1. The first cup of tea of the day

Tea & Cake

2. Stripes

Stripes

3. White things

White on White

4. Order

Order

5. Heart shapes

True Love Ways

6. The colour purple

Violets

7. The beach

Mr and Mrs Spud on Shingle Street

8. Nostalgia

Vintage Zebedee

9. Sunshine

Sunshine at Aldeburgh

10. Sleep

Sleeping Diggy

Sister Spud

I had a picture of the Pope on my bedroom wall, and used to turn it around when I got undressed at night, in his case His Holiness suddenly developed an All Seeing Sense and was offended by my Wombles knickers and Holly Hobbit nightdress.

I can’t remember when it tipped in to ‘I know, why don’t I BE a nun’, or when I realised perhaps I wasn’t up for getting me to a nunnery after all. Quite probably the realisation that I might have to have a man’s name and the fact that nearly every nun I knew was actually quite vicious…Sister Joseph Mary where are you now, with your ruler slapping across the backs of knuckles and yells of “Spudballo…I’ll..slap…your…LEGS!”. What a lovely, Christian woman she was.

As a child my mother thought there were three sexes: men, women and nuns. Nuns sounded like women, but didn’t wear make up and had short hair hidden under their veils, wore long black dresses to the ground (in those days), but had big heavy ugly black lace up shoes. So, men, women and nuns.

Mind you, my mother’s judgement shouldn’t be relied on. She also thought that the reason men go bald is because they run out of hair as it grows from the top of their heads, down in to their beards and eventually they just run out of hair altogether…it’s all been ‘bearded’ out, as it were.

The Lord and I aren’t quite so pally these days, since I ditched the chance to be a Bride of Christ in favour of being a Bride of MrSpud (nicer clothes and less rules).

Me and my 'other' husband

We’ve been together for 24 years now, since I developed a lasting and stonking crush on him as a teenager. Naturally, like any couple, we’ve had our ups and downs but in the end we love each other very deeply and will be together forever.

There is the ‘slight’ knotty issue of his wife and family, and MrSpud and my boys, but the course of true love never runs smooth does it?

I’ve never actually met Michael Palin, I will admit it. I have come very close on two occasions, both book signings. The first time, early 1990s, he was doing a signing in Selfridges and I got as far as the lift before my heart started pounding so fast I thought I was going to faint so I had to go home. Waaaaaah!

The second time I took reinforcements in the shape of various colleagues from work. Got to Waterstones, same thing happened, I was completely frozen to the spot. Someone shoved me forward and, squeek, HE LOOKED AT ME. That was it, I turned on my heel and ran back to the office, completely overwhelmed.

Recently I read an interview with ‘my husband’ and the interviewer commented on the longevity of his marriage, and how rare that is in celebrity world. Michael said that someone had caught his eye once or twice, but in the end family is more important.

HE MEANT ME!!!! HE LOVES ME TOO!!!

A photocopier accessory

Despite the universally accepted truth than Nikons are better than Canon, my neighbour insists on lugging round a big ‘ol photocopier with him. Bless. He takes great photographs but I was shocked to learn he doesn’t have a trusty nifty fifty in his armoury. It took me about 10 seconds to persuade him to buy one and today I took delivery of this little baby.

Mmmmm, pretty…look at its fastness, its bokeh-ry goodness, its compactness, its toner tray and ink cartridges….if he’d gone for the f1.4 it probably would have had an automatic stapler function.

Naturally I had to take it out of the box as I needed a couple of copies of some documents. Also, it needed a CLEAN. How can a brand new lens, right out of the factory, need a clean? I got busy with my Giotto’s rocket blower thingy and now it’s sparkly clean and ready to copy.

Joking aside, I’m so excited. I adore my 50mm and have to wrench it off my camera sometimes just to shake things up a bit. I can’t wait for Adrian to get going with his new lens as I know he’ll be hooked in minutes and won’t be able to understand how he lived without it.

I love that feeling of letting people in on a secret, adding something to their lives that you just KNOW is going to be a hit. Which got me thinking about book recommendations, when you can’t believe that someone hasn’t ready xyz book and you implore them to read it. And they do, and they love it, and you all bask in the shared wonderfulness of the discovery.

For me, it’s A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. I get a thrill when I come across someone who hasn’t read it but I’m also a little bit jealous as they are about to get to read Owen Meany for the first time. Bitter sweet. A bit like watching West Wing or Mad Men – it’s so fabulous you can’t stop watching it but at the same time you want to slow time down because you know at some point The Last Episode will come.

So what’s the book, the music, the programme, the ‘discovery’ you have that you love to share with people. Share it with us, we all need a little joy!

Early Morning Poppies

There are very, very few benefits to having to get up early every single day of your life once you have children. Admittedly I don’t have to get up ‘that’ early since I make MrSpud get up with them if they wake before the internationally approved Get Up Time of 7am. I totally resigned from getting up with children once I stopped breast feeding them on the basis that I’d done back to back pregnancy, breast feeding, breast feeding AND pregnancy, breast feeding for about 3.5 years. I’ve done my time.

Anyway, I found this wonderful poppy field up the road from our house last week and it’s been niggling at me ever since. It’s screaming to be photographed…snap me..snap me….SNAP ME!!!

But the weather and the light have been rubbish, and I was getting wibbly that the moment of the poppy field glory would pass before I could get up there.

So Bertie got up at 6am today and got in to bed with us. Out of the corner of my eye I could see sunshine peeping around the blind, so I dragged myself out of bed and up to the poppy field. Huzzah! The poppies were still there, but very battered by heavy rain.

I didn’t really get the shots I wanted, but then it’s pretty much always like that. But this is quite nice. Shot with a Nikon D70, Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 AT-X for the people who care. At f22, 15mm.

But, weirder and rather alarmingly, when they do eventually fall out…there are no adult teeth waiting to come down. I’m completely missing a pair of teeth. Not my adult incisors in fact, as they are next to my front middle teeth i.e in the wrong place. My dental arrangements are pretty complex.

More alarmingly a recent x-ray showed that the milk teeth are hanging on by a thread, i.e their demise could be imminent. So when they do finally come out, I will have large gaping holes. Children will point and stare and run back to mummy, and I will inadvertently whistle when i talk like a mad old lady. Might as well grow a beard while I’m at it.

I'm still due two more visits from the Tooth Fairy

On a more positive note, that means I’m due two more visits from the tooth fairy. Yay! How much do you get these days? At least a quid, surely?

So two of our finest British pounds as compensation for becoming gappy, whistling bearded woman? Definitely worth it.

I’m hoping the Good Hair Fairy might take pity on me soon. Although the Ken Dodd look as shown here might divert attention away from the dental issues. Although the beard might balance it quite nicely?

Folded over legs or 'my stumps'

In reality, I have calves on the chunky side, big thick ankles, chubby small feet and even chubbier, stubby toes. Believe me, this photo is very, very flattering.

This is deeply unfair because I NEED slim ankles and dainty feet for the vast collection of elegant designer shoes which I own (in my head). I love shoes, but not that many of them love me apart from Birkenstocks, Uggs, Clarks and other footwear loved by lentil weavers.

A ‘friend’ once told me I didn’t have ankles at all, just ‘folded over legs’, and no feet ‘just stumps’. So I killed her.

I inherited the stumps from my mother. She was even more self-conscious than me and, as a teenager, used to make my Dad and his friends walk ahead of her so they couldn’t see her big fat ankles.

Having shoes made for my wedding day was a particular low point. I had lovely shoes made to match my dress, made to my design, with beading to match my dress and – ahem – a very low heel so I didn’t completely swamp MrSpud who is on the little side. During my first fitting it became apparent I would need EXTRA LONG ANKLE STRAPS to accommodate my vastness, oh the shame.

So back to the cobbler they went who, I am sure, still dines out of the Tale of the Heffer With Folded Over Legs to this day.

The boys sugar rushed all the way home and both had to take their balloons to bed with them. Caused all kinds of chaos as Bertie had to actually have his balloon IN bed with him, under the duvet to stop it floating up the the ceiling. And Diggy had to lie in bed with his, holding it. Except of course he let go every 5 seconds and then howled because it drifted up to the ceiling beyond his reach. Arggggh!! I tried attaching it to a startled looking stuffed rabbit, but he just threw the rabbit out of his cot and wailed about that too.

Anyone for a cream tea?

This post is really a note to myself when planning Bertie’s 4th birthday party in a few months.

1. Make own cake. Last minute, panicky dash to M&S is no longer acceptable as everyone else is now lovingly making cakes for their offspring.

2. Make cake early given huge likelihood of baking disaster necessitating last minute, panicky dash to M&S.

3. Copy Take inspiration from clever party tea logistics idea: only savoury treats on the table first, sweet stuff comes out once the rabble have eaten something vaguely nutritious. This is to wow and impress other parents with my thoughtful attention to detail, but is mainly to back end the sugar rush so that the rabble leave totally pumped up…you know, right around bedtime. Mwah ha ha.

4. Start making some local friends so that we actually have some people to wow and impress.

5. Borrow Venetia’s hully hooping gadget to make own hula hoops like she did so cleverly. Possibly, she was pulling my leg. I bet Nigella hullies her own hoops.

Alas there are times when my can’t cook won’t cook mentality just doesn’t cut it. Our neighbour’s daughter turned two this week and my elder boy was quite determined we were to make her a cake. This demand came at 6am, I managed to put him off for a few hours but his pleas for ‘one with a cherry on the top’ were not to be unheeded.

So here is Lemon Drizzle Cake, which even I can make, with optional cherries on the top….introduced to me by the lovely Stephalie who even held my hand the first time I made it through the ‘help what kind of cake tin’ and ‘oh no I don’t have a food mixer’ panic attacks. Thanks mate! x

Lemon Drizzle Cake

For the cake:

110g Butter
175g Caster Sugar
175g self-raising flour
1 level tsp baking powder
2 large eggs
finely grated rind of 1 large or 2 small lemons
60ml milk

Drizzling Sauce:
3 tbsp granulated sugar
juice of the lemons

1. Preheat oven to 180 C/ 350 F/ Gas Mk 4. Grease cake tin/loaf tin

2. Put everything (except sauce ingredients) in a food mixer and whiz until really smooth. Pour into prepared tin and bake for 40-50mins

3. Meanwhile dissolve the sugar in the lemon juice

4. Test cake is done by inserting a metal skewer into the centre. If it comes out clean then it’s ready.

5. Place the cake, still in it’s tin, on a cooling rack and pierce all over with a skewer. Spoon over the drizzle sauce and leave in the tin until quite cold.

6. Hide from the children and stuff the whole lot yourself.

I lack intellectual curiosity

I’m reasonably smart, I’m well read, I’ve passed a host of exams and even have a good clutch of letters after my name and have had a successful career. But, here’s the thing and sssshhhh – I have absolutely no intellectual curiosity whatsoever beyond the very narrow areas of my natural interest or those which my work requires me to entrenched in. It’s not that I’m not capable of understanding the issues, I choose not to as it bores me. I’m shallow like that.

Politics, current affairs, business, the economy, history, science, technology…no thanks, I’d rather file my toenails. As a result I have a very loose grasp on some fairly fundamental issues and I regularly have to deploy my dazzling wit and charm to steer conversations away from the vast, gaping holes in my general knowledge. Any bets on how many years it is before my children discover that their mother is a bit of a thickie?

Poor MrSpud despairs of me, and continues his valiant attempt to broaden my mind with a daily flurry of excited emails with links to some tedious new scientific development or archaeological discovery and his seemingly unquenchable appetite for Time Team.

I’ve watched approximately 759 episodes of Time Team and haven’t enjoyed a single one of them. Or learnt anything. Or even developed an inappropriate crush on Tony Robinson or any of his bearded chums which would, at least, have made the wasted 759 hours of my life slightly more pleasurable.

Drink in knowledge? I’d rather drink in wine, since you asked. Cheers!