Stitch And Bitch – Truly a WI Warm Up!

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I am not a girly girl but if there is one thing I aspire to be part of, it’s the Women’s Institute. I do not have the spare time to join my local order (is that what they are called? Pack? Is it like Brownies?). I work full time, am a teacher so that means even when not physically at school I’m surrounded by marking or at the sink trying to get marker pen out of my shirt. So, when a good friend of mine suggested she wanted to start a local chapter (chapter, is that right?) of “Stitch’n’Bitch” meeting only once a month with no experience needed, I jumped at it. It’s like WI Lite.

The inspiration for our group

Stich and bitch, although a phrase used as early as World War 2, it was popularised in 1999 by a group in New York who met regularly to knit, sew, chat and, well, bitch. Similar groups have since sprung up all around the world and here was our turn.

We meet once a month and rotate who hosts it. In our group with have a number of quilters, couple of cross-stichers, and a few knitters. One thing that unites us is our complete and utter amateur approach to everything we turn our hand to. We’re not that good. We have been going for a year now so you’d think we’d have gotten a bit better. No. The reason? None of us carry on with our projects in between our monthly meetings!

I started knitting a scarf in February and joked that it would take me to Christmas. The only reason it was finished by Christmas was because one of the teaching assistants at school felt so sorry for me that I’d taken so long that she offered to finish it!

One of our number has been cross-stitching a cushion since we started but the significant dent made in it was not when we met but when she was called to jury duty and spent a lot of time waiting around, banned from using her iPhone. I have since started another cross-stitch but because it involves following a pattern, rather than jumped up colouring in. Every time I look up from my “stitch” in order to have a “bitch” I lose my place so it is taking 3 times as long as it otherwise would!

Supposed to say Garden of Weedin'. Maybe it will be finished by next year..

Our sessions invariably start with the opening of bags of our projects and the inevitable excuses as to why they look exactly the same as they did when they were packed up a month ago.

After about an hour and much swearing (because we all keep losing our places or miscounting stitches), the projects get packed away and the chat takes over.

I look upon Stich’n’Bitch as my dry run to joining the WI. Once I have enough time to attend to my “Garden of Weedin’” cross-stitch plaque between monthly meetings then I will have matured enough to progress to lemon curd lessons, wood-turning workshops and crochet classes. I can’t wait. Seriously. I really can’t. Is that sad at 32?

I’m Not Ungrateful. Honest.

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In these austere times I am hoping that friends and family will actually heed my advice this year of only buying useful gifts for Christmas. As lovely as it is to receive the hardback version of Attenborough’s latest TV epic it will never get looked at and far from being an impressive “coffee table” book, it will end up on the car boot sale by the following summer.

All Christmas presents. I guarantee it!

I’m not trying to be ungrateful, I’m being realistic. No-one has the money to throw away this year on gifts that seem like a lovely idea but will only be useful for cooing over when you open it and very little besides.

My husband owns a classic Mini but that does not mean he needs to receive Mini memorabilia every year. The remote-control Mini from 2 years ago was used for a couple of laps around the Christmas tree before the batteries ran out and from there it was collected with the other “oh, that’s lovely” gifts, stored under the bed and flogged on a car-boot in August.

I will repeat that I am not trying to be ungrateful. I’m sure a lot of thought went into the foot pamper kit complete with exfoliating socks but it hasn’t ever and will never get used. Perfume gift sets are not cheap but honestly, who ever uses the body lotion? Don’t waste your money.

Have I said I’m not trying to be ungrateful? I ask my family every year “what do you need?” and every year I get a reply of “nothing”. You must need something! Let me buy something you actually NEED. Has your whisk seen better days? Are you getting low on your favourite brand of foundation? Could you use a new demister for the car? All of these things are useful. They will save you money, you will use them and it shows I’ve actually put some thought into getting you something you want rather than something that will end up on a wonky paste table next to a box-set of Friends videos.

I’m really not an ungrateful person, I am thankful that someone has gone to the effort to buy me something but I’d rather have nothing than something I have to make room to store for the allotted “safe” time before I can sell it on eBay.

For the past 4 years I have hinted (not all that subtly) at needing a potato scrubber and have yet to get one. The reason? A potato scrubber is not Christmassy! Then paint it red and green and tie a bell to it! It would get used and I would give you a big fat kiss! Honestly,

I’m not an ungrateful person. Just get me a sodding potato scrubber and not a Strictly Come Dancing Annual!

Breaking Up Is Hard To Do

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It’s not just a cliché. Breaking up is hard to do. Especially when you have been together for a long time. From sitting on the sofa together watching your favourite film, snuggling up under the duvet on a lazy Sunday morning, and some days you wake up and all you want to do is spend the rest of the day with each other. But then there comes a time when being together just doesn’t feel right. It hurts. That’s when you realise, despite all your best efforts to patch things up; you’ll have to let them go.

I almost shed a little tear when I had to get rid of that pair of pyjama bottoms. But the elastic had gone meaning I woke up in all kinds of twists and turns – and pain. The drawstring had been lost to the washing machine Gods long ago and the number of holes in them meant that even hoping to get your leg in the right place when putting them on was something of a lottery.

I tried to fix them, I really did but as you may have seen from previous posts, I’m not the handiest with a needle. Iron-on Wonder Web does not exactly hold up to the rigours of a weekend lie-in. The time came when my husband said those immortal words “just chuck them out or I will”. Like a dagger to my heart!

It’s been over a year. You try to move on. I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve experimented. I’ve even resorted to using online companies to find that perfect match. I’m yet to find another pair that ticks all the boxes.  They are either too long, too short, the wrong fabric, too tight, too loose or just plain vulgar. I’ll cherish those happy memories we spent together black and white tartan check PJ bottoms. Clearly you were one in a million and if I’d been a better person, I could have made our relationship last longer.

I'll miss you my lovely PJ bottoms. Rest in peace.

Learn When To Keep Quiet

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I have an issue with silence. If I’m alone in class, I put music on. If I’m on the computer, I have to have the TV on in the background for company. If a suggestion or question is made in a meeting and no-one responds, I can literally feel my brain about to explode. I can’t stand it. I will then have to talk – even if this means I lumber myself with more work. This happened recently when our head teacher asked if anyone would like to join the school governors as a teacher governor. Everyone looked at the floor, all probably knowing that if they kept quiet for long enough my silence-busting Tourets would kick in. Sure enough it did.

My first meeting did not go well. I did not understand the protocol, asked stupid questions and managed to insult the host (also the chair of the governors) by asking if her Royal Wedding commemorative mug was given to guests of the wedding. She looked insulted and the rest of the people at the meeting all went “oooh, get you”. I have replayed the scenario to many people and they are as stumped as me as to how this can be an insult! It seems to have gone from bad to worse.

Being a school, meetings involving a number of outside parties have to happen in the evening. This meant that by the time the next meeting started, I had already been at work for 12 hours. This almost meant that I was tired, hungry, grumpy and had pen, paint and glitter in all the wrong places when confronted with the fresh-faced, fresh-fed and freshly-groomed outsiders.

We had been sent a weighty 78 page document to review before the meeting ready to ask any questions at the meeting. I had opened the paperwork but the sheer size of it made me immediately allergic to going into any great detail. Sure it will be fine I thought. No-one can possibly digest this amount of information and be that interested in graphs and data to have prepared questions. We’ll rattle through this and it will soon be home time.

Last on the agenda was the War And Peace number crunching exercise. We’ve been at this meeting for 2 hours I thought. It’s almost 9:30pm. Surely no-one will have any questions, we can end this meeting and go home to wrinkle in a bath. Wrong! I swear we went through each page in detail!

It was a conspiracy! It was as if each person at the meeting had picked several graphs and pages and prepared questions and comments on to impress the rest of the delegates. This meant that for every new page turn someone chipped in with “what I find interesting about this set of data is….” Really? You find this interesting? No you don’t. You haven’t read this. You’ve skimmed it on the way to the meeting now you are all torturing me by keeping me in this room, in this chair looking at these numbers when I could be at home, in a bath, glass of wine in hand, listening to Stephen Fry on an audiobook!

All payback for the wedding mug comment I thought. I am going to practice sitting in meetings not saying anything. Silence is golden. My colleagues have learnt this. This is why they will be at home watching DIY:SOS while I will be at yet another meeting; tired, grumpy and picking PVA glue off my fingers while the rest of the governor sadists discuss “data significance whiskers”.

Read The Small Print. There Is ALWAYS Small Print.

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I’m angry as I type. The urge to put a load of G’s and R’s together, along with a collection of A’s followed by even more R’s, G’s and maybe some H’s is overwhelming.

I have already over used my quota of these letters in many recent text messages to friends and I’ve bored school acquaintances with numerous Facebook status updates this week. The reason? SMALL PRINT!!! (I may have also overused exclamation marks too but I’m not apologising for that)

On Sunday my husband and I had just finished day 3 of our packing and cleaning marathon ready to move house on Wednesday. As the oven and hob had been buffed to within an inch of their life and we’d packed everything that we could have used to cook anyway, we decided to stop off for some food on the way home from the dump (love that word, dump. That and the word pickle, but I digress). We pulled up at a retail park outside of town, you know the ones, Argos, Hobby Craft, Carpet Right etc but as it was 4:30, they were all closed. The “authentic” Italian-American chain offering reasonably priced fare while surrounded by Rat Pack tunes on loop was open.

After about an hour we’d had our fill, listened to about as much Dean Martin as we could handle and left to finish the last of the packing. On getting back to the car I had a yellow and black ticket stuck to the windscreen. I instantly looked around for a car I recognised thinking we’d been pranked by a friend. Nope, it was genuine. Apparently the car park we were in, although “free for 2 hours”, you still need to get a ticket to prove what time you arrived!

So a free car park, on a Sunday, when the rest of the town has free car parks, at a time when all of the shops had shut, has a car parking attendant hiding in waiting to issue £90 tickets to people unaware of the tiny sign situated at the far end of the car park! Gggrrrr! (there I said it). I don’t have a leg to stand on according to their website. They had displayed the regulations the legal minimum number of times in the car park and I have 14 days in which to pay or the price will double. Aaarrgh!

Not content with this, life also throws more wallet denting small print at us this week. On Wednesday, having spent the last 5 days packing and cleaning our rented house, we drop the keys back to our letting agent so that our landlord can move back in. Our landlord’s new life in America did not work out so, hoping Karma would repay the favour later, we moved out early so they could stop living out of a hotel. Karma did not get this message.

5 solid days of cleaning is not enough for this letting agent. They demanded an invoice from the professional cleaning company our 34 page contract required us to use. As we had not done this, they had instructed the landlord that they would be sending in cleaners of their own. The landlord didn’t require this as he was sure from my photos it was clean and empty and he just wanted to move his family back in as soon as possible. Great I thought, common sense prevails.

Wrong. The letting agents held the keys to ransom, instructing the landlord they would not end their involvement until their cleaners had been in “as per section 7.4.2 on the contract both parties had signed”.  Wanting to get his keys back, the landlord had no choice but to agree. The spotless house (which we’d only been in for 6 months I might add) suddenly had almost £200 worth of cleaning required…. Including £45 for the spotless, Cilit Bang advert worthy oven!! Aaagh!

Note the "filthy" yet strangly reflective surfaces!

An oven that would make Barry Scott proud, but not Tim Russ Ltd!

I am sitting a lot now, drinking tea, as I have no legs with which to stand on. The racketeering letting agents, car park owners and cleaners can kiss my soon to be dunked ginger nuts.

Bad Corn – And Other Disappointments

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It had been a busy day doing the garden so the husband and I reward ourselves with a barbeque. A favourite accompaniment is sweet corn. It got us talking about how good corn on the cob is and how disappointing it is to get bad one. This conversation opened up a rather lively discussion both in person and on Facebook after I posted the corn comment.

Large gas bills, a stolen bike, redundancy, all of these things are disappointments, yes, but I’m talking about those irritating, annoying disappointments. The majority of the disappointments we thought of were linked to food. Probably because it’s universal. We can’t all relate to the disappointment of lack of a mooring space for your yacht in Monaco but we can relate to the disappointment of a jam-less doughnut.

We’ve already established bad corn on the cob and a jam-less doughnut, here are a few others you may be able to relate to even if you do own a yacht.

  • Pouring the boiled water onto your tea bag, going tofridge to get the milk only to discover you have run out.
  • Getting to the end of a delicious bag of cherries and the last one is bad
  • The biscuits in the tin have gone soft
  • The rented DVD skipping so you miss the last 5 minutes of the film
  • Making a cracking fry-up then realising too late that

    How disappointing

    you have no ketchup

  • Dropping the best part of the meal you were saving until last (a friend added the detail that despite the 5 second rule, it’s covered in fluff and ruined)
  • Having only enough butter for one and a half slices of toast
  • Only realising you’ve forgotten to replace the washed bed linen when you actually go to bed
  • A pip in every segment of the Satsuma

Life really is rubbish.

Commit to memory ready for the inevitable moment you drop the best bit.

You’ve Got To Have A System

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My sister came to visit last week and after a jam packed day, we collapsed on the sofa and made the usual discovery of nothing to watch on TV. After a lengthy discussion about the irony of hundreds of channels but nothing to watch, my sister revealed a secret vice and suggested that for a laugh I venture up to the mid-600’s.

From channel 640 onwards you are in the realms of the shopping networks. JML, Argos, QVC, bidupTV, Gems Direct, there are loads of them! I’m now addicted.

Not the shoes I'd have if I owned a Body System Vibration Plate

I think you need to have a certain voice to either present an hour long feature on halogen ovens or to voice over a 10 minute advert for a rowing machine. Up and down, always sounding amazed, always wanting to give you something extra; “and we’ll throw in the grooming kit free as our gift to you!”

I’ve discovered that these channels do not sell anything simple. It is always a “system”. A home decorating system, a food preparation system, hair removal system, foldaway storage system, you’ve got to have a system. If on the rare occasion they happen to have a normal name, the channels add the word “pro” to the end. Paint Sprayer Pro, Pressure Washer Pro, Power Blitzer Pro…

Body Sheild Pro, complete with a screen cleaning system

They have a way of making even the mundane seem like a unique selling point. A kettle no longer has just a gauge up the side of it, it now has a “unique one cup indicator allowing you to boil only what you need reducing your energy and water costs and your impact on the environment by up to 50%”. What? Seriously?

I’m off to take advantage of the latest leaf distribution technology in my drink master pro. I may even open my lock away storage system that keep my  products air tight. Also known as a cup of tea and a biscuit.

Free Food! (if you can cope with being stared at)

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I believe that “Pick Your Own” places are popular as it brings out our ancient hunter-gatherer instinct. That and the satisfaction of seeing the punnet in your fridge and thinking “I picked that”. However, you can get carried away at these places. “Just a few more” you keep saying to yourself – not only plopping them into the plastic pot, but popping them in your mouth too. Resulting in an incredible stomach ache and  a large bill at the weighing station – think pick and mix at the cinema!

So imagine my delight at finding a plum tree 50 yards from my house dripping with fruit! Free fruit! Off I go, bucket in hand and start picking. As it’s next to the road, I notice cars slowing down as they pass. The net curtains of the houses opposite start twitching. Now I live in a small, quite well to do town and it occurs to me that maybe feral foraging is not the done thing around here. A car pulls up to park on the other side of the tree and the driver gets out shaking his head and laughing at me!

Free fruit. What could be better than that?

When I mentioned my delight at my fruit find to a couple of friends they remarked on how brave I was to go picking and that they wouldn’t do it! Why should it be considered brave? Pick fruit from a field which you then pay a little old lady for and you are considered quaint. Pick fruit from the side of the road in a southern suburb and you are considered slightly odd.

I get it from my mum. Many a day trip out when we were young, either around our home in Norfolk or on holiday, would have been peppered with my mum’s familiar war cry of “nuts!” signalling that a hazelnut tree had been spotted and needed to be plundered. This was fine if we were walking, but if in the car my dad would have to scare the life out of the driver behind by slamming on the brakes!

Maybe it’s the memories of those days sitting on a grass verge cracking hazelnuts with my back teeth that I regress to when picking wild Damsons, blackberries, sloes or elderberries rather than my ancient hunter-gatherer. Either way, it’s free.

Damson wine. The results of most of the plum harvest. 18lb went into this 6 gallon bad boy. Wine bottle to show scale.

Dabbling in the wine trade

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The rhubarb beast!

When we moved into this house a few months ago the garden was in a grip of terror from a giant rhubarb plant. Don’t get me wrong, I love rhubarb but I wasn’t going to let this beast prevent me from finally managing to enjoy a garden (something we haven’t had for a number of years since living in a flat).

As I only have so much room in the freezer, there is a limit to what I could keep of the rhubarb and it seemed like such a shame to waste what would ultimately be about ¾ of the plant. I scoured the internet and it caught my eye like a beacon! Rhubarb wine! I love rhubarb, I love wine, I had discovered a load of my old wine making equipment in storage following the house move, how hard could this be?

Well, quite hard actually – especially as I’d only ever made “kit” wine. For those of you not in the know, and not able to deduce what a “kit” wine is, everything you need to make it comes in the aforementioned “kit”. You don’t need to worry about chemical names, quantities etc, you just do what it tells you on the packet and in 6-8 weeks you have something resembling cheap, out of town pub Chardonnay.

Rhubarb wine is known as a “country” wine. Code for “you need to do everything yourself and fruit is involved”. There were many recipes but I finally settled on one that I stumbled across on another blog by Hazel and Jane. They started it after starting an allotment (again of great interest to me as our new house came with an empty veg patch).  I recommend it – http://hazelandjanesallotment.blogspot.com/

Too early to drink?

Once I got over all the jargon, ingredients, quantities, bubbling, gurgling, stelising etc I now have 2 demijohns of what I’ve worked out at being 13% wine (could be wrong, there was maths involved). I’m an impatient soul, it’s supposed to take almost 4 months before bottling and then another year in the bottle. It’s been 2 months since I started and I’m bottling it next week and I think I’ll start drinking it the minute I’ve cleaned the demijohns.

If it tastes good (who am I kidding, if it’s passable and alcoholic) I’m worried I will become slightly addicted to “Country” wine making. Already have designs on the pea pods I’ll have left over ala The Good Life! There are worse hobbies but already I’m eyeing up 30 litre fermenting bins in Wilkinsons – this could get expensive!

Millions on a Census? Just take a bus.

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Since going down to just the one car a few months ago, I now get the bus home from work everyday. As there are only a couple per hour and I travel at pretty much the same time everyday, I find myself on the bus with pretty much the same people everyday. It’s an eclectic mix. I work in quite a cosmopolitan city but in the 45 minutes it takes to travel home, my internal bitch has completely and utterly made assumptions, stereotyped and categorised everyone of them. I feel a little sorry about that. Only a little.

No bus passengers were harmed in the writing of this blog

There’s the very large chap with a neck as wide as his head, hoping desperately the bus doesn’t fill up too much as he’s embarrassed to be taking up two seats. Then there’s the 20 something in her first “proper” job since university, head to toe in suitably muted Next tailoring, changing the heels into ballet pumps at the bus stop. The school kids (both private and state) who think they are being so original and rebellious by wearing the thin part of their tie out of their shirt and playing hideous, tinny music out of the mobile their parents bought them.

The cool dude wearing shorts and flip-flops no matter what the weather and always looking like he’s had a better day than anyone else on the bus. And what about the phone bragger? Everyday there is another tale about how drunk they were last night and how their boss was like “damn” and they were like “whatever” and then they like got really annoyed while their mate was like “that is sick”.

The chavvy mum with a penchant for peroxide and buying high heels for her toddler. The “suit” with his netbook in his backpack because laptops and cases are so 2009. Not forgetting the older individual, awkwardly wearing an ill-fitting baseball cap, threadbare fleece complete with wolf and full moon illustration and a couple of non-descript carrier bags.

Lately my work load has been up and down so over the last few days I’ve been catching either an earlier or later bus. I noticed that I was still travelling with the same people! On closer inspection, The large chap was now female, The chav’s toddler had different colour hair, the young-professional was now shopping at Dorothy Perkins instead of Next… Hang on, these are different people! No matter what time I take the bus, there are the exact same categories of people! The majority of which are also Facebook grazers; heads down, thumbs active. The government spent a fortune this year on a census. Seems pointless When it appears the exact same cross section of people use public transport. Cheaper to take a poll at the bus stop.

Suddenly I was aware of a new category on the bus. A 30 something teacher, always with a pen or pencil in their hair, glitter, glue or pen on the face, depending on the day and a look that is crying out for a glass of Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc. Oh, hang on, that’s me.

Might need a bigger pole for my bus queue