(Relative) sobriety

And - the playhouse!

Happy bank holiday Monday! This edition comes to you from - the children’s playhouse! Which turns out to be multipurpose, as it’s also my new writing, napping and meditation (ha!) hut. (Do you think that means 1/4 of the hut counts as a legitimate business expense? I must ask my beleaguered accountant - at least it’s not a house for ducks.)

Tax-deductible or no, here it is - isn’t it glorious?

The children’s Jacadi coats are hand-me downs from my god-daughter - a win!

I have no idea how the lovely delivery/construction men managed such a good job in the dark - lavish carrot consumption? All that’s left to do is varnish the outside, and paint the door and windowframes in caulk green - there were various paint options on purchase, but I thought it’d be good to save some ££ and do it myself. SO frugally minded - husband, take note.

(If you are in the market for a playhouse for the children/grandchildren, I bought this from the Artisan Deco store on Etsy - link to the house here, and there are lots of customisable options if you send Kamin, the seller, a message. Pepper does, of course, feature in the photo in my review.)

The playhouse is a hit - the children have played in it all week, drawing on the (interior) walls with the pastel chalk eggs that I forgot to give them for Easter, making up games, and eating most of their meals on picnic rugs just outside it. (I have been a killjoy and insisted no food inside, because ants, etc. The base has also been copiously sprayed with vinegar and peppermint oil, to deter any from a nearby nest from having a nosey.) We’ve planted Ghislane de Feligonde* and raspberry canes along one side (which is why I haven’t ant powdered the nest into oblivion) - the peas and beans in the raised bed opposite are now in Alba’s care, and as soon as I get a minute, I’m repurposing some of the old narcissus tubs to pot up the sweetpeas to grow up the right hand side*. It’s fair to say I’m getting AT LEAST as much enjoyment as the children from this project.

And as a final surprise for the girls, the wooden market stall arrives next week. It’s going to have to live outside the playhouse during the day, as there is no room for anything else inside.

The best bit - the stuff to go into the market stall arrived already. I assembled this collection piece by piece - the wooden play-food and empty baskets are from Erzi and BigJigs (it took about two weeks of research, adding and taking things out of both baskets - just look at the tiny macarons in their own tin! Also very hard to whittle down when almost each individual piece is under £2.)

My favourite item has to be this pear - sadly not life-size, about the size of a ping-pong ball in roundness with an additional sloped top and stem. I actually got an extra one just for my desk to roll in my hands and admire as it’s so sweet - best £2.50 I’ve spent.

Isn’t this Erzi pear just incredibly pleasing?

Indulging myself with purchases aside, it’s been an interesting week professionally. I took part in a talk at the British Library as part of their Food Season in conjunction with Vittles, on ‘What’s the point of a Cookbook’ (and thank you so much to all of you who came! Apparently you Substack legends made a spike in sales, and the event sold out!) The event - chaired by Ruby Tandoh and food writers Ozoz Sokoh and Sophie Wyburd, went really well - I can only thank the muse of off-the-cuff public speaking for seeing me though. You know that sense you have when you’ve been on fire at work, handled a meeting or presentation well - it felt like that - lots of laughter from the audience during, a lovely chat with readers and a pleasant sense of accomplishment afterwards, even if I did collapse into Booking Office with my best pal on leaving, with a request that she did all the talking for the next hour over a bowl of chips because I was TALKED OUT. In a good way.

Then later in the week, the Fortnum & Mason awards, which are very glam, where food industry types head to the Royal Exchange, down vg champagne and canapés, and do the whole ‘ooh, look there’s Mary Berry/John Torode/is Stanley Tucci here this year?’ thing. (At least, that’s what I do.)

I enjoyed getting rather more put together than usual in my favourite peach silk caftan and green silk heels (Liz Taylor’s caftan era is my go-to look for evening wear) and swirled around chatting with pals and work friends and publishers. I then very much enjoyed making a French exit into a pre-booked taxi precisely two hours after arriving, with the cheering thought that there might yet be enough light to blast the aphids off my roses with a hose when I got in.* I know! Priorities.

But both work events could not have been more different had I attended them just over a year ago. Holding my hand over a flute, so a waiter brandishing a Fortnum’s magnum couldn’t top it up, and leaving after just one and a half glasses of champagne? Politely declining British Library green room offerings of white and red wine before a live event? A single glass of Aperol Spritz while hosting guests? This might sound entirely normal to you, but I was a big drinker before my cancer diagnosis, even if I fell (just) short of being an actual alcoholic.

We’d have at least a glass of wine every night with dinner, weekend entertaining would see us through several bottles of champagne, and there were absolutely no protests at work or social events when someone offered to top up my glass. Dinner out with friends would routinely involve a bottle of wine each, and through lockdown a I devised an elaborate portable Aperol Spritz station in a giant coolbox, complete with ice, sliced oranges, & glassware (old Bonne Maman jars, which we still use daily in lieu of real glasses.) One of the unofficial perks of early motherhood was watching the clock turn to 6pm and opening a bottle of wine, pouring with that wonderful sound of liquid hitting glass and a feeling of absolute relief - that I deserve this wine, a reward for parenting a young baby ALL DAY.

(The only mitigating factor in 20+ years of wine consumption is that I have always religiously had at least twice as much water as wine, because I hate feeling dehydrated.)

But I’ve shifted through the past year, starting with the really quite difficult intention not to drink on weekdays, for which I credit Rosamund Dean, and her Mindful Drinking book. To start with, I substituted wine for the excellent Pentire non-alchoholic Margarita mix (it’s particularly good if you line the rim of your glass with lime and Tajin). Then it was just sparkling water, or a cup of tea, to really quite an astonishing point last week. I had the girls to myself for the day, knowing that Tim was pulling a late one at work. Old me would have poured a glass of wine by 5pm without compunction. But even though I could have justified it this week with exceptional circumstances - a whole day, and evening, of solo parenting! - I briefly wondered if it would add anything to an already lovely day, and decided I didn’t feel like it. Just as I didn’t feel like carrying on after one glass of champagne, or after one lovely spritz in the sunshine. And I realised that not only was this a milestone, but that I’ve felt this way for quite awhile, in such gradual increments that I’ve barely noticed the change. (Another positive influence was India Knight’s How I stopped drinking piece, which I initially read at a point where I loved wine only slightly less than Bernard Black. (Slightly less than Bernard Black loves wine, obv, not because he’s a pin-up of mine.)

The old, pre-cancer me would think it incredibly boring to have switched from wine-buying to kitting out the house like a high-end Montessori nursery. The old me would have thought the point of a beautiful garden would be to sit and admire it, with a drink in hand. But the new me kind of - doesn’t care? Under the frivolous purchases, the replies of ‘Yes of course, I’m fine now!’, cracking jokes on stage and prowling the garden with increasing monomania, is the underlying fear that if I don’t make some sort of significant lifestyle change, I might not have another ten, twenty, thirty or forty years to spoil the children. My husband - and my oncologist - say there’s no point in my thinking the cancer could come back through wine consumption, but it feels like it can’t hurt to cut down - and now the less I drink, the less I want to drink. There’s such a difference between denying a craving, which is how this started, and getting to the point where there’s neither a habit, nor a craving. And perhaps that means I wasn’t an alcoholic after all. Hurrah!

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*Forgive me for encouraging you to spend, but here’s Ghislane for a tenner from Cottage Memories - a lovely, almost completely thornless climber with a fantastic scent.

**I’ve probably done the sweetpeas wrong, as read on the Sweetpea Society website that I was supposed to pinch out the tips, but haven’t yet, and the seedlings have just gone rampant in the cold frames along a single stem instead. Any sweetpea advice/success stories much appreciated.

***With apologies to the RHS and their advice to put up with ‘some level’ of plant damage from aphids - I will not tolerate a single rosebud being blighted by those tiny green bastards, when not a single bird or ladybird appears to be assisting me with their removal. A jet of water it is.

****An entire outdoor dining table is now covered with seedlings - cosmos, scabious, nigella, tomatoes and peppers. Everything else is still in the glasshouses. Luckily they make great take-home gifts for children, who seem genuinely excited to leave with little pots of sweetpeas or cosmos. I’ll take a photo of the table next week.

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Thank you so much for reading, and I hope you have a fantastic bank holiday Monday! If you have a look at today’s Guardian online after lunchtime, you’ll find a lovely recipe in my column for crispy chicken schnitzel with zhoug & jersey royals - will pop the link here when it’s live! Mini xx