Last remnants of Christmas

I always feel sad about 'the tree'. We are beguiled every year into buying the 'real thing' by the smell, the rustling crispness of the branches, the enthusiasm of boy person. The plastic version just wouldn't quite have the same effect. We like the wrestling with the thing, being spiked, and then sweeping up drifts of needles everyday.
I don't know as a P.Mat if we should be buying a vrai or not...apparently Paris scoops up its 24,000, or something, trees and makes lovely mulch for the green spaces, sounds pretty good...
Our 2010 tree is now in small firelighting pieces, and the needles are in newspaper parcels for the same reason. Perhaps I should enlarge on this next year and make it a ceremony of P.Matism, including a purge of all festive flab food, gorge ourselves on cabbage soup, ryvita etc, could catch on....

Plank, 2 manky chairs and 4 nails

and you have a magnificent rainproof, to a certain extent, recycling area.
Created during shed clear out and pre-winter wood pile sorting session...more of these excitements soon.

SIN

O.K I admit it. I do have a bath most days. Showers just don't soak ones aging feet, or sooth the pains of the day as well as a good hot bath. BUT I do save it all for the garden. This is an illustration of the amount of water from a fairly restrained bath. Makes one think.... Next year I'm going to construct a sort of Heath Robinson grey water recuperation system, but for the time being its me and aerobic workout with watering cans.

Goodbye....

Sob...sad day in the hothouse and for post-materialism. My old faux croc shoes have to go. They are becoming a public health hazard, and to quote someone Mark knows 'they don't owe me anything'.
Bought in the heady days of being a stylist, I saw them in one of those scary shops with black clad stick insect assistants and beech veneer everything. They were in a sale but quand meme, very expensive...Patched, repaired, more hole than sole, time to go.....
I did save a pan today however, that had cremated rice pudding in it. Mark was about to bin it. Scraped and wire wooled it lives again Ha!

A thing of beauty....

Our beautiful, tank like kettle, purchased from Loupia vide grenier a few summers ago, finally had a break down. Knob fatigue so to speak. Now fitted with a smart new, heat resistant cork, courtesy of Guinot, it will live to see thousands more cups of tea.
The other item pictured herewith is our elderly spanish tea-strainer, Mark, fool-hardy waster, was about to throw this jewel out. It has been re-conditioned, clumsily but with an artistic flair, with a length of super wire, and is now serving as 'bottom of the washing up bowl bits collector' to prevent drain blockages.

Saved from trip to IKEA by 1970's tray

I was struck by some weird urge this morning, to go to IKEA. this has not happened to me for about five years. The reason, apart from the thought it might be warm in there, was that I had suddenly had enough of picking up bits of straw in the bathroom from the perpetually molting washing basket lid. The thing itself must be twenty years old, no problem with that, but I was beginning to wonder if a new one would be..nice...no more bits, the gentle whiff of a couple of decades of socks gone...

Also the rug in front of the fireplace is VILE, hey we could get a new one, a better lampshade in the sitting room, fresh duvet cover, kitchen table is very wobbly, those old mugs are very unpleasant ...STOP.

I could have spent all day driving to and from Ikea, eating dodgy round meat products, buying not only the afore mentioned washing basket, but about fifteen other not actually really needed items, and spending money with the help of a small rectangle of plastic. These are dangerous places.

In the end I went out into the shed and found a 1970's vide grenier tray, banged a nail through it

attached some wire in a handle shape...new lid, which will do until the rest of the basket gives way, and we find another during the V.Grenier season next year.

Thanks Penny for the article about 'cashless man' in the guardian, which was probably another reason I didn't take the drive...

Rare event

Rarely seen in the hothouse, MEAT. Mark still stuck to the veggie option for Christmas lunch, with a nut roast sort of item, which was very good, in fact he had to fend off the carnivore folks.

This is a small pintade or Guinea fowl, the spotty black and white birds which emit a un-oiled gate sound (when not dead). José the butcher told me at length, while everyone waited patiently in the queue, how to cook it to perfection, what to stuff it with, and how many times to baste it. I like José's boucherie, it has a few prized cuts on display, no acreage of bloody formless things, more like a gallery of precious things to be admired.

Meat has become, in our present time, something too available, an assumption that protein in meat form should be eaten every day, vegetables something secondary on the plate. I would rather regard meat as something eaten as a special event, like the traditional Sunday roast. A bit more money spent occasionally on a good quality 'happy' beast must be better for us than a continual consumption of ultra cheap antibiotic soaked animals.

Unfortunately I lit the fire last night with 'Le Monde'. There was a really brilliant article in it about the huge production of meat and the consequences for us and the planet. One of the statistics was that 70 percent of South America's arable land is now given over to cattle production. Add that to the incredible amount of cow fart methane gas and its a massive problem.