20/11/14: Homeward bound

Home comforts have rarely been more welcome than when I was their grateful recipient for the first few days at the beginning of this week. Following a particularly croaky Sunday lunch with lots of family that I've not seen for a long while - alongside plenty of red wine, vegetable lasagne & flowers bought for the host at an uncharacteristically quiet Columbia Road en route - I accompanied the Bedfordshire contingent of our clan back home for a couple of days. Rolling into bed early that night with an almighty sore throat & the beginnings of a head cold, I nonetheless had a good feeling about the ability of home as a healer. The next morning meant a warm croissant in the bath with Beckett (the reading I have been grudgingly undertaking for university with very mediocre results i.e 40 pages of a mandatory 140) followed by a bracing couple of hours zipped & tucked into my old wax jacket & scarf walking dogs in the woods not far from home. It was over to my Gran's house for brew after lunch then back to the homestead to settle by the fire for the evening & catch up on newspaper supplements while my Mum got on with her Christmas knitting in earnest ('tis almost the season) 

Tuesday was much of the same, honey granola eaten while perched on the edge of the bath waiting for it to fill & then a walk up into the town for a viewing of a cottage that my Mum has since bought(!) Mum has been trying to sell our house for a long while & just when she'd resigned herself to giving up again until the spring, everything fell into place. The new house is going to be much smaller than the one that most of us have inhabited for the last eleven years but change is good as is the pretty little courtyard garden, low ceilings (hello '70s futon in my room) & the fire being moved to the kitchen so we can keep warm while the kettle boils. For now it's a case of making the most of our very last Christmas in our current house & taking stock of the multitude of memories that have been made there. The afternoon was predictably spent secondhand shopping where I was lustily eyeing various homewares from wicker magazine racks to mid-century mirrors but was recurrently reminded of our bedroom here being at full capacity to say the least. I was already back in London by the time that offers were accepted & confirmed but our family had an anticipatory toast to the news alongside my favourite 'proper chilli' from Anna Jones' 'A Modern Way To Eat' that I had promised to make for my Mum for a long while. I was glad to have chosen a one-pot dish for the evening as its preparation was simple & stress free & I was so glad that my Mum - who has never knowingly eaten quinoa, bulgur wheat, black-eyed beans or puy lentils - sung its praises throughout the meal & beyond. 

I've been back in London for a couple of days, coughing & spluttering my way through aforementioned Beckett lecture, making a note of upcoming festive plans (work Christmas party is a'callin') & mostly feeling better. Oh & then there's the research for mine & Andrew's three year anniversary trip to Brighton this upcoming weekend...! We've not been away together for a little while so we can't wait to check into our B&B on Sunday & eat our way through the reams of vegetarian/vegan restaurants I've made a note of.  I'll of course be back to blog it for you soon but...

Have you any tips of your own for the seaside town? 

Have you been similarly snottily afflicted of late? 

Speak soon - O. 

13/11/14: Woollen wayfaring & my first belated blanket

It had been a busy week this one just gone. I was undertaking the most ambitious & productive reading week since my studies began which meant five days of work experience at a newspaper followed by a weekend of working at the bookshop. Looking ahead to a seven day week, perhaps I should have anticipated my being slumped against a Northern Line tube carriage just a touch tearful come Sunday morning. It still felt good to have made the most of the time & actually prove that I'm not as habitually lazy as I had come to fear that I, err, was. One of the best things about busy weeks is also the not-so-busy weeks that often follow, when the focus of my frequent to-do lists shifts from dashes to Tesco Metro for milk on the way home & topping up my Oyster card to replying to long emails from friends & completing long-lost projects such as this.

Crochet isn't something that I've talked a lot about on this little blog (& I understand that it doesn't correlate exactly with the books & broccoli manifesto that I put forward since the name change) but I feel as if it's earned its place. Unlike some of my crafty friends, crochet isn't something that I've inherited as part of a family tradition, far from it in fact as I, modern gal that I am, taught myself from a series of YouTube videos, building up a tester swatch of stitches that I still hold dear. Although it seems a while ago now, I suspect that I took up my hook while looking for distractions from university work but it's a hobby that has really stuck. 

The first Christmas since I took it up I perhaps predictably crocheted woollen scarves for everyone, family and friends alike, as my confidence grew. Soon I was fast making my way through the pattern index of numerous creative bloggers & pledged my allegiance to Ravelry, through which I was able to find patterns to make things like this amazing crochet turban (it's so cosy) Soon enough I was making crochet collars, triangle bunting & floral coasters in numerous hues & with varying chunkiness, likely enough to stock, say, an Etsy shop. I put a lot of time & heart into my short-lived Etsy venture 'SewKitschCrochet' but alas sales weren't spectacular & my time was increasingly taken up with other things (like the university work that I had been, ahem, avoiding) I hung up my crochet hook for a while but not before my Grandy had lodged one last order. She wanted a crochet blanket comprised of the larger squares that I'd tried out & shown her (this brilliant pattern here, if you're curious!) My Grandy promised that she would be the one to put them together (the least fun of any crafty project, I think fellow crocheters will agree) & I said I'd do it, happy to receive a bag full of  wool & something to keep in mind over the coming weeks.

Well, weeks soon turned into months turned into I-don't-know-how-long. There was an initial burst of enthusiasm as I got to grips with the pattern but that soon waned as I wasn't used to the sheer repetitiveness of making something on such a scale. 21 white, 21 blue. The blanket was mostly forgotten about although it occasionally cropped up in a family joke e.g 'Liv'll probably have finished that blanket before she tidies up that bedroom, ha ha ha'. When I went back to university recently & found myself uncharacteristically organised with my course reading, crochet seemed like a great way to fill the gap again. I worried that I would've lost the stitches, that I would encounter the same boredom. Thankfully, not so. Determined to finish it before Christmas as the best of surprises for my Grandy, I diligently picked up my hook again a month or so ago & watched as the tally of the squares went up & up. 21 white, 21 blue - ta dah! Here she is & ahead of schedule too.

I've always thought that there are many ways to chart progress - updating your CV with work experience, for example or endlessly photographing your dinners, of which I'm also guilty - but there's something special about wool. You can hold it in your hands, up to the light that it stencils, feel the stitches beneath your fingers, see where you've tiredly woven in the ends, where the edges are wonky. This blanket is by no means perfect. The squares are different sizes - large, loving, loose stitches & tiny, taut ones - some are lop-sided, others evidently earlier than others. That's the best thing about this blanket. It holds within it the last two years of my creative life & will soon go onto my Grandy's bed, at long last.

Now to keep it wrapped up until Christmas...!

Do you crochet? What've you been crafting lately?

Speak soon - O.

02/11/14: 'The Beet Generation' begins!

I think we're likely all full of contradictions if we're being honest. I've always been meticulously organised yet hopelessly forgetful, full of love for my family yet prone to my brother's provocation, spontaneously impulsive yet frustratingly indecisive. The latest development on this little blog of mine particularly concerns the last of this trio. It was while peeling beetroots in the kitchen one evening after work (for this particularly tasty Greek dip for a dinner party, if you must know!) that I joked off-handedly to Andrew that it was a wonder that no one had started a blog called 'The Beet Generation'. We're continually bandying puns between us, cool couple that we are, but I felt as if this particular turn of phrase might have something in it. Full of enthusiasm for a whole-hearted rebrand, I soon discovered that Blogger had other ideas, or rather that the person who had already nabbed the URL didn't because it lead me to a site that hadn't had a post for years. Hum. I abandoned the idea for a while before it came back to me this afternoon with a more determined intention for this blog to represent what I really wanted to write about (& an altogether funkier URL to boot...!)

I didn't have a particular idea of what I wanted this blog to be about when I started it & I can't say that that has changed much. I only ever wanted somewhere to document my day-to-day life, to even take a step away from it to hold certain moments in my hands a while, & hopefully reach out to a community that I was already invested in from the scores of brilliant blogs that make up my bookmarked pages. As it happens, this place has also become one where I can express my interests in books & cookery as worthwhile ways to spend my time & since I do spend so much of it propped up against my oven with a book in hand, I thought that I should do the same here.

So hello & welcome to 'The Beet Generation' where I hope you'll come to read about poetry & puy lentils, Ginsberg & guacamole, Burroughs &, well, beets as well as, well, what's going on with me & with you too. 

For now, I've got a butternut squash roasting & the Sunday papers to get through.

Check back for what's been served up on my table (or, more often, duvet) lately & more news of that unavoidable reading list, reading week or no reading week.

Speak soon - O.