#Pancakes and Love.

My very good pal Will inspired this blog post with a picture. I always associate Pancake day with a really weird burning smell. Not from my inability to make pancakes or anyone else’s. But as a child this was the smell which greeted me as I walked through the door from school. I can already hear my mother saying “Why your father can’t burn the palm crosses outside i’ll never know”.

Will’s fireplace today. His poor wife and child…

As we’ve all had it drummed into us, our yearly pancake fry up comes as a pre-curser to Lent where we have one last hurrah in the kitchen and eat all the treat stuff before tomorrow. Except who am I kidding? I was totally the one queuing up with lemons and Nutella in M&S earlier. I just wish I hadn’t bumped into the slimmest person at my gym whilst stockpiling sugar and carbs. For the record i’m a traditionalist lemon and sugar gal but there’s also something so blissfully outlandish about a nutella and banana one as well

Tomorrow Ash Wednesday kicks in and we get ready for Lent. You may see people with black ash crosses on their foreheads. Some brave souls put them up on twitter. Ashtag. Gettit?

Much of the outside world assume that it’s all about giving up things and celebrating your struggles and indeed it can be if that’s your bag but there is another approach. I used to try to give things up but every year was either encouraged not to by my dad who seemed to believe that there was always a reason for us not to- we were working hard at school, away from home for the first time and needed creature comforts, were working far too hard at work (he always seemed to go the whole hog for us on our behalf). So i’ve given up giving up. Just couldn’t be bothered anymore.

The other day I saw something which made me stop and think. Maybe we need to rethink what we mean by fasting. Maybe fasting could lead us to a higher love. Higher love of ourselves and others. In my book the image of fasting means that you feel you’re not worthy for some reason, that you require punishment or self-inflicted. Some others decide to take something up instead to show that it’s not about metaphorically beating yourself over the head with a stick and the mental health running group i’m part of have decided to exercise every day in Lent to raise awareness for Mind. I’m loathed to preach anymore than i’ve shamelessly done in this post already but have you ever thought about spending 40 days trying to focus on hope rather than pessimism? or practising gratitude? or maybe doing 40 random acts of kindness? That’s way more up my street.

When I joined the church I now go to in Warwick I was floored by some incredible words from my absolute cracker of a priest. At the end of the usual “Remember that you are dust and unto dust you will return. Turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ.” he adds “God longs for us to be whole”.

Because this isn’t all doom and gloom and about how s***t we feel we are. It’s about how much we are loved and for us to come to the realisation of knowing we’re loved. It may be hard to have that stark reminder of how we come from dust and that one day we will die, for me that holds particular poignancy as a few years ago we lost my lovely Grandad to Alzheimers on Ash Wednesday and this year we hourly await the arrival of my Brother and his wife’s baby. There’s a promise of new life, just as we honour the old life, but at the heart of it is love- quite fitting for a day that is also Valentines day.

 

So enjoy those pancakes, enjoy your evening with those whom you love- whether it’s your partner, you’re celebrating gal-entines, or curled up with your family. If you are on your own, please please know that you are loved.

xxx

 

 

 

 

 

 

The lesser of two Weevils…

I’m job hunting at the moment. When i’m job hunting I bake. A lot. I also compulsively consume other people’s blogs a lot while taking breaks from job hunting. Recently i’ve been reading a fantastic blog called ‘My Make do and Mend life‘. Jen Gale and her family spend a year making do and mending. The blog is an Aladdin’s cave of makes and how to repair household items which we normally don’t think twice about putting out for recycling or throwing away. At first I thought she would be a bit of a smug hippie, but this lady is really genuine and not preachy which is so refreshing. What she writes has really convinced me that I should be taking any small steps I can in order to think about what we throw away and at what point we throw it. You can check out a fantastic TedX talk which she did here.

So when I opened up my Kilner jar of flour on Friday to whip up some banana choc chip muffins to use up some quickly browning bananas a terrible dilemma met me. There were weevils in my flour jar. My airtight flour jar. Normally I would throw this out straight away but this time I couldn’t bring myself to having been such an avid reader of Jen’s blog in the past few days. So I procrastinated and left the jar by the sink while I used some non-yukky flour to bake.  There was no way we could eat it. I was wary of composting it as i’d heard rumours- and if it says it on pinterest then it must be true– that it would encourage rats.

At 10pm on Saturday night a brainwave hit me. Salt dough! The boiling water and the time in the oven would surely kill the bugs and any eggs. So on Sunday I had a very happy afternoon making a start on these beauties which I can then make into decorations. Aren’t they beautiful? Making the dough also took me back to when my mum used to make play-dough for us when we were kids.

Some things are definitely happy accidents and if you ever get what i’m now told are flour mites (still gross) then the recipe I found is here.

I’m hoping they’ll make some great Christmas decorations once i’ve dug out some ribbon or cotton to thread through them.

A paper anniversary

Mr and Mrs W turned one year on the 23rd July. A whole year since our beautiful (i’m biased) wedding in Warwickshire with Brass bands, village fete games and Father Christmas stopping by to wish us well.

The first year for me was very much about putting the firm foundations in place which will hold us in good stead for the years to come. There was a lot of learning for both of us even though we’d lived together before marriage (gasp!). But that sounds a bit sombre. There have been moments where my abs hurt from Mr W making me laugh so much and so many happy memories. I’ve also learnt that even when you’re married just being silly and having a giggle is everything, especially on the days when work has been rubbish and you’re swamped by life.

But I don’t want this to turn into a slushy post about marriage because this is really about how we celebrated. Mr W nervously broached the subject of ‘What would you like to do for our anniversary?’ a couple of months before and people had begun to ask us. We didn’t really know. We didn’t need any more stuff! But we didn’t just want to go out for a meal in town either. So we hatched the plan of going away for a night to Hay on Wye, home to dozens of beautiful second hand book shops which ideally suited our paper anniversary. We’d agreed on just cards and no presents which both of us broke in our own different ways. I arrived home to flowers on the Friday night (sorry for bragging) and he found a lottery ticket tucked inside his card. He also taught me how to make a paper aeroplane- it’s the little things isn’t it?

Still working through wedding jam…

Paper aeroplane proud face

We stayed at the Swan at Hay.  I’m afraid we shunned the fine dining opportunity and went to an incredible tapas place called Tomatitos which seemed much more in line with our low key plans. The food is amazing there.

But the best thing about Hay is of course the books. Yards and yards of books. Everywhere you look. Great to browse and good for an opportunity to tick off the next item on my 30 before 3 list, to browse a Hay on Wye bookshop.

As i’m on a ‘no new books until i’ve read all the unread ones in the house’ I managed to sneak away with two, which is pretty good especially as one was the complete works of Lewis Caroll. Will definitely be back. Unless you know of anywhere even more amazing for second hand book buying? If so please leave me a comment below. I’d love your suggestions.

 

Choose life. Choose an art class on a saturday afternoon.

I wasn’t good at Art during school. I can still remember the puzzled fraught expression of my art teacher desperately trying to find some nuggets of wisdom to help me without delivering a whole thesis about what was wrong with whatever I was drawing or painting that particular lesson.

So i’m not sure why I put down ‘Take an art class’ as number 13 out of my 30 things to do before I turned 30 challenge. I suspect it has something to do with having gone to an icon painting workshop a few years ago. I got totally lost in what I was doing. All other thoughts melted away and I thought, aha! Perhaps this was a good way to switch off while being creative.

I really wanted to do life drawing because I also spend a lot of time having hangups about my body. Namely its shape, why it doesn’t look how society tells me it should, why it is different, how it has changed as i’ve changed as a woman, and so I felt that this would be a way to remind myself just how beautiful, stunning and miraculous the human body really is, with a hope that I would begin to recognise this in myself.

After a few google searches I came across a guy called Nick Logan who runs classes in Shottery just outside Stratford. Over a few friendly emails back and forth I signed up for a one day workshop. Having put the postcode into the satnav I expected a pop-up class in a village hall however Nick actually has his own studio there which I found in the upstairs part of the hall having nearly accidentally crashed a weight watchers class.

Nick was brilliant at welcoming in an anxious beginner, as were the rest of the group. I did feel a bit shy at first but he’s very approachable helping you to begin to understand the approach, and the environment you’re in feels incredibly natural rather than clinical. What I hadn’t realised was how technical the basics of life drawing are. I was having to think about scale and proportion but also drawing the shapes of the body in hard lines and then adding the details later rather than the other way round. It was fascinating. For example someone’s head might start off more hexagonal in shape and then you soften it once you’ve got the basic shape. You also use parts of the body for units of measurement to work out where different body parts line up. I used charcoals which again I hadn’t used since school and being there for a day meant that I could draw the model Sonia in several different poses.

Feet are rediculously hard to draw

Very boxy. How Picasso started though apparently so hope for me too…

I had imagined it being quite relaxing and chilled but far from it. I feel like I worked really hard, but in a good way.  A full day class like the one I went to costs £45 and includes all materials and refreshments. All you need to remember is a packed lunch and bucket loads of concentration. There is still so much that I would love to learn about proportion etc and so I would be really tempted to go again. Thanks to Nick and everyone at Shottery studios. For a complete beginner I came away with a sense of pride in what i’d achieved and drawn.

Below are some more of the sketches I did. I’d love to go back again so that I can get to grips with drawing feet and heads.

 

And the Oscar for better late than never goes to….

Life gets in the way. I’m more of a books person. 2-3 hours is a long time. I prefer chick flicks anyway and they’re never on the top lists. These are some of the many excuses I’ve trawled out for not watching those classic films which generate the horrified look and exclamation of “You’ve never seen (insert classic film title here)???”

The rock I’ve clearly been living under

If I’m feeling particularly cheeky i’ll ask them when it came out and say. “Ah, I wasn’t born when it came out then”. However this kind of reaction tends to lose you friends. So basically I needed to pull my socks up and get on with it. So, here are the 10 classics I should have seen by now but hadn’t up until this year, thus ticking off number 10 on the 30 before 30 list with a few sentences to sum up my thoughts on them. So in no particular order:

Trainspotting

I was gripped by this. Andrew felt like it hadn’t aged very well, but I really get how it’s a classic. Made my morning run on our holiday in Edinburgh listening to Lust for life an absolute must. Also poverty and drug abuse is just crazy.

 

Indiana Jones: Raiders of the lost Ark

I had high hopes for this and was mega disappointed. Everything that’s wrong with feminism in film. The best bit was the “Snakes. Why did it have to be snakes” line. The rest of it was either warped or included a pathetic female who needed rescuing. Yes I know she did that kick ass scene in her bar at the beginning, but why did she suddenly decide she needed rescuing all the time? Opinion possibly influenced by the fact that I  watched it on the back of Star Wars and Princess Leah is awesome.

Star Wars: A new hope.

A proper heroine.

 

Harrison Ford definitely gets the best lines. Han Solo is cool. I enjoyed the first half more than the second. R2D2 and C3P0 were a bit irritating. I’d be tempted to watch the Empire Strikes back and Return of the Jedi now.

Blues Brothers

Bit odd but WOAH THAT’S ACTUALLY ARETHA FRANKLIN!

Pulp Fiction

Awesome soundtrack which took me back to hanging out in my big brothers room listening to the CD. Interesting concept. I understand it’s a classic bit of cinema but I just couldn’t deal with someone quoting the bible while shooting people. Just no. Glad i’ve seen it though.

The Godfather

Lumping all 3 films together here as we watched the whole trilogy. My favourite was the second one and the first one was great. I wouldn’t normally watch something like this but the story was gripping. The third one was an anticlimax because of Sophia Coppola’s wooden acting.

Compulsory to watch this with spaghetti and meatballs

12 Angry men

Great concept, slightly ruined by the fact that a slightly egocentric person I used to know claimed that he had done this in a real life jury situation using his perception of their MBTI types. No you probably hadn’t Michael* you’re just wishful thinking.

Gladiator

One of the best I watched. Incredible story, soundtrack and acting. This was one of the few I regretted not having seen until now. I cried at the end. A lot.

Yes, Russell. I was very much entertained.

My fair lady

You’d never get away with half of it now would you?!?! But a fab soundtrack. Audrey, you will always be wonderful. A really lovely Saturday afternoon with a cup of tea kind of film.

‘But that’s only 9!’ I hear you cry. Or some of you may consider the 3 Godfather films not to count as just one. However I am now stuck on what to watch as the 10th. What is the most classic film that I really should have seen? I’d love to hear your suggestions. Can someone please suggest ‘Goodbye Christopher Robin’ because I really want to see it.

*Names have been changed.

Take a swim on the wild side

On a sunny weekend back in June I finally made my wild swim happen so I could tick off my next item on the list.

Youngest Pyke had agreed to let me crash her commuter belt pad and picked me up from the station for a girls weekend. She had agreed that she would like to do a wild swim with me as long as “this wasn’t the skinny dip swim was it?” I assured her that in no circumstances would there be any nuddy swimming and we might even see this guy…

She suggested hampstead heath bathing ponds and told me to lower my expectations.

Having packed some wetsuits which we’d borrowed we headed over to the heath via Highgate and across the common. The bathing ponds are almost fairy tale like. Beautifully secluded. We opted for the ladies pond which also has a lifeguard and a changing area which website had described as basic which having been there I think is a bit harsh. There are no lockers but there is space to stash a small bag in the changing area. You can get all the details here

I’ve got limited photos as understandably, they do not allow photography. Susie and I were super flattered though as we got to the water when we asked if we were training for a triathlon and if we were could we swim to the left of the pond? No. We assured them, we were just wearing wetsuits because we’d never been wild swimming before and thought it might be cold. Result. I’ll wear a wetsuit more often if I get mistaken for a triathlete!

Wild swimming makes you feel so calm. It allowed me to indulge my inner guardian reading, granola eating lefty liberal self and I felt all the better for it. I would definitely go again. It was so peaceful swimming surrounded by trees and awesome randomly seeing a duck swimming past. A curl up on the sofa with a Brownies, Tea and an Austen drama so I could increase my chances of seeing THAT lake swim was the perfect end to a perfect day.

 

 

 

Macarooned in my own Kitchen

We’ve got decorators in today. They were supposed to come weeks ago. We’d even booked a week off work for a staycation so that they could get it done while we were there, but they cancelled. So yesteday evening they confirmed to my assertive other half that they definitely would be there today at 9.30am this morning and no later. I was still in British mode. Quietly seething with rage that it should have been done weeks ago and that our living room looked like a cloakroom, but still  in Sainsbury’s stock piling the nice biscuits with extra chocolate on rather than dull digestives to keep them sweet in case they picked up on my rage and either did a bodge job or decided not to come at all.

This meant several things. 1)That I would be unable to stick around the house for long periods of time, as every room in our house is the size of a child’s shoe box and i’d become bored very quickly. 2) They were doing the hallway, so if I was bored of being marooned in one particular room i’d be getting in and out of their way whilst moving to the next room resulting in option 3. I was going to have to go out. Which I did. To the library to do some more of my A level Maths that work thought would be a hilarious idea to put me through giving me deadline of 4 weeks. So many tears before bed time at the moment…

Maths I can do

 

Maths that’s hard

Having decorators in has its upsides though. It means that when you do get back because you’ve been exiled for the day and made to calculate the volume of a cylinder 30 times over, you can retreat to the kitchen.

 

When Mr W and I got together he was in the the process of buying a house which is the one we live in now. Being a do-er upper (the house not him) he was determined to choose bright colours and really put a stamp on the place. He’d “lived in magnolia houses for over 10 years and wanted colour”. Like any new girlfriend I was reluctant to put many suggestions forward in case the worst happened and he ended up sat in a house which reminded him entirely of his exe-s colour choices. I did step in at the point he suggested black curtains but that’s another story. By the time we decided we were both for keeps I made a few more suggestions. It’s now safe to say that the kitchen is my pinterest palace and possibly my favourite room in the house. Even though it’s small i’ll happily stay there for hours, cooking, baking and listening to the desert island discs archive.

This also gave me an excuse to blog about number 15 on the list. Make Macaroons. I’ve actually made them twice already this year but kept running out of time to put the blog post up.They demand a breton top, some chanel lipstic (I wish) and Django reinhardt on the ipod while you’re making them.

The recipe I found is here and i’ve found the chocolate ones much easier to make than any of the other recipes i’ve found. I think it’s something to do with the cocoa powder not making them too moist. They never look as great as on the bake off. Lots of cracking (insert Sue Perkins style voice here). But i’m always dead chuffed as they’re almost put on a crazy pedastal difficulty rating of don’t-even-go-there-with-these and there’s absolutely no reason to be scared of making them.

While the decorators can stick with their jammy dodgers i’m looking forward to taking these to Silverstone Classic as part of our picnic tomorrow and i’ll let you know how they go down with my gluten free gal pal.

Sew satisfying

In mid-June I took a day off in order to achieve number 5 on my list. I needed to make something to wear on my sewing machine. I’d inherited this bad boy (pictured below) from my fabulous granny and I’d only ever got as far as making some placemats for the first Christmas I hosted at our house for my Mr W’s parents. I was trying to win some ‘our son has a great girlfriend’ points. The sewing effort went down pretty well and I was mostly happy with them apart from some dodgy pattern matching and a few sewed lines which were more wonky than some of my walks home after a night out.

But four sewn rectangles cannot be worn and while they were for Christmas, they couldn’t be for life. I’d now caught a whole series of the sewing bee (late to the party and mortified that the BBC discontinued it). I wanted to be able to say, “oh this? I made it!” There was however a spanner in the works. My memories of GCSE textiles are not necessarily happy ones. The sewing bee had numbed the pain of school, plus they all seem to enjoy it and they also get tea and flapjacks as part of the deal while sewing. I’m not necessarily saying that the two correlate but STAGS you could’ve learned something there. Just sayin’! Also don’t ever get my mum started on the curriculum content we had to run the gauntlet of covering….

This would never be an easy feat alone, but cometh the hour, cometh the mum. Like a hero she arrived in her Peugeot with all manner of gadgets and gizmo’s in the back which would help and wearing a dress she’d made herself. Fortified with Tea and flapjack we got going.  I learnt, thanks to my mum about pattern cutting, seam allowances, pattern matching and much much more.

The pro at work.

Making something to wear also made me really think about ethical and sustainable fashion, it took us about a day and a couple of hours the next morning to finish the top we made together, which really makes you think about where your clothes were made and how much those who made them were paid. I’ve never been a Primark shopper but I do hear rumours that places like H&M etc. are just as bad.

Deep concentration, unusual. Messy hair, standard.

 

I used a ‘Tilly and the Buttons’ pattern which I’d been given by my lovely sister in law and also is an antidote to the frumpy dress patterns you might think are the only ones on the market. Tilly has transformed the sewing industry and made it cool. So thanks Mum for all your help and for helping me to tick off number 5 of my 30 before 30 list. Just need to keep up with slimming world so it’s a little less snug by autumn. I may not be a sewing be yet, but I definitely have the bug.

The finished product. Thanks Mum.

Running like a Girl

Number 11 on my 30 before 30 list was to join a running club. I’ve been running on and off for quite a while now. I was never athletic at school, normally one of the first few in the class to drop out of a bleep test (mostly because running from one end of a gym to the other felt a bit like how I imagine prison exercise used to be).

Everything changed in 2012. I aquired an awesome flatmate and friend. She is a health and fitness inspiration She is always trying new exercises, pushing herself hard, and nourishing her body properly with the right nutrition. It was when she moved in that I tried my first juice. For the first few months I was a total couch potato but her enthusiasm rubbed off on me. Under her guidance and encouragemet I completed my first 5k, my first Parkrun, and my first 10k. I’ve never looked back. Running is something which seriously helps my mental health, particularly as I battle anxiety and the odd bout of depression.

But i’d hit a rut. I’d given it all up for wedding cake so as time freed up now that wedding planning was over it was time to get out there and do something about it. My flatmate was in the super hardcore Spa Striders and there was no way I was ever going to manage that. Like a beam of light in one of those hollywood movies Run Like a Girl came onto my radar.

I signed up to their return to running course on New Years Day which follows a programme written by the army to get people back running after a lapse or an injury and on a cold night in January I arrived not sure what to expect.

I’d actually sat in the car for ten minutes trying to talk myself into getting out while I  panicked and wondered, would an all female group be a bit bitchy? (They couldn’t be nicer and more encouraging if they tried). Would I keep up? I’ve never dropped out yet. Would it all be a bit girly? Yes it was, but in the most positive enouraging, pro-female environment you could ever want to imagine.

First run with RLAG. Having talked myself out of the car.

The group are an inspiration. The group is free to join with a small fee for any courses which you do with them (approx £30). Since joining i’ve done sessions which make me feel like a ‘real runner’ including speed sessions and hill sessions. I always get a bit nervous before I turn up to the group but afterwards I feel fantastic. I’ve never regretted a session, and the private facebook group where everyone encourages each other during their runs away from the group is amazing.

Thanks Run Like A Girl. Not only have you got me hooked, you’ve helped literally hundreds of women to feel better about themselves physically, mentally and emotionally and I am proud to be one of them.

As an end plug, I am also running the Rugby 10k on Saturday the 17th June dressed as a superhero so I can cross off number 16/30. Please do sponsor me a few pennies on the link below if you can so that we can win against cancer.

https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/Alice-Webber1

 

A shellfish day

I’ve been working flippin’ hard of late. The first six months in my job as an Adult Skills Tutor have been a huge baptism of fire. I love it but i’ve noticed the real need for down time since I started. While I was doing my PhD my rule was to treat all weekends like a mini holiday so a few weekends ago some indulgence was called for.

Number 14 on my list of 30 things to do before 30 was to eat a lobster. I’d never had one before and I was keen. Probably a good thing that I never saw The Little Mermaid as a child. Don’t feel sorry for me, i’ll watch it at some point. I’m a huge seafood fan much to Mr W’s dismay. His idea of eating fish stretches to a tuna baked potato or cod in batter with chips. Sad times for me. His theory is that if you need blacksmiths tools to eat it, they haven’t prepared it properly.

Luckily I knew just the person who was hugely up for joining me. Enter the youngest Pyke. Susie hadn’t eaten one either. Having spoken to each other midweek on the phone and both realising we had a free Saturday we hatched a plan to meet up in London, that well known non-coastal and landlocked place for seafood… but needs must. It was a good place to meet and we knew we’d be able to find a Loch Fyne. After the usual awkward laugh about the fact we’d dressed more or less identically without even consulting each other we headed onto the tube exchanging seafood puns: “So crabby until I saw you, Pal”, “Nearly Clam-ed up when the train was late”, i’ll stop now before you stop reading.

So Lobsters. I don’t get how anyone could eat a whole one. It’s tasty but goodness me it’s rich. We just went for half each, covered in garlic butter with french fries and samphire. I didn’t want to eat for hours and hours afterwards which is highly unusual for me. At £34.00 for a whole one it’s a treat but when you work it out as £15 each for a main that’s not bad.

 

As i’d been told it does taste like a cross between a prawn and a crab but, and Mr W is going to LOVE this, though it was tasty it was a faff to eat.  In some ways though it’s quite nice to have a sense of really having had to work for your food. Like celery, but more glam.

So thanks for your company Suz and thanks for helping me tick off number 14.

Oh. And sorry Sebastian.