Martha's Marvellous Munchies

"I had to buy a new mop bucket because my old one got smashed by a marrow." That's surely not a sentence many people get to say even once in a lifetime. The marrow in question was left, with a group of its friends, at the back of church by an anonymous donor.  It weighed 7 lb, about the same as a newborn baby, but was decidedly less cute and a lot thicker-skinned.  I adopted it and brought it home. Presumably Theo was just curious about this giant vegetable that I'd left on the counter.  At any rate, he was reaching for that or something else, and shortly afterwards I found a sheepish 3-year-old, a wrecked mop bucket, and a remarkably unscathed marrow lying on the floor. A few days later, I got my revenge on the marrow by turning it into chutney.  This recipe from BBC Good Food made plenty, and used up over half of the vegetable.  The rest I peeled, chunked, and stashed in the freezer for now.  I have vague ideas of making marrow and ginger j...

Write, they say.  And keep writing.  Every day if possible.  That's what you do if you want to be a writer. Right, I say.  Writing.  I'll get to it as soon as I've done the shopping cleaned the bathrooms called some volunteers mowed the lawn hung up the washing got some exercise spent time with my family.  Um.  Maybe tomorrow. So writing has slid backwards from being a priority, when I called Cafes with Kids my job and reviewed a cafe every week, to a sideline, now that I'm the other side of the counter and, once again, calling cafe management my job.  And, as a bonus feature, actually getting paid for it.  It's exciting.  It's rewarding.  It's also all-consuming and completely exhausting, at least in these first few weeks when I'm trying to learn everything and everyone all at once.  That breathing space seems a long time ago already. But sometimes you have to carve out space for who you want to be as well as who ...

Theo and I sat perched on a rocky step in the sunshine.  Somewhere above us, Graham and Toby climbed higher up the path, while behind us, a waterfall splashed noisily down the hillside.  In front of us the land spread out in patches of green and grey and purple, sun-bright and dappled with cloud.  I drew in a deep breath.  We were definitely on holiday. Our usual last-minute AirBnB searching had led us to a cottage on the corner of the Yorkshire Dales.  Technically we were in Cumbria, but this area is far less popular than the more famous Lake District, with the guides tending to use words like "under-rated" and "little-known".  We certainly didn't have the place to ourselves, but then the weather that first day would have dragged the most reluctant walker out of doors.  Or just about.  You can see how enthusiastic our little walkers were! Cows.  On an A-road.  Definitely under-rated. The target that first day w...