Geocaching at Harcourt Arboretum

I have never been geocaching before. Didn't want to. Didn't see the point - why ruin a perfectly good country walk by bringing along a piece of beeping technology to interfere with everything? Mostly, I still think that, but having allowed my husband (a geek of the first order), and my 5 year-old daughter (full of the enthusiasm one has at that age) to convince me to try it, I find myself forced to admit that my one and only experience of geocaching, at the Harcourt Arboretum near Oxford yesterday, was actually really good fun. I'm blushing at the admission, but there it is. Even in the pouring rain, I enjoyed it. And it wasn't quite what I expected.

It's part of the Arboretum's series of family activities for the summer holidays, and there are two trails, designed with the Institute of Physics. We chose the longer trail, with ten caches, which took about 2 hours. We were thankful for our wellies, waterproofs, and an all-terrain buggy, in which our 18 month-old slept most of the way round; at her pace it might have taken us about 4 times as long.

So why did I enjoy it? Well firstly, the kit is not too complicated, even for a Luddite like me. The only problem with the GPS unit is that you have to be moving for it to work, so you have to pick a random direction at first and set off confidently, so that in 10 yards or so you can change direction equally confidently once the kit has worked out where you are. It took us on a lovely convoluted route round the meadow and amongst the trees, and not knowing where we would be sent next added a pleasing air of mystery. The ten caches were hidden in army surplus waterproof tins, containing a log book and an activity designed by the Institute of Physics, and it was this aspect that was most interesting.

I'm not in any way a physicist, having given up formal study of the subject at the tender age of 14 due to some spectacularly poor advice at school, but these were perfectly accessible to me, and the practical nature really appealed to our 5 year-old - in one activity she got to pretend to be a bat, echo-locating insects (the rest of us standing round her in a circle responding to her "beep beep" with our own!). We also loved the one about thin-film interference, which explains the way we see the fabulous colours of peacock feathers (peacocks being a feature of the Arboretum), and had a pair of sheets of polarising film with which to make mosaics:

All in all, a brilliant couple of hours, and an activity that I would highly recommend, even if you don't think of yourself as the geocaching kind!

Harcourt Arboretum
Institute of Physics
The Geocaching Association of Great Britain (GAGB)

A Necklace of Raindrops

How wonderful would it be if you could stop the rain by clapping your hands? Or go out in it without getting wet?

I was one of those children who perpetually had their nose in a book, and one of my favourite authors was Joan Aiken. I’m pretty sure my first introduction to her work was the collection of short stories called “A Necklace of Raindrops”, with black and white illustrations by Jan Pieńkowski. 

It is in the title story that a little girl receives a necklace from the North Wind, which gives her these powers and more. I have always loved this story, with its fabulous combination of the magical and the real:

‘Who are you?’ Mr Jones said. ‘What are you doing in my holly tree?’

‘I got stuck in it, can’t you see? Help me out, or the storm will go on all night. I am the North Wind, and it is my job to blow the storm away.’

So Mr Jones helped the North Wind out of the holly tree. The North Wind’s hands were as cold as ice.

 As a thank you to Mr Jones, the North Wind becomes the godfather to Mr Jones’ new baby, Laura, and gives her a necklace:

From under his grey clock he pulled out a fine, fine silver chain. On the chain were three bright, shining drops.

The North Wind promises to visit Laura on her birthday every year to give her another raindrop for the necklace until she has ten drops, giving her great powers, including being able to go out in the rain without getting wet, swim the fastest river or deepest ocean safely, stop the rain by clapping her hands, and make it rain by blowing her nose. But of course, there is a catch - the North Wind tells Laura that she must never take the necklace off, or it will bring bad luck. And of course, because it's a story and there must be a problem for our heroine to overcome, she is indeed persuaded to take it off before she receives the tenth drop, and then has to fight to get it back before the North Wind visits on her birthday and realises what she has done...

It's a fabulous story (as are the rest in the collection) and I've always loved it - like many children I longed to be Laura, and have such a glamorous godfather. I too would have loved to be able to control the rain, and of course it sounds like such a beautiful necklace! So the story has always stayed with me, and although my original copy of the book went the way of many cheap paperbacks in a busy household, I bought myself another, and since I started making jewellery I have been determined to make my own necklace of raindrops. I've made several versions, but this latest is closest to the description in the book, using a fine sterling silver chain, with ten crystal quartz flat oval beads to represent the rain drops in the story. 

This necklace is for sale in my Morgan & Pink etsy shop (click on the photos to go direct to the necklace; if it's sold out, please use the link above to the shop, and use the contact option if you'd like to order one).

This blog post was originally written for the Morgan & Pink website, but now that I've moved my shop front to etsy, that website no longer exists, so I've taken the liberty of publishing it again here.

Caterpillars munching, caterpillars crunching...

I'm loving the macro setting on my camera at the moment! I've been using it for a while to take close ups of my jewellery, but recently I've taken it into the garden too. A couple of weeks ago I caught a bumble bee on a poppy, and today I've got a mug shot of the little beasties who are destroying my favourite rose bush.

This is a Zepherin Druin - a climbing rose with a heavenly scent - and I chose it because there's been one growing beside the kitchen door of my parents' house for years. But recently I noticed the leaf damage you can see in the background of this photo, and here are the culprits:

My limited research suggests they're the caterpillars of some kind of white butterfly - a large white perhaps? If anyone knows any better, please do tell!

Update - it's now a week later, and there's only one caterpillar... but he's now a big fat caterpillar:

I'm tagging this as part of Mum's the word's Closer to Nature linky:

Sagey chicken recipe

This is a family recipe, adapted from a dish my Mum used to make. It’s quite forgiving – quantities don’t have to be precise, and most importantly, my children will eat it happily! It's also quick to prepare, and then you just bung it in the oven, so it's ideal for when you have guests or manic children who need entertaining. Ideally, the chicken should marinade for at least 4 hours, but it’s still pretty good if you forget to start early enough...

To serve 4:

4 chicken breasts

6 sage leaves

5 generous tbsps of olive oil

3 generous tbsps of lemon juice

A couple of cloves of garlic, chopped or crushed

Salt & pepper

To marinade the chicken, mix together the oil and lemon juice in an oven-proof dish, add the chopped garlic and the sage leaves. Season with salt & pepper, then add the chicken and mix it so that the chicken is well covered. If the chicken breasts are quite large, I usually slice them into two or three smaller pieces, so that they soak up the marinade better. (If you're being frugal, this is also a good trick for making 3 breasts feed 4 people. It also makes it easier to dish out smaller portions onto children's plates). Put the whole lot in the fridge for a few hours.

Pre-heat the oven to approx 190°C (fan 170°C). Stir the chicken in the marinade, then simply put the dish in the oven for about 40 minutes. Check it after 25 minutes or so, and cover with foil for the remaining time if it looks as if it’s going to burn on top. You can also turn the chicken pieces at this point.

I normally serve it with couscous, and some fresh veg. The couscous works really well if you stir-fry some carrots with a shallot, some garlic and a handful of pine-nuts or munchy-seeds, and mix that in with it. The whole thing is also delicious cold as a salad, if you chop the chicken up once it’s cold and toss it in a bowl with the couscous – a very versatile recipe!

Confident parenting

From the moment you get pregnant, people feel it is their opportunity, nay their duty, to share with you their most invaluable advice about how to parent the tiny tadpole who will soon be running your life. Some of this advice is plain loopy, some is downright irritating, but almost all of it is couched in terms of “This is what I did, and look how brilliantly my kids have turned out”. And heaven help you if you dare to think differently!

 All of this is very difficult for the first time parent. Especially if you have that golden glow of enthusiasm for being a truly wonderful parent, and bringing up a child who will be a credit to the family – your child will suckle frequently (but not too often), smile charmingly at ugly relatives,  poo such sweet smelling faeces that no one minds at all that it ends up all over the sofa, sleep through the night even before he/she is born (never dreaming of waking you with a sharp kick to bladder at 2am), take herself off to the loo as soon as she can walk, and put herself to bed as soon as she can climb the stairs and reach the door handle to shut the bedroom door. And through all of this, you will naturally feel entirely happy and contented about the way it’s all turning out so splendidly...

And then your child is born. If you thought you’d been given plenty of advice before, brace yourself for the tsunami of maddeningly contradictory advice you will receive. You should feed on demand/every 2 hours/every 4 hours, put your child in a moses basket/hand-built cot/pram at the end of the garden, you’ll need 6 of this and 12 of the other, disposables, re-usables, bio-degradables... Everyone else seems so confident! How is it that you are the only one who doesn’t know what to do?

My first pregnancy was normal enough; I thought I knew roughly how to parent (I have plenty of younger siblings and already knew how to change a nappy, how to clear up sick, and which way up to hold a newborn). But then I gave birth, in a ghastly grey, windowless room with swing doors at each end like a corridor, with two midwives who spoke to each other but largely ignored me except when they had to attach belts or probes to me or the baby, or take yet another lot of blood from my pin-cushion arms. Nothing about it was how I’d imagined or hoped, and I came out of the experience with a baby who felt like a stranger, and with a sense of deep trauma. I was physically and emotionally exhausted, and rest was hard to come by. There wasn’t a bed free on the ward for another three hours so I missed supper. I was awake nearly all night listening to other people’s babies cry, but then fell asleep at 6.30am and missed breakfast. They woke me an hour later to check my blood pressure and panic that I hadn’t fed my baby for 9 hours (no-one told me she might not wake to feed – I thought babies scream when they’re hungry. Everyone else’s was screaming, so if mine wasn’t, she was fine, no?) By this time I’d had precious little sleep or food for 48 hours, and still felt like I’d been in a car crash. And now I also felt indescribably guilty for not feeding my child. I was in no fit state to look after myself, let alone a baby. I had no idea how to feed her, when to feed her, what to do if she didn’t feed, what to do if her poo looked like spinach mousse, or how to deal with the fact that when she cried, I cried too, inconsolably. And so they said I could go home.

Back at home, I read all the baby books I could find, increasingly desperate for something that made sense, or sounded like my child. Nothing felt right, or made sense. I couldn’t sleep, even when the baby did, and I completely lost my appetite. I’ll draw a veil over the next year or so, but suffice to say it involved anti-depressants and a resignation letter when maternity leave expired. I remember saying in despair that being a mother felt like trying to play ping pong in the pitch dark with people shouting instructions at me in Chinese (and for the avoidance of doubt, I don’t speak a word of Chinese). But eventually I began to feel human again, and to form a bond with the little creature who’d caused all this trouble. I was sent a baby book that actually sounded as if it was written about a baby like mine, and somewhere around 9 months I found some other parents whose ideas and methods sounded like the sort of thing I was trying to do. Little by little, I put together my own jigsaw of parenting. I began to stop automatically feeling stricken with anxiety or guilt by other people’s opinions, and started to believe in my own. It took a long time. You might still call it a work in progress.

And then, a few years down the line, we decided to do it again. This time I was armed and on the defensive. This time round I really did know what I wanted, and I was determined that everything that could be different from the first time, would be so. Miraculously, it was everything I’d hoped for, first time round.

Labour was 3 hours, not 14. It was at home, not in hospital (though I should admit this was by accident; it was all so fast we’d barely got the ambulance crew there in time to catch the baby, never mind take us anywhere) – but hallelujah it was wonderful to be at home! We had arranged help with the housework in the first few months, and it was a godsend. And most importantly, I knew what I wanted in terms of practicalities, so I wasn’t blown in the wind by other people’s advice. I knew which bits of kit were useful, and which could stay in the loft gathering dust. I knew my own mind about feeding, sleeping, weaning, and the latest must-have gadgets (smart-phone app to tell you which boob to use for the next feed, anyone?)

For anyone who’s interested, that baby book that finally made sense is Dr Sear’s The BabyBook:

and my favourite piece of kit is a bright pink ring-sling (like these from Pouchlings). The path we chose involves continued breastfeeding, co-sleeping, baby-wearing, and not worrying too much about domestic goddessness. (Is that a word? It should be.) Oh, and throwing away all the books whose advice confused me the first time round (yes, actually throwing them in the bin. Giving them to a charity shop would have meant some other poor sod had the chance to be panicked by them too). Those of you who know how much I love books, and how many I have around the house, will understand the magnitude of this! It was surprisingly liberating. And because I love books, I have now, inevitably, collected some more parenting books, but this time I’ve found some that seem to be about people like me, and children like mine. 

I’m sure some people are perfectly confident parents from the beginning (you’re the ones who wrote those wretched books I ended up throwing away, aren’t you?), but I’m guessing a lot more people take a while to find their own parenting style. What’s your story?

Bumble bee and poppy

I was planning to photograph this gorgeous poppy (which is self-sown but so lovely I left it), and as I approached with the camera, a bee joined me. Isn't he gorgeous? (Or she? How do you tell with bumble bees?)

I'm tagging this as part of Mum's The Word's Closer to Nature linky:

Waterproof children

There’s so much to see and do in the rain: you can study the reflections and ripples in puddles, then you can jump in them and see how big a splash you can make; you can notice how the puddle gets smaller as you repeatedly splash the water out; you can watch the way leaves and flower petals ‘ping’ as a raindrop hits them; you can wait as a drop forms on the lowest point of a leaf, trembles for a moment catching the light, and then falls; you can tip your head back and feel the raindrops falling on your face; you can catch them on your tongue, or hold out your hand and collect them in your palm; you can listen to the different sounds of the raindrops landing on leaves, or the plastic roof of the playhouse, or into a tin cup...

As a full-time parent, I have found that there are some days when it is quite simply essential to get out of the house, come rain or shine. Today was one of those days. And my daughters are quite happy with that. We bought them waterproof clothes and wellies pretty much as soon as they could walk (a necessity for Lakeland holidays anyway - Poppet, then aged 2, pictured above having a sandwich break in Keswick as we tackled the Keswick Railway Path in driving rain), and they are much happier to go to the playground like that than stay at home watching raindrops sliding down the window pane. Besides, the playground slide goes magnificently fast when it’s wet and you’re wearing slippery waterproofs! 

I was disappointed therefore to discover this week that Poppet's school still persists in the whole wet-play routine of keeping children indoors at playtime if it rains.This is despite worthy announcements at the beginning of the school year that they have an “open door to the outside” in her Foundation Stage classroom, and strict instructions that we should send our children to school with appropriate outdoor clothing...

As far as I know, people are pretty much waterproof. Modern clothes, by and large, wash easily and dry quickly. Schools seem to be centrally heated all year, and children undeniably get ratty if kept indoors all day. All this is manifestly true, so why persist in holding children captive in the classroom if it happens to be raining at playtime? I remember hating it as a child, and when I was teaching, those ‘wet-play’ days were always dreadful, with children and staff bored and full of pent-up energy by the end of the day.

Surely the perils associated with inactivity and lack of fresh air are much greater than that of getting a bit wet (Jane Bennett always excepted). So let's not be so precious about our children: put on their coats, and let them go out in the rain.