When Kat and I first left our jobs and moved up to our little cottage in the Calder Valley, the most frequent comment from people up here who learned we had just arrived from down south would always be: “Ah – so you haven’t experienced a winter up here yet…?” This would always be accompanied by a slightly sadistic glint in the eye; the assumption presumably being that these foolhardy southerners had no idea what they were letting themselves in for, and that once they had discovered just what the phrase “It’s grim up north” really meant, would go scurrying back to London wrapped in a skinny frappuccino. Well, with the sun shining bright and warming our faces and our cockles, spring is well and truly in the air here at Gardeners Cottage, and so we can triumphantly say: Yes! We have survived our first winter up north! And Yes, it was sodding FREEZING! But then, the weather this winter has reached new heights of wintriness over the whole of the country, hasn’t it? As opposed to the few isolated days of snow we get most years, the stuff has stuck around for the majority of the season – causing absolutely glorious chaos, unprecedented outbreaks of fun and many wonderful excuses to have days off work to stay in bed with a mug of something hot and get stuck into a good book. But now it seems the last of the snow has finally gone slip-slidin’ away, and we can turn our attention to enjoying the glorious springtime sunshine!
Then again, maybe we shouldn’t tempt fate just yet. Kat and I made the mistake of being overly optimistic about the weather last weekend, when we were getting very excited at the prospect of veg-growing season finally having come upon us! We’ve been waiting for this time to come round for a while, and encouraged by the beautiful spring-like weather we’d been experiencing for a couple of days, decided that the time had come to take a trip to the garden centre. So it was that, last Saturday, off we went and eagerly filled our basket with seeds feeling like excited kids at a pick n mix: parsnips, beetroot, leeks, fennel, peppers, tomatoes, chillis, rocket, shallots, broccoli, broad beans and spring onions (yes, we may possibly be accused of being a tad ambitious, but it’s our first growing season, and we’re not gonna do things by halves!) We took them home, along with some seed trays and compost, and went to bed that night very excited about getting into the garden for a mammoth planting session the following day – then woke up in the morning to find…yes, everything was once again covered with several inches of snow! It’s probably the first time I’ve ever woken up to a thick white blanket outside and felt a little disappointed; however, that didn’t last long, and I was soon feeling that excitement at the sight of the white stuff covering the hills of the Calder Valley once again! Besides, refusing to let our plans be totally foiled, we decided to get busy planting our tomatoes, peppers and chillis, as these are being grown inside on windowsills anyway; and once we’d done that, Kat spent the rest of the afternoon making bread, which filled the cottage with that most delicious of smells, and meant the disappointments of not being able to get out in the garden mattered not a jot. We shall, however, be getting out there to plant our crop as soon as we can, and I’ll be sure to keep you updated on their progress.
In addition to the veg-growing and breadmaking, we’ve also both been using our abundance of free time at home to explore other new creative pursuits: Kat has taken up knitting with a quite unprecedented passion, and in the past fortnight has already steamed through two gorgeous scarves and is onto a third (she assures me she has ambitions to progress onto other garments when she feels confident enough, but until then we certainly need never fear a cold neck again!). Both of us have also been using our long evenings to improve on our culinary skills, and while Kat’s been filling the house with the smells of freshly-baked bread, I’ve learned how to cook more new dishes in the past few months than I have in the whole of my previous lifetime (inspired in no small part by Kat’s recent subscription to Good Food magazine and growing collection of River Cottage cookbooks). And our musical activities have also found time to flourish: in addition to our continued participation in our fab local community choir, the Calder Valley Voices, I have joined an 8-part male vocal group called Men Folk Waits, who last night all trekked up the hill and squeezed into our living room for an evening heartily belting out Manly Songs about sex, drinking and sailing. We were also lucky enough to enjoy a personal workshop with the wonderful Janet Russell on Friday, who really helped to whip us into shape – which is a good thing, since we now only have one more rehearsal before the first ‘proper’ gig at the Harmony Open Mic, a night of a capella singing at lovely local hostelry The Stubbing Wharf (Sunday 14th March if anyone’s in the area and fancies coming along!) – an event for which Kat and I are also rehearsing some duets together, including my own arrangement of Robert Wyatt’s gorgeous ‘Sea Song’. And finally, while the snow was still thick on the ground, it also provided the perfect opportunity to wander around with a microphone recording lovely crunchy noises which will, when I get around to sitting down to it, get turned into beats for the electronic element of the music Kat and I are working on. It’s a slowly developing project, but it is developing, and we hope to be able to record some new material at some point fairly soon. Progress has been hampered, of course, by the sad demise of my iMac, and with it the ability to use Logic Pro; however, I have downloaded Reaper onto Kat’s PC, which for a piece of shareware is a remarkably versatile sequencer, and have been getting to grips with its functions so that I might carry on my electronic noise-making endeavours until I think of a way to lay my hands on a MacBook without having to sell parts of my body to medical science….
(Incidentally, the aforementioned death of the iMac after only three-and-a-half years of moderate use has got me thinking a lot about the murky area of the materials economy and planned obsolescence – a subject which I may expand upon in another post…until I get round to that, I’d heartily recommend watching the fantastic online video The Story of Stuff – and being very wary of the motives of anyone whose second name is Jobs.)
I’ve also been spending a lot of time reading some most inspiring literature around the subjects of work, play, freedom and the simple life recently; and so I am going to begin compiling a recommended reading list for this blog, and maybe include a few reviews too, simply for anyone who is interested in the concept of taking full control of their life and sculpting it into the shape they would like it to be, and would like to look into both the philosophies and the practicalities more deeply. I shall hopefully be getting around to posting the first of these up very soon, so watch this space!
But right now I’m off to enjoy what remains of this lovely sunny spring day before eating a stew, toddling off to choir for a good sing and then supping an ale or two with my fellow singers. Until the next post…cheery-bye freedom-seekers!
