Tag: caravan

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Small, disorganised and evil

We have reached peak storage capacity here in the caravan after two years of occupation. We are officially full.

The tiny kitchen has very limited cupboardage and what there is is highly inaccessible. Things get stuffed into every available crevice, causing carnage whilst cooking and frustration in searching for ingredients that I’m sure that I have, but can’t find.

The tiny kitchen in the caravan

As the day started with torrential rain and it was definitely one for indoor entertainment I took a deep breath and decided to make a start on sorting out the cupboards.

It won’t be long until we move things into the kitchen and pantry in the house and I figured that a bit of work now wouldn’t be time wasted.

It’s the small cupboard that holds what I call “miscellaneous cooking stuff”. Basically an overspill of everything else. Tubs of spices, bags of sea salt, containers of currants, pine nuts and ground almonds. That sort of miscellaneous. It’s small, disorganised and evil. Impossible to extract anything without a landslide.

Over the last two years things have got buried, packets opened and not properly resealed, and I had no idea what lurked beneath the first two rows of stuff.

In I went.

There were mysteries in there, dear reader.

Three tubs of custard powder, all opened and about a third empty. The remnants of winter trifles, I could only imagine.

Several bags of sea salt. I vaguely remember buying lots for pickling and clearly not using as much as I thought I’d need.

More pink peppercorns than I could feasibly use in a lifetime.

A tub of smoked paprika that I’d lost a year ago.

A bag of currants so old that it had shrivelled into something that looked like mice droppings. Hmm.

Tidiness!

I’m feeling triumphant, even if it is only one small cupboard. A good use of an hour of my time.

I need a labelling machine.

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Home and healing

I’m home now in the caravan, and starting the process of healing.

There’s immeasurable comfort in being at home in your own environment when you’re ill. The warmth and familiar feel of your own bed. The support of your loved ones around you. The now familiar views across the croft to the sea and over to the mountains of Knoydart.

The croft

Husband is heroically administering my daily stomach injections. I tried, but simply couldn’t bring myself to self inject – all respect to those that can and have to do this every day. The injections are blood thinners which have to be administered for a week following the operation whilst I’m not as mobile as I would normally be.

Evil injections

I potter about happily as often as I can to keep everything moving between periods of rest, legs up on the bed. I’m not allowed any strenuous activity or lifting whilst my body repairs itself .

I learned the hard way that post operative fatigue is a real thing early on in this process. Stupidly, a few days after getting home I decided that I could sit on a chair and just gently hold a garden hose to water the polycrub plants. It weighed almost nothing, and I wasn’t standing up.

After a few minutes the strain of holding up even something that light started to tell. I rapidly retired back to bed. Since then I’ve been much more sensible and husband takes the strain.

Each day I feel a little more like myself. I’m healing well even though it’s still early days.

Flowers from friends

Friends, family and neighbours have been wonderful, sending messages of comfort and cards, flowers, food and treats. Good friends made dinner for us one evening and drove it over to us. I’m feeling quite overwhelmed at all the kindness.

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Christmas Reading

I promised myself that I wouldn’t buy any books whilst in the extremely restricted living space of the caravan. I promised myself. But it seems that I have an addiction that is very difficult to shake.

Books have always been a big part of my life.

One of my earliest happy memories of Christmas is opening a gift-wrapped book. The smell of the paper and printing ink. The tactile pleasure of handling it, feeling the slight roughness of a linen book cover. The crisp turning of its new pages. The pleasure of curling up quietly on a sofa and losing myself deeply in its world. These are things I’ve always loved.

I couldn’t resist buying a few books to read over this festive break. It seemed sort of traditional.

Besides. Alan Garner has just published a new book at the age of 87. It would seem rude not to support such a momentous undertaking. I first read his novel The Owl Service at the age of eight, and I found it deeply disturbing, and very powerful. So much so that the memory of the book stayed with me, and when forty years later I came across a copy of it in a secondhand book store, I had to buy it to read again as an adult. It was still a strongly evocative, disturbing book.

His new book, Treacle Walker, is apparently based on the legends around Alderney Edge in Cheshire, where the author still lives.

I shall wrap it in festive paper and gift it to myself for Christmas. I shall find some quiet moments to absorb it.

It’s over fifty years now since I first read his work and I feel that Mr Garner and I are overdue a revisit.