Osso Bucco day

An oyster shell-coloured sky today - sheets of water all about and it seems a far cry from the dry we had only a few years ago. Any vessel left out on the lawn - the odd jam jar, forgotten coffee cup, empty plant pot, boot, tipped over watering can, (I've told you not to leave them out - they rust through faster than.....), anything left out overnight is filled with rain.


It might seem drab out but winter colour can blaze. The camellias are pink, white, speckled cream and deep rose through to red. There are still haw berries on the hedges and lemons, oranges and cumquats have started marmalade themed cartoons in my head. 


Indoors it's an osso bucco day. I'm simmering one in a black enamelled casserole under a blanket of lemons, thinly sliced. It will get another good dose of citrus with the gremolata and after a 90 minute stew we should be able to eat it with a spoon. Long cooking means a chance to get at the mending too. There are trousers in for repair, socks and an apron pattern to cut. The rain rattling the casement windows makes me glad to be busy inside.

How to blow a bird's egg

Yesterday my feet took me to the museum and my eyes enjoyed it immensely. Was it Darwin who said that god had a fondness for beetles? Me too! Nothing else comes close to their irridescense, their machine-age aesthetic. Engineered for earthworks, their design almost entirely externalised as exoskeleton - by all accounts what's inside is mostly mush. I want to handle them. I know museums are hands in pockets places but I'm itching to touch. My heart drops though to see the birds - their twiggy toes tagged and no note on the noise they make nectaring or courting. I jolly myself by tracking through to fossils and shells.

On the way home I look in at my favourite opshop and come away with a bunch of books and a Harris Tweed hat. The hat is a good fit, snug and silk lined so no pricks or itches from the wool. Best of all though is the lyrebird brooch pinned smartly to the side. I have done well on the book front too. A 1962  edition of John Gilmour's Wild Flowers - Botanising in Britain, which begins, "The first step to becoming a field botanist...is to be visited with an irresitible passion."  It's true. To be struck with a lunacy of love is surely how we begin to know. The other book is a musty smelling 1955 print of The Young Collectors. The pages are foxed and yellow but there are articles by Georges Rees on pressing flowers and blowing bird's eggs and one by Clarence Ellis on pebbles. Who these days could wear the name Clarence without an apologetic smile? But as collectors go he is one of my heroes. Other chapters discuss in earnest tone the merits of collecting cheese labels and porcelain - an unusual hobby I would have thought for a child. Georges Rees spends a deal of his article on how to prick out an egg with a thorn. "I carried a few hawthorn points in my pocket, blew the egg straight from the nest and carried the blown eggs home loose in jacket my pocket; and rarely broke one." I can picture the young George kitted out in something like my tweed cap, socks pulled over his breeches for tree climbing and a future in filling museum cases with specimen birds.

A List for Winter

Pipe smoke/wood smoke/sooty chimneys
Early evenings
Pie: chicken and leek,spanakopita, apple
Puzzling out knitting stitches

Hard frost

Broth

Brews

Berries

Birds that are hardier than other birds

Hail

Moss

Museums

Books

Floor wax

Earache

Coughs

Puddings

Marmalade: cumquat, Seville orange, lemon 

Lanterns

Lay-a-beds
Radio
Sock darning /shoe polishing
Seed starting: making newspaper pots/ bird proofing seedlings