This morning the air is misted by rain and brings the scent of damp, aging leaves. The night holds tight to sunrise slowing the day’s beginning.
Alt text says this week’s photo is a plate of heart-shaped cookies. I wholeheartedly agree and look at that plate!
PodBean Link for those who like to listen
This week I did some recipe testing and these biscuits were the result. I had a very clean kitchen floor before the baking because I had moved everything in the kitchen for a good mopping and just as I had finished, and mopped myself out of the room I tripped over the bucket. The floor got a very thorough second clean whilst I cleaned up the lake I had created.
I am a very neat and tidy baker when I have weighed the ingredients in advance and set up the kitchen. Unfortunately the same does not apply when I leap off the settee suddenly fancying biscuits, realising we have none in the house and remembering that I have just looked up a recipe. A little flour here, a few blobs of dough there and a third of a packet of semolina almost everywhere! I attended to this with some attentive spot cleaning because I didn’t want to get the mopping bucket out again so soon.
The biscuits weren’t particularly even in size. Speed seemed to be my focus so the dough was rolled and cut and rolled and cut without much attention to the gradient. I will refine my process over future baking batches because they are delicious. But as a test batch I would say they are mighty fine. I am grateful to my sister for inspiring me, Mary Berry for the recipe, and Maria for rubber stamping the recipe and the results. At last I have a use for the cookie cutters. We seem to have a wide variety of shapes and sizes so I can definitely enjoy experimenting. I wonder how often these biscuits will turn up in different shapes and flavours over the coming year.
The title for this blog, ‘From Couch to Christmas Lights in Less than Thirty Seconds’, comes from the second time this week I leapt off the settee. I was listening to the Eat The Storms podcast when I heard the sound I absolutely love at this time of year – Santa’s Sleigh. Luckily, we had put our decorations up so the Christmas lights I like to wear for such occasions were easily accessible on the bookshelf. This meant I could put them on like a cowl, find some fifty pence pieces, and get to the door before Santa appeared. I often think my hearing is a bit dull, but it is certainly tuned in to the sound of the sleigh approaching. Having a wave from Santa as he rides down our road is a wonderful part of Christmas for me. And this year it went really well with the fact that it happened in the evening of the day we had spent time singing at the Christmas market in the precinct.
As a result of singing as part of the choir I have been spurred on to spruce up my Christmas playlist this year. We have been singing ‘O Holy Night’ and I don’t think I have ever paid the song much attention before. Working as a head teacher in a primary school for many years saw me all sung out by the time the actual holiday period arrived, and a lot of the songs that echoed in my head were from nativity plays and other children’s events. It feels refreshing to be experiencing the festivities as a performer and with a different set of songs. There is also that wonderful feeling of nostalgia when singing carols such as ‘Once in Royal David’s City’ and thinking that the last time I sung it with such reverence was as a child. I see the words in my head in exactly the same way I did back then, and the same images for each verse are still there. When I consider the origin of these images I think they might be based on the scenes on advent calendars I had when I was young. How lovely it is that they are etched there.
Receiving an, “Ooh get you!” this week from the person I sing next to during rehearsals made me smile. It turns out I finally learned how to breathe well enough to maintain one of the long notes. Here’s to the joy of practicing, and the joy of keeping going.
‘River’ by Joni Mitchell remains the second song on my seasonal playlist and I wonder whether the images I see in my head when listening to it sent out their ripples when I wrote the poem ‘Skating’. I wrote it whilst listening to an episode of Stress Test, and I remember seeing a vivid wintry scene in my head as if it were a key moment in a film. I wanted to capture and set down the feelings of the scene.
Skating
I watch her
skating straight out across the ice
taking a furious ‘here to there’
zig-zagging a line.
No laying down of tight circles,
no figures of eight
dizzying on her frozen pond.
I swear I see
thoughts
thrown out above her.
I watch them dropping slowly
through the fir trees.
Sometimes I see them right up against the sky
she can make them touch that blue.
There’s so much she wants
to outrun
leave behind.
One day she will let me skate beside her
take her hands
show her how to spin.
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