Flapjack

I have had a very stressful weekend in terms of arguing with people, and it would be a black day indeed if I didn't have my friend Fee's microwave flapjack recipe below;

(anyone using this recipe should pay everyone called Fiona in large quantities of
chocolate)

8oz rolled oats
3 tablespoonsful of golden syrup
4oz butter, margarine or other non-liquid fat
4oz brown sugar

Put the syrup, fat and sugar into a larger-than-you-think-you-need Pyrex
basin and cook on HIGH for 2 - 3 minutes.

Add the oats and mix well. Cook for 5 or minutes, depending on how hot your
oven is (oo-er, missus!). Turn out into a greased greaseproof papered tin
and leave to cool for an hour or so. Scoff quickly.

I lined the pyrex with cling film, added a tablespoon of glace ginger, and couldn't find brown sugar so used normal sugar. We'll see how it turns out, when it's stopped being napalm and started being flapjack! Read more about Tea and biscuits here.

Palaces and spaces

These are Blenheim Palace's gates. Viewed from the inside. Huge and impressive, they are titchy compared to the palace and grounds themselves. Set near an almost unbelievably picturesque village called Woodstock, we danced there, far too early on Saturday morning, observed by hundreds of Daddy-Long-Legs from the damp grass, and the odd tourist or two. I looked around and thought, yep, this would be just about enough space for me. Just about enough to run around in, have my own space in and never really feel like leaving. The grounds stretch to the horizon, so large that there is a lake with a bridge, and a distant sculpture on a massive thin plinth, like Nelson's Column. Beautiful.

Christmas Jewellery Party. Countdown begins.

I'm completely exhausted. Beads everywhere in the house. Scarily empty 300 metre roll of beading wire. Sparkling drop shapes, luxurious lariats, blinging earrings, and that's just a start! I still have mountains to do in this my busiest time of year..... the ten-week lead up to the dreaded Christmas Jewellery Party.

A bustle of Mum-friend people will flock to the house which will have been scrubbed cleaner than an operating theatre, to view the treasure trove that is the Front Room Table, with an almost comically triangular pile of glinting jewellery balanced on it! Clutching plates of my home made chocolate cake, or mulled wine in Mum-hand-made sixties ceramic goblets they'll circle the table looking for the Right Thing For Granny.

At the moment though.....Bank=empty, Workshop=full of beads Head=full of fluff

Amazonite Decisions

This particular entry was supposed to be here on the 2nd September. It would appear I've been busy. See the picture of the amazonite beads above these words? That’s nowhere NEAR the amount of threading and making I have to do. Think, like, ten times that. But that’s today.

2nd September

This entry was going to be about the Sree Krishna restaurant and it's moist flying saucer-breads called Iddly. Then it was going to be titled "Turning 31" and have something about my realisation of the reality of increasing weight, related to the relief of unhooking an over-tight bra strap after a day of dance. The breeze was gorgeous.

But this entry is about decisions. I look back on all the decisions I've made, tonight, at 1.23 am, indeed practically every night at about that time, and they all seem wrong. Not just a bit pants, or perhaps not-such-a-great-idea, but really big mistakes. I wrote a massive list of them, with WRONG typed next to each little fact, like a teacher's mark. I realised after a while it read not like an exam page, but like a Reality CV. A timeline of stuff I've done, stuff I've got Wrong. A William Shatner version of the song of my life story.

But there are gaps. There are achievements I have made, things I'll also never forget; as well as, and naturally and of course normally, directly alongside and even related to the mistakes. I'm not sure if this is rocket science, or something I've just never realised. Perhaps mistakes are necessary, no matter how huge they are. No matter how humungous and big and looming and eclipsing they may seem, next year, they'll be that much farther away.

In writing the list out, I was examining myself, in a way, and expecting to fail. Perhaps I need to write a list of things I have got right. It won't be as long but it will make more uplifting reading!