Not necessarily mysterious – it just sounds more interesting than ‘miscellaneous’.
Our potted miniature maple is beautiful when in leaf, but during the winter it’s a bit bare. So I have made it into a Christmas tree inspired by Charlie Brown’s threadbare one. I used green strinsel, a kind of tinsel made from recycled string.
I am not really posting any cards this year, but here is my little Christmas painting instead – it is an adaptation of one by Lin Fengmian, but obviously I lack his skill with the brush.
This year’s sloe gin is ready!
Plus… gin-infused sloe berry chocolate!
I made a multi-coloured set of container candles in glass goblets, each with a different fruity scent*. These need a quicker-melting wax than pillar candles. No skill at all is required, but they are quite practical (they never dribble) and look especially good when the wax is molten.
*From the left: passionfruit, grape, strawberry, mango, banana and watermelon
I made sparkly candles. It must be about sixty years since I last used glitter. It still gets everywhere.
November is coming, but there will be no NaNoWriMo…
You may know that this was the annual exercise in which people attempted to write an entire novel (well, 50,000 words, a bit skimpy actually) in a single month. You could register your progress, meet up with fellow writers and so on.
There was always something a little strange about this. It seemed designed for people who didn’t really enjoy writing, but wanted to get it off their bucket list once and for all. Arguably it encouraged bad writing because quality was not important, just quantity. And while it was meant to be encouraging, most people always failed.
Apparently there had been several problems. There were claims that its forums were misused, though the organisers were quick to act. It weirdly decided to allow the use of AI, which most people thought rendered the exercise pointless (it even claimed that denying AI to participants was ableist). Somehow it ran out of money.
My feelings are ambivalent, but they include a big element of regret. I entered (and succeeded) in 2008 with a story about, what else, someone entering NaNoWriMo. I polished the result up afterwards, but it’s still medium bad with a few good lines. Probably my biggest mistake was to make my hero, the narrator, pretentious and verbose. Humorously, but still.
Nevertheless, in a spirit of commemoration and for what it’s worth, here it is.
This year I have tried out using Mirabelle plums to flavour gin, in the same way as sloes. (I’ve done some of those too.) The result is now bottled and while it doesn’t have quite the impact of the sloe variety it’s an agreeable fruity variation. The sloes need a bit longer but will be ready before Christmas (which is creeping up on us now).
I did a presentation on writing competitions! Regular entrants will know all this stuff already, but here it is if you’re interested.
The mini peaches from our mini peach tree still feel quite firm, but they are a good colour and have started to drop off the tree of their own accord (I blamed the foxes at first), so they have to be picked. They are in fact ready to eat – I think they might be nice grilled with a bit of crème fraîche or similar.
We’ve had some civilised vegetables this year, but the carrots…
Seen and Done 