Being Creative

Lost and found

Usually, I am quite an organised sort of person and the member of our household the others turn to when they can't lay their hands on something but when it comes to things I haven't seen/used for ages then it can be a different matter. Yesterday, for instance, I was trying to find a particular photo taken of my sister and myself together when we were little. I wanted to get Si' to scan it into the computer (haven't mastered that technological wizardry, yet) so that I could print it out today to make her birthday card. I began by looking in the drawer where we normally keep photographs and instructions for how to work the various gadgets that we've gathered together over time. There are lots of photos in there and most are still in the envelopes they came back from the developers in. I was soon immersed in the baby photos of my children - sleepy babies, sticky babies and babies smiling those first toothy grins.Then there were the toddlers - with unsteady gait - at home, at the seaside and enjoying a bedtime story. First one, two, then three all at school in their little uniforms - first bikes, enjoying the snow and wearing Easter bonnets. These gave way to bigger uniforms, by which time we were becoming digital with our photographs. Certain of my children have been known to remove the photos they consider most offensive of themselves lest I show them to their friends/boyfriends/girlfriends. I'm mentioning no names! By this time I was nearing the bottom of the drawer but was no nearer to finding the photo I was looking for. I did, however, find photocopied sheets of the instructions on how to work/clean the Rayburn cooker (circa 1950) that was in the cottage we rented in Devon. I put this to one side to copy for said sister who is after a Rayburn herself. I then tried the next drawer up and 'bingo', I found a folder, containing not only the picture I was looking for but a collection of letters, cards and postcards that I'd sent to my grandmother towards the end of her life. We were living in Wales then and were a long way away from my gran at a time when she was making the decision to give up her own home and move into residential care. When she died, some time later, my dad found all the correspondence together and asked me if I'd like it back. At the time I took it for sentimental reasons but reading them again I realise what an important contribution they make to my own family's history. Each card and letter is dated and describes our lives then and records the milestones of our children's development. It is easy, as your children get older, to forget which child did what and when. There was a lovely one which describes how Lucy - aged about three - got hold of my embroidery scissors and cut all her fringe off, right down to her scalp! I didn't read them all but have made a mental note to, somewhere in the near future, before I forget where they are again!

I then went in search of an article I wanted for a future post that I thought I'd stored in my 'Inspiration' folder. I could see the pictures in the article clearly in my head but couldn't recall the precise nature of the information it contained, which was what I was really after.I never did find it but having trawled through the entire folder I did find all sorts of other articles that can be put to good use as inspiration for posts spanning a wide range of subjects.

I suppose, from all this, that the point I'm making is the change I've noticed in myself in the short time since I gave up paid work. At one time, not being able to lay my hands on something quickly would have driven me frantic and would undoubtedly have ended in a bout of self-reproach. Today, I'm finding myself to be much more philosophical. I found one of the things I was looking for but failed to find the other. It didn't really matter in the end as I found the information in the misplaced article elsewhere instead but in looking for what was lost, I also found so much more than I'd bargained for.

Jam today

If you have read the tips on my Home-Made page about making preserves, you will have noticed that I encourage people to have a go at making their own jam and chutney on the grounds that it is both enjoyable and that "jam and chutney making can be cost effective if you buy fruits in season or when you have a glut of your own produce". I've recently been reading a copy of 21st Century Smallholder by Paul Waddington and was interested to see what he had to say on the subject of preserving, or, as he prefers to call it, 'making delightful things'. Although he acknowledges that these processes are easy and the results long lasting, he also states, "It's not particularly cost-effective, as both products are commercially cheap to buy and you'll need a lot of sugar and a bit of time to make your own". I think he is misleading his reader here as he is not comparing like with like. Yes, you can buy jam from the supermarket for less than fifty pence a jar but if you were to compare the taste of it against that of home-made there is simply no comparison. This brings to mind a piece I read in Gardener's World magazine recently, which refers to the dissimilarity between 'municipal' daffodils and the more subtle forms of the species, as being "the difference between an oboe and a kazoo"! To get something even approaching the same league, you would be looking at the Bonne Maman range. At our local Tesco, a 350g jar (or 12oz, in old money) costs between £1.79 and £2.29 depending on the variety of fruit it contains. I would need to get a full-time job again if making my own jam cost as much as that! Even the cost of cooking it is not particularly high as all the softening is done at the lowest flame setting on my gas ring, with the heat only being turned up at the end for 10-15 minutes to reach setting point. To get the cost of sugar into proportion, I buy mine in 10lb bags to keep the cost down - and this will make a cupboard full of jam - for less than the price of one portion of fish and chips. A similar case can be made for chutney, particularly since it uses less sugar and includes vinegar, instead. Cheaper than chips!

He then adds, rather lamely, I feel, "but your own is somehow always best". Damn right, it is! Your fruit has been carefully sourced, even grown yourself - in which case you know if it has been sprayed or not and have also limited it's food miles. Your own preserves only include the ingredients needed to make them, without the use of additional thickeners or preservatives and you will have a lot of grateful friends and relatives who will make a point of telling you how much they enjoyed consuming it. As for time, you can waste an awful lot of it standing in a supermarket queue waiting to pay for your pots of cheap stuff, without the benefit of a fabulous treat to come. Going back to yesterday's post about wasting food, I bet lots of cheap jam gets tasted then wasted. Stick it in a cake or dilute it with water and use as a glaze for fruit. You've then got another empty jam jar for your home-made preserves!

It's alright, Paul; you can come out from behind your potting shed. I've put my soap box away now. As for anyone reading this, have a go yourself and make up your own minds. I'm going to enjoy a cup of tea now with my (home-made) jam sandwich, thank you, Paul!

The Store Cupboard Challenge

"Most of us are guilty of going to the supermarket even when we have a freezer or cupboard full of ingredients which could be used to make a meal. So this challenge stems from the desire to use up stuff before buying any more".

Thrifty Ways For Modern Days    edited by Martin Lewis

 

Although today is the first day of a new calendar month, it marks the middle point of our own financial one. Just after Si' gets paid we tend to do a bit of stocking up and each month it will be on something different. In March, we went to Lincoln Farmer's Market and bought several different cheeses and on the way we called at a farm that sells their own Aberdeen Angus beef for a few bags of stewing steak for the freezer. However, by this stage in the month I am always getting just a little concerned about staying within budget and I naturally seem to adopt a little belt tightening. Even before we downshifted, I tried to keep an up-to-date list of the freezer contents. I've now extended this to listing the contents of my store cupboard and the various other little stashes of comestibles I have around our home. Lest I sound worryingly squirrel-like in my tendencies, let me explain. Each autumn I gather large quantities of walnuts from a tree locally, partly because I really like them but also because I cannot bear to think of them going to waste. Once the shells have dried out they live in stackable baskets, that once held mushrooms, in the cupboard under the stairs. They will keep like that for months or even years. Then I have to hide any chocolate in various 'safe places' away from the nose (and claws) of the Chocolate Monster. I am not naturally secretive and often I cannot remember which of the many spots I might have hidden them in! As the kitchen inevitably gets hot during cooking, as a rule I try to store things in other rooms to ensure they keep well. For example, the jams and chutneys live in a big store cupboard in the relative cool of the dining room. I've also read recently that it's a good idea to keep a list of the contents of your fridge, with the use-by dates, stuck to the front. That way, if things get pushed to the back, you will still know that they are there and remember to use them up.

The idea of the Storecupboard Challenge as described in Thrifty Ways... is to plan one (main) meal a week using only what you have to hand in your storecupboard or freezer. (I'm presuming that you can include the contents of the fridge, too). I am bending the rules slightly here, for this month, so that all main meals must have something we already have as their main ingredient. If we can find the remaining ingredients at home, too, then so much the better. For tomorrow, I have some pork chops in the freezer, bought from Tesco for half price as they were nearing their sell-by date. I have a little double cream, left from another recipe, in the fridge. Also in there are some mushrooms and some lemons, minus their zest, that I used for the banana and walnut bread on Saturday. That gives me all I need - plus flour and butter from my staple basics - to prepare Delia Smith's recipe of Pork Chops with Cream and Mushrooms (see Recipe page). I also have a lot of blueberries in the freezer and some buttermilk I bought to make blueberry muffins. The buttermilk needs using this week so blueberry muffins are definitely on the menu, as well. Naturally, I will still need to stock up on things that don't keep so well like milk, bread, eggs and fresh fruit and veg but it should keep my food costs down nicely, as well as using up things that I've had a while, before they go off.

I found a brilliant website today called LoveFoodHateWaste. Did you know that in Britain we waste 6.7 million tonnes of food a year and that this is the equivalent of throwing away one third of all the food we buy? Although some of this is inevitably peelings, cores and bones, most of it could actually - at one stage - have been used. Once in landfill it produces huge amounts of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, and cutting that waste would have the same impact on carbon emissions as taking one in five cars off the road. I think that's what they call food for thought! We are no saints ourselves; only this morning I found some gravy that I'd taken out of the freezer for the dogs (whilst compiling my freezer list last Friday) right at the back of the fridge. Hence I will be sticking my fridge-list in a prominent position tomorrow morning. The site has some really good ideas, though I swear they've been spying on me through my kitchen window as I already use a fair few of them! It also has a great list of recipes and you can search by the left-over ingredient you want to use up. Below is a quick list of some of our own family favourites for using up leftovers or things that are getting past their best:-

Bananas - make a lovely Banana and Walnut Bread or a great thickener for smoothies

Mashed Potato - combine with a little beaten egg and flour and shape to form Potato Cakes (which can be cooked the next day or frozen) or use it as the topping for a Shepherd's or Cottage Pie

Chicken Carcass - either cook in the pressure cooker or on the hob to make Basic Chicken Stock, useful as a base in many other recipes

Tired Looking Fruit - use to make smoothies or lemons and limes can be squeezed and the juice frozen in ice cube trays till it's needed.

Egg Whites - brilliant for making meringues or frozen for use at a later date. It's usually the yolks I'm left with as I make a lot of pavlovas and meringues as presents. Our dog, Zephyr, can hear an egg cracking in the kitchen from wherever he is in the house at the time; I'm sure I don't have to elaborate on how our egg yolks are used up!

Odds and Ends of Fresh or Frozen Veg - choose from the many recipes on the internet for making soup. You could even freeze it in portions, once cooked, to de-frost and heat up in the microwave when you're in a rush. Much healthier than most ready-meals. Click here to go to the Recipe page for our family-favourite soup recipe.

I was thinking of compiling a list on this blog of 'using-up' recipes but since LoveFoodHateWaste have already started, I would encourage you to send your recipes to them to create a resource that everyone can use. Now I think I've just remembered where I hid that Easter chocolate ... 

A gentle bit of chit-chat

What an absolutely glorious day it is today. The sun is shining, the horribly cold wind that we have been having here recently has gone and I have my fingers crossed that Spring has arrived at last. Of all the days to start sniffing, coughing and sneezing it just had to be today! To be fair, it has been coming on for a few days but I am very intolerant of cold bugs - both in myself and in my family - and I thought that if I ignored it it would go away. Yesterday, although the weather was lovely, I wrapped myself up in hat, scarf and fleece and sowed two rows of broad beans on the allotment, thinking the fresh air would do me good. By bedtime it had not done the trick and this morning I was not at my best. So I have declared today a 'dog and blog' day. The boys had nice walks in the sunshine earlier and now that they are sleepily ensconced on their respective sofas, I am able to sit in the warmth of our south-facing sitting room and type away at the keyboard to my heart's content.

With the wind being so bitter last week, I tended to hurry with any activity that involved being out of the house. Consequently, I didn't see many people to talk to and it got me thinking that I would like to get to know more people, more specifically, others who have downshifted like myself. Being a long term reader of Country Living magazine, I put a post on their website forum, and I have been really heartened by the response. Not only have I had encouraging replies - thank you so much, emjay53, juliey and Gilly FB - but the number of people visiting my blog has mushroomed. I'm even getting listed on Google now. Wow! Do please feel free to leave comments on what you think of it. It's not nearly so rewarding if I think I am only talking to myself! It's a funny feeling knowing that so many people are reading my blog. It's rather like expecting visitors at home where you whizz round with the hoover and want your house to look at it's best. I will be casting a very critical eye over my punctuation on all my existing posts and pages later, whilst wearing my 'best' fleece to type my entries! Gilly FB, the violas at the top of the page are for you, so that you know that I am thinking of you.

Although Saturday dawned bright and breezy it rained heavily in the afternoon, so I used the time to make three banana and walnut loaves. I'd bought the bananas in a big bag for a pound at the market on Tuesday and still have a lot of walnuts left from those I collected last autumn. Once the loaves were cooked, I found there wasn't really enough room in the freezer to get two of them in, so, having removed a box of blackcurrants to make space, I made a batch of jam. In case anyone is worried that I am setting myself up as some sort of superwoman, it did take me until nine at night to get everything finished, washed up and put away.

Yesterday, we celebrated our seventeenth wedding aniversary. When we got married we lived in a hamlet in mid-Devon and Carrie, my eldest daughter, wore a little turquoise dress with a straw hat and carried a tiny basket full of wild primroses we'd collected from the hedgerows. The photo above was taken at the cemetery where my dad is buried and I'm really pleased to see that the staff who tend it are allowing these wild plants to flourish and multiply. We also had our annual general meeting for our allotment association yesterday and Si' and myself have taken on the secretary and treasurer's roles jointly for the forthcoming year. It makes sense for us as I am about more during the day to show prospective plot holders round, etc. Si' has been tremendously effective at letting our vacant allotments in the last year and our aim is to let the remaining ones in the next twelve months. We are getting to have a good mix of older and younger plot holders now and and it is developing into a nice little community with a shared interest in common.

I want to end this post by going back to it's title. When I was really busy with my former job, I would see people I might not have seen for ages in the street and apologise, as I passed them, for not having time for a chat. We were always going to catch up at some unspecified time in the future. It's a sad fact of life, then, that those opportunities are missed so, knowing that I would be finishing work, I made 'making time to chat' my New Year's resolution for this year. I'm happy to say that I am still sticking to it; even the dogs will lie down beside me on the pavement if they sense that the conversation will last more than a few minutes! We always made fun of my dad for bending people's ears but, my goodness, I've lost count of the number of people who tell me how much they miss those chats now. Me, included!

My cup(cake) runneth over...

We awoke early on Easter Sunday morning, thinking that we might brave the big car boot sale locally but instead of Easter sunshine outside we were greeted with four inches of snow. My heart went out to the poor Easter Bunny, whose job is already made difficult enough these days, what with Staffordshire bull terriers lurking in many a garden and children clamouring for more chocolate eggs every year! She must have been chilled to the marrow once she'd finished her deliveries and in need of a cup of hot chocolate to warm her up again. I am proud to say that I did not buy a single over-priced, over-packaged, shop-bought egg this year. This is partly because I had planned to make my own chocolate eggs but I didn't get round to ordering the mould until the last minute, so it hasn't arrived yet.It's also because Lucy still has a lot of chocolate from her birthday last week and one person can only eat so much (can't they?). I still intend to make an egg or two once the mould arrives - hopefully today - so watch this space for an update.

Back to Easter Sunday. The snow had all but melted by the time we walked the dogs - though Hector loved shovelling the last bits with his nose - but the wind was still icy. Not the sort of day for tackling outside jobs at all. So, with a heavy heart (not at all, I was delighted) I decided to test out a few new recipes in the warmth of the kitchen. Early last week I'd ordered the book, Cupcake Magic by Kate Shirazi, from Amazon Marketplace and it arrived on Saturday morning. I'd read about Kate in Country Living magazine. A former nurse and health visitor, she now makes brilliant cupcakes from home, using eggs from her rescued battery hens, and posts them out all over the country (the cupcakes, not the hens). Each book sold includes a donation to the Battery Hen Welfare Trust and as free-range eggs are a cause close to my heart I decided to invest in a copy. I was not disappointed. As well as including a wealth of recipes, Kate writes with wit and perception about icing, ingredients, hens and hyperactivity! I have made cupcakes before but they always sink when I take them out of the oven and require a lot of sickly icing to fill in the 'dip' in the middle. Kate's 'basic no-mucking-around cupcake' recipe really works, with flat, golden tops just begging to be iced. Well they did when I followed the instructions. The recipe said to put a heaped teaspoon into each paper case and that the mixture would make about 12 cupcakes. Once I'd filled 12 cases with a heaped teaspoon there was a lot of mixture left, so I added a bit more to each one. This was a mistake as the cupcakes either rose clear of the paper case on baking and/or assumed an alarming slope on top.They were golden alright but not good for icing. Having made a lot of cupcakes in her time, Kate probably suggested the heaped teaspoon to leave a little room for the icing on top. Batch number two were, as we say at our house, just 'baby bear' (whose porridge, chair and bed Goldilocks found to be 'just right'). To see how the professional (Kate) does it, click here to see her cupcakes "in all their glory"!

If you make these yourself, ignore the Supercook liquid food colouring in the supermarket and invest in some proper sugarcraft paste/gel colours. It is nigh on impossible to put the Supercook colouring in one drop at a time and, as the nice lady in the sugarcraftshop told me yesterday, "once it's in, you can't take it out again"! The Sugarflair ones are very longlasting, can be mixed together and you only need a tiny bit, added with a cocktail stick. Our weather forecast is for rain after today so I can see myself having plenty of time to experiment with colour and cupcakes quite soon!

As Si' was cooking our leg of lamb for dinner, I had already decided on a strawberry mascarpone tart for dessert. It was really to use up the left-over strawberries from Lucy's birthday pavlova and yes, I do occasionally buy imported fruit, out of season, so shoot me! In my defence, I bought them from the local market, walked to fetch them and carried them home in a basket, instead of a plastic bag; the green tops went in the compost and I've washed the container to re-use. The recipe is a Nigel Slater one, from his book, The Kitchen Diaries, and in it he suggests a sweet oat biscuit base. Making a batch of biscuits helped to keep the kitchen warm so I felt I was killing two birds with one stone. He suggests a long rectangular tart tin, with a removable base but I found a cicular nine inch version of the same did just as well. I didn't have enough strawberries in the end so added a few frozen raspberries about an hour before serving. The end result was both fragrant and delicious and would have been quite quick to make if I'd had the biscuits made in advance. I'll be adding the recipe to my list of strawberry ones before I return the book to the library. So we might have been chocolate-free for Easter but we certainly enjoyed the home-cooking!

             

Good Friday

I haven't just had a good Friday today but a really rather excellent one. Si' was on holiday, so we didn't have to get up quite so early, and after breakfast we went to show some prospective new starters around the allotments. Si' is the allotment secretary and he has been very successful at letting some of the overgrown vacant plots in the last couple of years. Can you believe that in other areas there are waiting lists for allotment plots? Anyway, the couple seemed very keen and wanted to get started right away. Then we took the boys for a windy walk in the sunshine, up through the cemetary and saw our first green woodpecker of the year, with his startling blood-red cap. On returning, I donned my apron for my annual Good Friday ritual of making my own hot cross buns. I've done it every year since we got married, except for last year when the reminder that I'd always taken one across to my dad, as they came out of the oven, was too raw to bare. We really find the shop-bought variety too sickly to stomach and I enjoy marking the season by making them myself.I had some organic stoneground strong white flour to use up that I bought from Mount Pleasant windmill in the autumn. I got it originally to make bread with but my hands crack terribly during cold weather and I'd not managed to co-ordinate bread-making with a warm spell. Once I'd made the dough, and it was smelling good and yeasty, I put it to rise in the sunny front window before nipping into town. As I returned the sun had gone and it was trying to rain. The dough had not risen as much as I'd have liked and the strong wind kept causing our central heating boiler to cut out, which didn't really help. So I knocked the dough back, divided it up onto greased tins and set them on the hob of our gas cooker, with the oven turned on to create some warmth. Within the hour they had risen beautifully and the oven was nicely pre-heated to cook them in.

After ten minutes I take them out of the oven, briefly, to glaze them with a little sugar dissolved in milk. Just after they'd finshed cooking, and I was easing them off the tins, the sun came out and I whizzed them onto a plate to take this picture. We ate them for tea with lots of butter and they were delicious!

Just as I was about to download the pictures onto the computer, I noticed that the daffodils I'd brought back as buds from the allotment on Wednesday had opened, presumably in the morning's sun. They are a mixture of yellow ones I'd planted in the autumn, for picking, and some that are orange and pale yellow that I'd inherited with my allotment. They had been sitting in the window but I'd moved the vase next to the computer whilst photographing the hot cross buns. I'd mixed them with some dogwood stems, with pinky-tipped leaves just emerging, and I was quite overwhelmed with what a bright splash of spring colour they made, especially as the sun had disappeared again. I never think of daffodils as having a strong scent but these smell lovely, even sitting two feet away from them as I am now.

So today has been full of lots of little treats which were all about noticing and appreciating and none of which involved a shopping bag. Perhaps when Lucy, her boyfriend, Siffy, and myself make Easter nests tomorrow, I will be able to think of it as 'even better Saturday'. I hope so. Enjoy you're Easter holiday, whatever you have planned!

My Other Half

Today it is my husband Simon's birthday and I feel it is quite apt that he should be the subject of my first post in the 'Inspiration' category as he inspires me every day. We are totally different in temperament; he is the chalk to my cheese. I am small and full of beans, keen to tackle everything all at once and wearing myself to a frazzle in the process. Simon, on the other hand, is tall, much more laid back and measured in temperament and often possessed of patience and perseverance of saintly proportions! Whilst I ranted and became disillusioned with the teething problems of this blog, Si' systematically tackled each one as it arose, calmly and without fuss.When my father died fifteen months ago, Si' was a source of gentle light in the darkness that was bereavement. He also has a very kind heart which, now and again, a foolish person mistakes for meekness. It was he who first suggested I might give up my job some months since, for the sake of my health and - knowing me better, perhaps, than I do myself - he was absolutely right. Although different in disposition, we share a love of such a diversity of things and I see that as being our glue when times get tough. He's gone off to work today in his zingy orange Ted Baker tie with a box of home-made ginger biscuits under his arm to share with friends. Happy Birthday, darling; you are the icing on my cake!

Digging for Dahlias

This week I have ordered my dahlias. If you have read my Growing page you will understand that this will cause a certain amount of trepidation on my part, so this afternoon I am going to clear their intended patch on the allotment and dig in plenty of nourishing home-made compost in readiness. Since I won't actually be able to plant them out until the risk of frost has passed at the end of May, I am considering growing some green manure on that patch first. This would prevent weeds growing on the prepared bed, prevent nutrients being washed out of the soil in the meantime and improve the soil structure for the dahlias. The idea then is that you dig the green manure into the soil a couple of weeks before the dahlias go in, to give it chance to break down into the soil. I buy my green manure seeds from The Organic Gardening Catalogue, the retail arm of Garden Organic (formerly HDRA).

A visit to the National Dahlia Collection, near Penzance, last summer persuaded me that I really must bite the bullet with dahlia growing this time, lest my garden should remain bereft of these brassy blooms forever!

Meringues for Mother's Day

I love making meringues. They are quick, easy and taste a million times better than anything you can buy in the shops. Also, as Nigella Lawson will tell you, "people really do seem far more impressed by a home-made pudding, however simple, than they would be by the most lovingly produced main course". For years I thought they were difficult and the preserve of 'good cooks' but I've found that if you can wield an electric mixer then you can make your own meringues. I buy free-range eggs, from the greengrocer, that come from a village on the edge of town (so are low in food miles) and I find I get much better results with these than supermarket eggs. Nothing is wasted, either. The egg whites go into the meringues, the dogs have the yolks with their breakfast and the shells and cardboard box find themselves in the compost bucket. I keep meaning to make an egg custard with the yolks instead but have not quite got there yet. My mum loves meringues and so last night I made her a batch for Mother's Day.

The meringues in the photos are, in true Blue Peter fashion, some I made earlier (in the week). On the same day, I bought some lovely primrose plants for the front garden in a multitude of gorgeous colours. Since I had the camera out to capture the meringues, one thing led to another and soon the upstairs sitting room had been transformed into a makeshift photography studio full of food and flowers. First I snapped the meringues, then took some shots of the primroses that I'd picked and arranged in tiny containers. Inevitably, I began experimenting with taking photographs of the two together.

 

I spent a very happy hour snapping away until the light began to fade and Lucy arrived home from school. Once the meringues had served their purpose as photographic props we felt quite justified in eating them.... 

As for the primroses, I have spent a most contented Mother's Day afternoon planting them into our tiny front garden to compliment the miniature daffs that are already in bloom. Massed together, they look almost good enough to eat!                                                                                                                            

Staying Put

"But don't believe all you read about rural idylls, because they don't exist. If anyone tells you that downshifting is only about moving out to the country, don't believe a word of it. It's a state of mind, a change of attitude and perspective that may or may not cause you to move house, down the road, to another part of the country. Or stay put."  Downshifting - The Bestselling Guide to Happy, Simpler Living Polly Ghazi and Judy Jones (p. xii)

Many people, it would seem, decide to downshift by moving house. More specifically, to the country. This may be to find somewhere in a less expensive area, perhaps somewhere bigger/smaller or with more land. Or for a change of scene. For us that was never really a consideration. We bought our big, Victorian terrace house very cheaply, before prices began to rise here, and although there has been a big jump in the cost of local property since, it is still some of the cheapest in the country. According to Country Homes and Interiors magazine, (September 2007), "Lincolnshire......Is the only county in the UK with an average price for a detached family house below £200,000." The size of our house suits us, too,and we would have to pay an awful lot more for a five-bedroomed house in the country, even in Lincolnshire.

Our daughter, Lucy, attends a school within walking distance of home, my mother lives across the road and most of our local facilities are very close at hand. Within a stone's throw of our house we have a newsagents, our dentist, our vet (very handy for the 'boys'), an excellent fish and chip shop and a Chinese takeaway. We are within a short walk of Tesco and the centre of town, with its twice-weekly market, a greengrocer selling local free-range eggs, the town library, our doctors and no less than five charity shops! My decision to shop locally, wherever possible, and to buy anything else online was confirmed last week when we travelled to Lincoln and spent the best part of two hours trying to find somewhere to park and travelling between the centre and the out-of-town stores we'd gone for. For a small town we are lucky to have our own Arts Centre, which shows films and hosts live performances, two swimming pools and leisure centres, a medieval manor house and four different allotment groups with plots to spare. I can be at my allotment just over five minutes after leaving my front door and in open countryside in ten minutes.

Before moving here we lived in the country for eight years, six of them on a smallholding with hens and a flock of sheep. Although, in many ways, it provided an idyllic environment for our (then) young family there were also many drawbacks. For us they were the physical isolation, the time and cost spent travelling and, if you live in the Welsh uplands, the weather. At 600 feet above sea level on the slopes of Snowdonia, you could be enveloped by a dense mist for two or three days at a time and that was in the summer! I always found the word 'waterproof' to be a misnomer with regard to outer layers and the local weather. Persistent drizzle could find it's way through all of them and you just had to have a selection to choose from ; one to wear and one to drip itself dry in the outside loo!

If you are reading this and you are hell-bent on moving to the country then this will not deter you - and so it shouldn't - but I always think any awareness of potential pitfalls helps you to be prepared, at least psychologically, should they have the misfortune to happen to you.

I do miss the skippy little lambs, and even the lack of sleep that was the norm for us at this time of year but there are many skills that I first learned whilst living there, such as making preserves and being self reliant, that have stood me in good stead ever since. Others, like splitting logs with a nine pound axe, will be invaluable for feeding the woodburning stove we plan to install as a way of reducing our heating costs. I have often thought what an excellent tag-line Country Living magazine has: “WHEN YOUR HEART IS IN THE COUNTRY”. I think many readers like myself are not looking to physically move there but are looking for a simpler, more traditional lifestyle that living in the country is seen to embrace. When I'm on my allotment weeding the blackcurrants in the sunshine this afternoon I shall truly feel that in staying put I can have the best of both worlds!