During a family gathering this week

my father and I took turns to relate the story about how he came to visit me in France in the early eighties: I was working as a goatherd in a remote woody-hilly place somewhere near the Pyrenees and had sent a letter home describing the route to get to my hut, it was illustrated with a map and my father used it to pay me a visit. *

it was a good story with lots of adventures  - there was one part that I had never heard before:

My father left me to get on with my goatherding and went off to do a few days walking in the area by himself. The first night he stayed in a B&B then continued on his way. A few hours into the day's walk he stopped by a hedge on a dirt track to scrump a few cherries when a van hove into sight and stopped next to him, there were two men inside - one from the previous night's boarding house, this man leaned out of his window and said   

Monsieur, you left this at our 'ouse

and handed over some greyish white fabric that my father recognised as his own, rather unfashionable, underpants

* the map and another version of this story is here

on the bus to London

I did knitting and caught up on podcasts -  99% invisible - for a story about the worst smell in the world then a piece about 'sewbots' at Planet Money. Yesterday's best show was Freakanomics  about racial profiling in restaurants if there were shows like these in Spanish I'd be fluent in no time - if anyone knows of any good ones please send me the links.

yes I am still trying to speak Spanish like a native - did I mention that I'm off to Spain soon?

Dolores and I still have our regular spanglish meetings, we speak Spanish one visit then English the next - today was English day and, as she is a professional sportsperson, we discussed the fashion for 'cupping' amongst athletes.

When it is my turn to speak Spanish I seem to always end up talking about insects 

we're plagued with flies

massive bluebottles suddenly appear and buzz crazily around the room bashing into windows and light fittings

tonight I watched one drive himself into a tiny spiders web, the tiny spider was hiding behind a book licking his lips as the fly (which was 10 times bigger than him)  tangled around in the web 

finally the fly buzzed itself free and continued it's noisy flight around the room but this time draped in cobweb like a great big ghost fly

my jobs-to-do list could wrap twice around the house

this sort of thing has colonised the terrace 


there are days when I sense that the jobs-to-do-list may have reduced infinitessimally 

last week

the electrician fixed my blinking lights.

I told the electrician that I could use some young muscles to tidy up the terrace which has become submerged beneath gigantic tufts of a hybrid-vigour-super-grass that is anchored firmly between the paving stones. The electrician said   


I know someone  

being Welsh his tone is naturally ironic so I was not sure what would happen

today

A plump sixteen-year-old crept up to my gate clutching a plastic carrier bag full of crisps and orange fizzy drink.  He tickled the grass with a spade for a couple of hours we were both relieved when the rain gave us an excuse to call it a day and head home for chips

in other news

I have fixed 2 sets of broken curtains

The Haitians got lost backstage

at the other end of the arena -  a man with a buggy got them rounded up and driven over to our stage, they spilled off the buggy and ran around laughing and kissing us all, there were at least fifty ten people if you counted all the seeing double that was going on.

Meanwhile in front of the stage the audience had been sampling the wine provided by our sponsor and were already pretty happy but they  roared with approval to see a cascade of stoned people arriving on and around the stage giggling and dancing. Their music was fantastic but they weren't up to slicing vegetables - several audience members were pulled onto the stage to help including a girl called Trixie wearing a very short white fairy outfit and crimson hair .

Trixie was able to chop cabbage, twist open bottles of vinegar and fry plantain while band members fell at her feet and grinned at her.

The woman in the Haitian band was the danciest and had many many silk patterned scarves  tied around her waist which she dispensed liberally along with perfume and many kisses - my scarf is blue stripey with flowers and a rude fruity smell, apparently it contains a lot of voodoo so I have put it in a nice box for safety

I wore emerald silk

to attend the festival

looking around the market area there was a table piled with old costume jewellery which I picked through and found some earrings to go with my favourite daisy necklace (which I was wearing as you can see from this picture taken near the best food stand)

The jewellery seller sidled up, looked at me and then at the earrings I'd chosen and said approvingly  

Ah yes, I can see that you're a fan of early plastic

Other things

I've been told that it's difficult to follow or comment here unless you sign up to the all-seeing-eye that is Google. If you are not a spammer or purveyor of porn or dodgy inheritances and feel inclined to send me a cyber wave feel free to do so via lululabonne(at)gmail.com - my profile page connects to this address too.

Vine leaves were the biggest challenge

I live near Turkish supermarkets and various sorts of hippy shops and imagined these to be the least of my problems but it appears that Bristol is experiencing a World Leaf Shortage (and I needneedneed them for WOMAD see my post from two days ago)

I returned home leafless to meet the new electrician who arrived before I'd had time to clean the grease off the broken kitchen light that I hoped he could fix

at peak panic a chum appeared and we both busily phoned potential vine-leaf vendors while watching time running out on shop-opening hours

at the latest moment a leaf supplier was discovered and the person with a bike had to cycle to the other side of the city to buy pickled foliage while I washed my embarrassing light fitting and made tea for the electrician

A naked man was in the road

two doors down from the friend I was visiting this evening

it was raining so I wondered if he was making the most of the free water but then I saw the mattress wedged half-in-half-out of the open front doorway of the house - maybe it was throwing him out for being unfaithful

he saw me looking at him and said

I forgot to put it out earlier

to make Kale crisps

tear up dry raw pieces of kale leaf without any stem, rub them over LIGHTLY with nice oil and lay the pieces out on a baking sheet. Sprinkle with salt and bake in a moderate oven for about 5 minutes.   When you remove them from the oven you must EAT THEM INSTANTLY they are delicious for precisely 30 seconds ... at 31 seconds they are foul

I'm all about food this week

WOMAD starts on Thursday - this is the 10th year that I will be shopping, chopping and hopping around for this musical food event * 

This year's big challenge has been to find a ewe's cheese like one used in Romania to make a rustic dish called Shut-up-and-swallow. I am also looking for live clams, garden eggs and several shades of yellow/green plantain

three years ago Babylon Circus made this film about their experience of Taste the World




*if you click the 'womad' tag below all previous posts on this annual extravaganza will appear

The Man cycles to the pub on Friday nights

he meets other people there, they drink pints, talk about car engines and catastrophise about Brexit

today he told me about the previous evening and said that he thought that his daughter might eventually want to join in on the Friday night pub merriment

why do you think that?

well I asked her along and she gave an excuse rather than just said no - it'll probably take a couple of years before she does though

An abandoned steel chair frame

arrived at our house 5 years ago

I gave it an new coat of red electrical wire  which faded and became saggy and sad 

luckily i was recently given a few miles of knicker elastic by the underwear factory down the road  - chair is refreshed

Doloresand I visited the river today

She produced special oily ham from Spain and I supplied a pair of pears. We ate our picnic listening to a roaring weir and squealing children then I picked my way into the river for my first dip this year.

from the end of the garden I could smell hot jam

and figured that my neighbours must be processing some of their abundant fruit.


then I remembered that I had put plums on the stove to stew - the burning jam smell was coming from my kitchen ... 

Kale Mountain

I'd photograph it but the pile of vegetation arriving from next door has got to the point that I can no longer push my way into the kitchen, there's also lettuces, raspberries and a cabbage the size of a big man's head


In Other News

I've been scraping the rust off my Spanish - listening to Spanish radio through the computer and language exchanging with Dolores - in this dayandage we should be able to meet in a clinic, have wires attached to our heads and download each others language files but unfortunately we are still poor so we meet every day for one hour: Spanish on Monday, English on Tuesday and so on for ever until one of us leaves the country.

So I made a gooseberry ice-cream

but I can't get it in the freezer because it's full of the wool that I've been hiding from the moths

so I haven't actually made ice cream at this point - just a sort of cold fool!

THESE!!!

arrived on my doorstep today, plus raspberries so soft that I have already squashed them into some cream and dates for my tea

While I was in Wales

the Man started putting out food for Mrs Bird. 

I was hanging out clothes this afternoon and she came hopping around near my feet - the Man said

she wants blueberries

I put some blueberries out on a plate

no you have to cut them up, she likes them quartered

I did this then turned my back to do some other chores, when I looked back at the plate the berries were so cleanly gone that I was sure that it must've been the Man eating them and pretending - like he used to do the Tooth Fairy. He came out behind me and looked at the clean plate

she likes some cheese after blueberries - shave a little Parmesan for her

It's like Santa Claus all over again

I was in Wales

and seeing a tiny charity shop, I went inside, it was crammed full of the sort of items that might be left after a garage sale had finished, all piled in that way that the removal of one thing will bring an avalanche of plastic beakers, blankets and jigsaw boxes down on the large woman on the sofa in the middle of the jumble who was staring at me

then a cross woman came in

My daughter's just bin yer, she bought these curtains off you and she wishes she never 'ad - she wanted plain and these are patterned and they don't suit 'er room at all - will you change 'em?

sofa lady indicated the other two curtains available - a single stained shiny boudoir curtain and a torn stewed-gooseberry throw. Curtain lady and I dos y doed in order that she could get into position, inspect them properly and decide which would look better in her daughter's room.

I'm nuturing a growing obsession

with bacteria - the more I read about them the more I love mine. Ten days ago the dentist made me drink a suicide cocktail of antibiotics and I've spent the intervening days growing a replacement microbe population.

In scientific experiments, lack of gut bacteria makes mice unhappy and listless - they won't bother swimming to safety and that definitely happened to me - I too forgot how to swim to safety without my biome.

This enthusiasm for all things bacterial might not be making me the best company at parties - best avoid me until I'm past the honeymoon phase of this particular relationship.

In Other News

Summer popped briefly in to the UK last month - then we had a referendum - Summer buggered off leaving Squally Showers to punish us for being pillocks.

Our political landscape has become a surreal farce with various overgrown schoolboys running away to hide behind their mother's aprons while peeping out to point and laugh at the Punch and Judy show going on in the Labour party. Our next Prime Minister will be one awful woman or another awful woman, which might be better than a series of awful men - but not much.

A Happy Thing

Mrs Bird still  pops in to nitpick about the state of our kitchen

is there a word for the opposite of talent?

Inabilities doesn't seem right I want to call it 'anti-talents' which might be an infection caught from a year in academia where making up words is de rigueur

my gum is stitched up

the wrist magically normal again

I paid my mother-in-law a visit - her back is bad and household chores are accumulating.

The job that most needed tackling turned out to be ironing - it didn't seem fair to mention that I'm the world's worst ironiste so I got started ...  

After a while we decided that I might be more usefully employed in the garden.

So that I wouldn't feel bad about the ironing, mother-in-law listed the two other people (both children) who are worse at ironing than me.

Owchy time

the IN/OUT of Europe referendum has stirred up an underbelly stew of misery - we're still reeling from that debacle.

also my wrist has been malfunctioning - today I went for a cortisone injection at the hospital which was really really hurty. On my way home from the hospital there was a limping man who was hurting a lot more than me and really needed the hospital so I turned around and we walked back there together with him using me as a walking stick and it must have looked like a very funny three-legged race because the path was all pot-holed and we stumbled like a pair of drunkards.

Tomorrow I am having more dental work done but afterwards I shall go back to London and look after my favourite cats while my bruises go yellow and purple.

In other news

The Birds have tolerated us poking about in their garden for long enough and have started visiting us for a good nosey around. Mrs Bird, appalled at the standards of housekeeping among humans, comes in every day to try and tidy us up. Mr Bird sometimes comes with her but he usually gets tangled in glassware or computer cables and makes things worse so she usually leaves him behind to look after the children. This is today's visit

Where to start?

there were cats and now there are none

there was school but that's  finished for summer

I'm sort of back in Bristol but keep going away - that embroidered rendition of Clifton Suspension Bridge was discovered on a visit to a Stoke Newington junk shop on wednesday with my fairy-godmother-aunt who haggled mercilessly to buy it for me. After the f-g-m-a left I met my tutor and asked him if our exam results were out yet

yes but I haven't worked out how to publish them

visited Holy Island with the Man to see the priory and the upside down Hobbit boats

then to Scotland to see my sister and the nibblings where a discussion of future careers was going on:
adult: you can be anything you want
five-year-old : can I be a Wot Wot Hoo Ha?

Afterthought

I feel the need to draw your attention to this poem about hermits

It was like the Sleeping Beauty House

While I've been up in That London for the last few months the dust snuck in and blanketed the house - slightly less in the places where someone had brushed a space to eat at the table or torn a path through the cobwebs on the stairs.

But I'm back and banging moths out of their sexy revels in my jumpers, degreasing the stove, taking the bindweed off the pinks and marigolds in the garden and getting my sunny sunshine clothes out from the under-the-bed-boxes.

It's lovely to be home

I've come back to Bristol

the garden is full of slugs and I'm shaking moths out of blankets as the Man appears - I tell him that we're besieged

no he says, we're popular

Mealtimes

Gary makes sure there's no funny business with the knives, Brian and Nigel cover the exit -Barbara is sitting on my feet

being held under strict surveillance

I'm under house arrest - will smuggle out messages when I've finished the tunnel

cat polisher

Two weeks ago the toothless cat had starey fur that was a bit sticky-feeling and off-putting and she also really really wanted a lot of hugs - so gave her a rub down with a slightly damp towel like it was a gigantic mother's tongue and put in a bit of regular brushwork with a soft rubber brush ... she's come up all lovely and shiny. 

I'm hoping that the owners are going to be ok with this new shiny cat when they come home because maybe they like sticky cats and they might just think that I've broken her

On Friday we said goodbye

to our friend Simon,

he hadn't been that keen on music* so there were no hymns or any kind of singing, instead we told stories about him that made us laugh because he was the funniest man in the world, he saved butterflies and kept a supply of food plants in his garden for distressed caterpillars and he would chase people up the street with the litter they'd dropped and wave it in their face - which sometimes got them angry and he had collections of bits of old motorbikes and interesting bicycles and big mechanical pencil sharpeners and his yard was full of the bee hives that he'd made because he kept rescuing bee swarms - once he inadvertently upset one of the hives and made a bee so angry that it chased him inside and upstairs and managed to follow him into his bedroom to sting him.

we'll miss him


*He went to a concert once  - the Rolling Stones - and slept through it

The other cat is perched by my ear

she purrs constantly - a rumble accompanied by the wobbly creaky-squeakiness - like an old fashioned pusher lawnmower

Different cat in the bag

This one is also sitting on my pencil case

I left my jacket on the sofa

when I came downstairs this morning it had been turned into a cat's nest and one arm was covered in sicked up hairballs  

I read until cross-eyed then walked out across Highbury Fields which were teeming with frisbee-playing youth. I should've been happy in the sun and the smokey barbeque air but an enormous gloom has descended.

the man came home

but today I had to return to London - another cat sit and a study binge before exams.

I am looking after a pair of rescued cats, one of them is already sitting  in an alert position in my half-unpacked suitcase, the girl cat has neither teeth nor tail and talks incessantly - naturally I am already very fond of them. 

We're in Highbury which is quite posh and appears to be a lesbian hotspot

The man is on his way home

the man is on his way home

the man is on his way home


from switzerland where he has been visiting these exact same ants


An Irish Sisterhood Practise their Defence Skills from Ammonite Films on Vimeo.

in other news

last year I wrote a post about the man going out to film a woman and her dogs who'd discovered bioluminescent worms in their french garden

the bioluminescence film is now ready and can be seen on english television on monday - here's a clip  http://bbc.in/1Oecrz0

exam study leads me to search for bathing suits

definitely getting this one

Too much going on

exams next week - scary   
houseboat study continues - great   
a death - tragic 
home -  messy 
weather - changeable/British 
friends - brilliant-but-not-enough-time
end of first school year - emptiness looms
job-hunting - grim

Tomorrow I am back at school

but today I am in Bristol  - we sat by the fire, me mending jumpers while my Japanese friend, K made a patchwork quilt and we spoke together about everything:

I showed her the holes in my jumper and made a crying face
moths ... moths make me sad

she thought I was talking about moss and looked puzzled, I explained about the creatures that eat my jumpers
aaah yes in Japan sometimes I think I can hear them in the roof space

That turned out to be mouses so I mimed an evil tiny flying nibbling thing  

Vienna was full of cake and sun

and I spent last Saturday walking beside something I took to be the Danube until I looked at a map and realised it was just a canal.

Returning to London, the Thames houseboat research continued, we visited a squillionnaire who owns three large houseboats - one for himself, another for his offspring and a third for guests, afterwards we visited the lady who had run the boatyard for 30 years, we told her that we'd just met Mr Threeboats. She scoffed

Him - he's an idiot!

We had been sifting through newspaper cuttings in the library going back to the fifties, there were many stories concerning glamorous-looking students, actors and writers who lived on the houseboats in those days, I wondered how accurate this image of houseboat tenants was

When I arrived in the boatyard (the early '70s), the houseboats were mainly occupied by old women, very well educated women, their boats full of books, interesting women who wanted to be left alone

In other news
spent last night with some girlfriends dancing to Prince songs

Back in Bristol today

walking through town it's hard not to notice the huge increase in homeless people. One neat, nice-looking older man walked up to me with a box filled half with nettles and half wild garlic

would you like some wild garlic, I've just picked it in Leigh Woods ... I'm homeless these days

foraging seems a whole lot better than standing around selling Big Issues but I worry about animal contamination when I can't see where the garlic gets picked so I let him fill my bag with nettles and then spent an hour cursing him as my hands got stung to pieces preparing it.  Cooked up with lentils, lemon and coconut it's delicious but my hands are still fizzing.

IN OTHER NEWS I'M GOING TO VIENNA TOMORROW!!!

One of the boats we visited yesterday

(the one with the muddy burglar under the bow)  was 'pratically given' to the owner's mother in the '60s when she was an art student. I hadn't really understood what was going on when he said that she used to have to get up in the night to pour concrete into the hull and stop water coming in - this aspect of boat life was clarified by an elderly lady today:

you had to bail every day because the wooden boats were so leaky, in 1974 a woman gave me her boat for fifteen pounds because she'd come to hate it. I bailed both boats every day and got hers fixed up, then sold it for three thousand pounds and took off to South America but my lodger sublet my boat and the sub-letter wouldn't bail - I got a call to say the boat had sunk but I still had the mooring and a thousand pounds so I bought this boat - this one's got a steel hull.

Today we started interviewing houseboatees

as part of an effort to record people living on boats on the Thames before they all get wiped away by property developers.  Newspaper clippings from the sixties tell stories of louche living and bawdy behaviour but we'd heard that the rising cost of moorings had respectabilised boaty life and that we'd find none of that sort of thing these days.

As we got to our first mooring so did the police - to evict a conman who had got into a houseboat on the pretext of doing repairs then locked the owner out and refused to leave. Four years later he was now taking his belongings, one armful at a time, to a waiting car several yards down the road.

We continued on our ways and spent the next hour with someone who told a story about the police helicoptering over his boat one night, shining lights in at him and then finally knocking at his door because a burglar had been seen running into the lowtide mud, rolling around in it and then wriggling in under the bow of the houseboat.

As we left the boat we saw the conman, he had filled the car to bursting and was continuing to pile his bags on the pavement around it and having an argument with the driver about how they were going to fill the car and also get in and drive it away.

blanch a whole cauliflower

then chopchopchop the florets and little stalks into crumbs  

mix with  tahini, cinnamon, good oil, saltpepperandlemonjuice 

chochopchop roasted walnuts, hard boiled eggs and  parsley  

mix that into the dressed cauliflower crumbs

cover the dish with butter paper and put it in the oven you just switched off, next to the almost-cooked roast salmon so that when Rosa turns up one hour late it will still be delicious 

also

the point is to have enough of the cauliflower dish leftover to fry up the next day - if you want to feel that it's a whole new thing add chopped anchovies and sprinkle with crispy breadcrumbs

two full days off the boat and I'm still swaying

or maybe the motion is what seamen call 'tacking'  - possibly I was a boat in a former life and, having discovered my roots, I'm trying to get get back there.

In other news

A reunion lunch at the family home yesterday - seventeen of us squashed round a table intended for six-to-eight in what-used-to-be-the-garage, shepherds pie and carrots for everyone followed by an assortment of cream pies. Once everyone was in place at the table we were locked into a sort of chinese puzzle - no-one could leave the room unless everyone rotated in the correct order.

After lunch my nephew continued an eternal wrestling match with his other auntie which is now in it's sixth year and my gappy-toothed niece declared her love for a magenta-haired cousin, imprisoning her in one of the bedrooms for the purpose of telling monster/princess stories.

I adjust quickly to being on a boat

but I am becoming more and more vertiginous when I leave the boat and walk around on this good earth

so I've decided to leave the boat for good 

I'm feeling a bit sad about this

but not a really really sad because I have come to look after my favourite cats and there is a proper bathroom and it's warm 

the tortoiseshell is currently leaping in and out of my capacious handbag and Wheezy has made a nest out of my pajamas

I woke to the sound of running feet

lots of them passing by the barge there was also a sort of commotion.

Assuming that a crime was happening I stayed put and then forgot about it. Once I'd persuaded the damp firewood  to catch fire, I put the kettle on and wandered into the park. There, under a large gazebo, was a man in a Puffa jacket tidying away thermos flasks and bananas. I asked what had just happened

It's the Nike race, they should be at Kings Cross by now

Notes on camp:

barge life is basically camping - issues that are insignificant at 'real home' suddenly loom large;

what goes in:

the quantity of stuff you carry to camp - you must keep this quantity in your head because if you could barely carry the stuff you arrived with and then you acquire more stuff - something has to 'disappear'.

what goes out:

I carried  quite a lot of food and tea to the boat - putting it into my body is simply hiding it from view - the way things work on the boat means that I have to plan my café visits strategically.

Luckily, there is a municipal swimming pool close by - combining bathing and bathroom addresses my major camping issues in one fell swoop.

fuel:

The boat has solar panels - if I manage things well (and if the sun shines sometimes) I have power for lights and batteries - so far I'm handy with that.

For heating and cooking I've been using the woodburning stove - I've been trawling the park daily to pick up kindling and any other useful wood but to be effective logs are needed, there was a small supply when I arrived and I've used those up.

This morning I bought a sack of the logs at the nearby garage and now I know that London wood is, by weight, more costly than diamonds and that my lovely stove suppers are costing more than I imagined.

Today there were visitors

we ate satsumas while waiting for our crumpets to cook on the stove

in the evenings

the man who lives two barges away from me on the canal takes a double bass and a chair to the park railings. 


He puts the chair and the instrument over the railings then climbs over and settles down to play

Barge life

is very tranquil - I am on a stretch of canal near an enormous park in East London, sunlight sparkles off the ceiling and it's all very beautiful. Last night I cooked my sweet potato supper in the woodburning stove.

Yesterday I walked across to the main road which is lined with Fancy-Gifts-for a pound-shops, pawnbrokers and counselling services, shops with shutters-down-long-closed and 50p burger bars. 

Today I crossed the park to a universe where everyone is slim and accompanied by stylish children in Bugaboo pushchairs, in this world the cafés are smart and vegetables organic. I purchased two of the most expensive sausages in the world and took them home to pop them in the stove for lunch.

Tate Modern

with mother-in-law having coffee. The actress Judy Dench is being discussed and she says

you know she's my twin? 

same birthday? 

same age, same height - five foot exactly, I'm keeping a close eye on her to see if she shrinks