiness Project I started last year which has somehow found its way onto the back burner.

Chapter One is called Energy. Expect updates.

My new thing for today is - vlogging. Though who really knows what that is.

So I got given this Flip Video Camera at the John Lewis thing the other week. It's a dinky little camcorder - very simple to use, very easy to carry. It attaches to a computer with an integral USB that flips out of the top. It's clearly designed to rest on a desk next to a laptop, because plugging it into a desktop tower just leaves it hovering uneasily in mid-air. I had to make a teetering pile of books for the camera to sit on. Call me old-fashioned, but I do like a proper tangled wire.

At first I was sad that it didn't take pictures too, but then I found that you can choose a snapshot from a video. If you're serious about photography, that probably won't  be enough, but I'm no photographer. And there are times - Sports Day, for example - when I want to take a video, but I want a picture too. Now I can do both at once - for me that's one of its biggest advantages.

I thought the best way to demonstrate it would be by preparing a short, inexpertly made film using its integral software which shows the parched reality of life in our part of the country under the punishing hosepipe ban. Mr Coffee warns that 'there is too much sky in it', but I would like to point out that the film contains footage of all the sunny sky we have had in the last month, and I wanted to record every single last second of it.

As you can see, the quality is very good: the only thing lacking here is talent.


Untitled from Coffee Lady on Vimeo.


The music, by the way, is a free download from The Hoosiers (available here). Their first album was the soundtrack to our holiday last year: we liked it, the children got to shout 'COPS AND ROBBERS' a lot at the tops of their voices - everyone wins. Sadly they are bringing their new album out after we go on holiday this year. Couldn't they have rung us and checked? I can't stand a full week of Hannah Montana. Does anyone have any other suggestions?

Anyway, since I subjected you to my wobbly film, you should get something nice to watch as well. This is the latest video from The Hoosiers.  It's got Bill Murray, Jackie Chan (okay, not really, but they're there in spirit) and a pretty young man in a tux. What's not to like?



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My new thing for today is - being healthy. Well, healthier. Healthy-ish.

The other day I visited a blog I hadn't seen before and read about the author's attempts to lose her baby weight. Apparently, lots of other women have been in touch to join in her quest, as it is a common problem for women '1-2 years post delivery'.

Yeah. See, Littlest is five.

Then on the radio there was some advert about how we were all thinking about our health now, weren't we, now we were over forty, and then I noticed that all the bus stops and phone boxes were at it too. Change 4 life! they snarked.

They hissed at me outside the bakery. They saw everything.

Today I gingerly visited the website. I can report that it is safe. There is no advice about coffee consumption, and the healthy living quiz is comfortingly non-specific. Questions such as 'Do you buy a flapjack on the way to work although you have already eaten breakfast?' and 'Do you view chocolate as a separate food group?' do not appear.

So I thought I would give it a try, eating a bit more fruit, and seeing if I could keep the chocolate chips in the cupboard just for baking rather than shoving a handful in my gob before the school run.

Besides, I have a new friend to help me out in my quest for fitness. A gorgeous, strong friend, who reminds me of a special friend I had at university many years ago, when I was young and free and unafraid.* I'll tell you more about him soon.

*I have never, ever been unafraid. Of anything.

Double, double toil and trouble

Illustration of the Pendle Witches
William Harrison Ainsworth's The Lancashire Witches, 1849

I call upon ye sorceresses of the internets, ye witches of knowledge and power. I call, all ye magicians who gesture with needle and thread, ye frequenters of the emporiums of the world wide web, all ye mistresses of dissimulation and deceit.

Come to me, sisters.

I seek to disguise a child.

I wish to send it back in time.

It shall be thus:

"We find that some sort of costume, even a simple one, helps your child to imagine what it might have been like as a Tudor peasant. Girls should wear a dress which is long and plain with a full skirt and wide bottom sleeves. The neckline was cut low to see the plain high neck blouse below. Make a small plain apron attached to a belt and wear it around your hips."

Sisters, I beseech thee. I raise my arms to the sky, I feel your power surging through the air to reach my fingertips.

Give me the spell. Give me the spell.

My new thing for today is... something we never saw coming

So. Things have been happening.

For a start, I'm five pounds lighter than when we last spoke. And I've made a change - not one of those little, piddling little changes that you read about in the self-help magazine articles, but the kind of massive, seismic life change that throws everything up in the air and leaves you wondering if you are still the kind of person you believed yourself to be.

We're talking about not taking milk in coffee.

Because I came to a realisation on day one of my diet (I only cheated once, by the way, in five days, when I decided I really didn't want a cooked chicken breast as my mid-morning snack and substituted a glass of wine in the cinema instead) that I was never going to lose any weight with the amount of milk fat swishing around inside me.

I love milk. I love playing with my milk frother. I love a latte when I'm out. And I don't like skimmed milk, before you suggest it. All around me there are beautiful things like this in the world. You lot all might enjoy looking at blue skies or piles of knitting yarn, but this is my porn of choice.

But I'm not called The Milk Lady, after all. And I'm not getting any thinner. And I can't give up wine. So I gave black coffee a try and you know, it won't kill me. It's actually kind of nice.

It's amazing the places life takes you.

My new thing for today is... giving it up

I don't want to go to the supermarket any more.

I don't. The supermarket sucks. I sit down every week, make a plan of menus for things I actually won't want to cook, buy a load of stuff, pile it into the kitchen and then towards the end of the week go searching for my ingredients to find them going a bit weird at the back of the shelf.

Not to mention having to take a four year old who constantly badgers for yogurt drinks and Babybel cheeses and cereal bars and far too many apples and look look this juice in the little plastic cartons with the tiny straws look look look

No more. I go into town to work, I shall Pick Bits Up. I am casually optimistic that this will not mean living in a Mother Hubbard type establishment with no food to be eaten. We shall eat like kings! We shall dine on seasonal vegetables! We shall eat all kinds of new and different things as I create meals day by day with cheerful spontaneity! We will save thousands of pounds!

I actually don't know about any of these things. But small victories have already been won - the discovery of loose muesli, in various yummy-looking different mixes, which is sold by weight in the health food shop. Freedom from the tyranny of Cheerios! At least now when breakfast is swept up from under the kitchen table, it will be a more organic and less uniform shape. And it will not adhere to the floor.

Ah, so what if they don't actually eat it. Buying it is far more fun.

My new thing for today is... frugal ineptitude

I grew up in the 1970s, and my friend Joanne was a very cool friend to have. She had blue jeans with tartan bottoms like the Bay City Rollers.

We didn't have a lot of money, so one day my mother took a pair of my outgrown orange trousers (look, it was the 70s, remember?) and sewed some blue floral fabric on the bottom to lengthen them. She then presented me with this frightening item, saying: "Look! You'll be just like Joanne!"

I don't need to tell you I looked nothing like Joanne.

The reason I am dragging up this sorry story once again is that times are hard in the Coffee House at present, and making do and mending is back on the agenda. I've spent the morning turning the heating off, reading Misssy M's list of vests and browsing the net for January sales of thermal underwear.

If that weren't tragic in itself, I have also been making the poor Littlest Latte her first pair of Frankenstein pyjamas. The Eldest Latte, due to her disability, often crawls at home rather than looking around for her elusive crutches, so holey knees are an occupational hazard. Recently I trotted down to the market haberdashery to buy an iron-on patch for her jeans that said Girl Thing!. Oh, I thought I was so clever as I ironed it on! I was appalled to see it peeling itself obnoxiously off the first time I washed it.

Anyway, anything she passes down is similarly challenged in the knee area, which makes the Littlest Latte look like an urchin as she climbs the stairs to bed.

The thing is, I know that some of you sit around your house of an evening handsewing beautiful things. (Ali, I'm looking at you.) And I'm not going to post a picture of these pyjamas after their knee surgery with a worn-out pink top but let me tell you, even the four-year-old looked scared. I am out of my depth and this is one thing that I know I can't ask my mother about.

So please, if anyone knows how to mend my children's clothes without them looking even worse than I did in my orange trousers, let me know.

My new thing for today is... making a calendar

So I had this idea, and I wanted you to help me.

I've been blogging for just over a year, and during that year have seen so many beautiful photographs on blogs I have read.

They have made me think so differently about the world around me, about my house, and about what I choose to stop and see.

I wanted to celebrate some of them by choosing twelve favourites, and then posting one of them (along with a link to their original post, of course) on the first of each month.

I wondered as well if you had any favourites that you could let me look at? Please if you do, let me know with a comment, or by emailing me at cappuccino.mum@googlemail.com