little green fingers

Kirstie Allsopp, gilded pears and telly rage

I was shouting at the TV screen last night - a lot.  Unfortunately, I quite often suffer from 'telly rage', and its closely related anger issue - 'radio rage'.  The latter is usually aimed at some politician on the Today programme as they avoid answering the question yet again.  The former is reserved for certain Cbeebies programmes and, of course, Kirstie Allsopp.

I know this sounds harsh.  I mean, I'm sure she's a lovely person and I really rather liked her and Phil on Location, Location, Location even when they were pretending to have a pseudo marital tiff every five minutes.  However, I'm afraid her Homemade Christmas has sent me over the edge.

The premise seemed right up my street - avoiding the shop bought extravagances in favour of handmade and personal touches to the festive season.  But then she goes on to show you some extremely talented artisans creating expensive luxury items which you couldn't even begin to contemplate without some pricey raw materials, specialist tools and about 15 years of experience.

The point where I really lost it was when she gilded pears in 24 carat gold leaf as a means of creating place settings.  Tell you what Kirstie, why not just tell your guests where they're sitting rather than torturing innocent fruit in the manner of a Bond villain.

The most annoying part of it all is that there are many, many easy ways to decorate your family's Christmas table without recourse to a second mortgage.  Just look in your garden for a start.  You can place ivy or holly down the centre of a table.  If you remember to save allium heads or you've collected walnuts or pine cones, just spray them gold or silver to add some bling to the greenery.  I have even used ivy leaves, decorated with a metallic pen, to label individual crackers, although, on reflection, that does sound a bit weird.

Anyway, enough of this.  Big Cook Little Cook is about to start and I need to do some more shouting.  I mean how can they begin to run a cafe with so few covers?  And don't get me started on their lack of food preparation...

Christmas cress elves, channelling tulips and general silliness

I'm beginning to think I may be a tulip. After all I like to lie in the sun in the summer and I'm downright frisky in the spring, but when it comes to winter, I just want to climb into a bed and wait for the weather to pick up.

This general winter hibernation appears to be affecting my blogging too.  Let's face it, there's very little to get excited about in the garden right now and, unless my kids show a sudden interest in turning the compost heap, there's not a great deal of family gardening to be done either.

Still, I'm doing my very best to show some enthusiasm this week as we are coming up to the last gardening club of the year at pre-school.

It gets tricky about now as there's not a whole lot to do. We've already started off the last of the veg outdoors, created some bulb pots and last week we even planted an apple tree.  Actually, that's something of the Royal 'we' as I did the whole 'digging hole and planting in the rain' bit, while some very dry, small children waved at me cheerfully from the window. 

Anyway, this week, we are getting festive and making Christmas cress elves.

I know some people are a little dismissive of cress growing but I'm never quite sure why.  After all, it's the only crop I know where you can see the seeds germinating in a matter of hours and be eating it within a week. Plus, it's cheap, cheerful and grows all year round.

Of course the objections may be more about the habit of growing cress in silly pots with silly faces, but what can I say, I'm a sucker for a silly face.  Plus, with my children eating up to 30 small, non-recyclable pots of yoghurt a week, I'm quite keen to find ways of reusing silly pots too.

So, if silly cress activities are your sort of thing, this is how to make Christmas cress elves.

• Take a toilet roll inner and cut a piece of green paper long enough to go around the pot.
• Add a small strip of darker green paper for the belt and cut a triangular shape for the hat and another shape for the feet - make both of these slightly longer than needed so you can stick them to the inside of the tube.
• Use white stickers or paper for the face and ears and then detail the face, trousers, belt, buckle and shoes using a black pen.
• Stick the decorated green paper around the tube to make the elf body and then stick on the hat and shoes.
• Fill your yoghurt pot with some cotton wool, nearly to the top, wet this and then sprinkle on the cress seeds.
• Put the yoghurt pot in the top of the tube, place on a sunny windowsill and wait for the elf's cress hair to sprout.
• Finally, make a large pot of tea, unwrap a packet of Jammy Dodgers and open a good book, safe in the knowledge you have completed your 'good parenting' task for the day - Cbeebies can take it from here....

Enid Blyton, Five Go Mad in Dorset and a gnome called Pinkity

Ava is turning into a nascent literary critic.  She has been complaining in recent weeks at the paucity of choice in the 'dark pink' reading category at school (a reference to some kind of colour coding for reading levels which is, quite frankly, beyond me). To be fair, all the stories do seem to involve either boys playing football or some kind of island community reminiscent of Castaway - the BBC one documentary rather than theOliver Reed film, in case you were confused.

Anyway, last night she went on strike and refused to pick up the latest offering from her school bag, so instead she chose to read me a chapter from Enid Blyton's A Book of Fairies.

I'm not sure where I stand on Enid Blyton.  Of course it's not absolutely essential to hold opinions on deceased children's authors, but the thing is, when it comes to Ms Blyton, I always have done. 

As a child I was a massive fan of her books, particularly The Famous Five and Faraway Tree series.  In fact, it was probably these stories which instilled in me the 1950s language I have never quite outgrown - 'crikey', 'gosh' and 'good heavens' being just the tip of my weird linguistic iceberg.

Then, in the early 80s, there was that Comic Strip Presents... episode Five Go Mad in Dorset which, let's face it, spoilt some of the magic of the books - I have never been able to view Uncle Quentin or a tub of vaseline in quite the same light again.

Plus, there's the casual racism, snobbery and rather mediocre writing to contend with.  To top it all, the Beeb's drama Enid a couple of weeks ago, revealed that Ms Blyton might have been, well, a bit of a bad egg.

However, as my daughter read a typically Blyton-esque story about a small ribbon-rolling gnome called Pinkity, it became a tale of bracken, ferns, fronds and the effects of frost.  Cripes!  By the end, I had nearly revised my opinion of Enid... again.  Still not sure about vaseline though.

Toodle pip!

Planting bulb wellies

 
I've been thinking about Nigel Colborn's shoes for nearly six months.  In case you're worried, no, I have not developed some weird footwear fetish nor have I started stalking the horticultural aristocracy, it was just that on his ever-entertaining silvertreedaze blog, Mr Colborn had fashioned a sort of floral tribute using his gardening shoes and I thought I would like to do something similar myself.

In my mind, I was keen to plant up some lovely old Brogues with a few sempervivums.  But, given my husband rarely seems to wear anything but ridiculous Converse-style footwear, I came up short on that one.  However, I did get some rather fetching new wellies earlier in the year which meant I was able to retire my old green pair that had sprung a leak.

Yesterday, I dug these out from the back of the shed, found a few leftover bulbs from the pre-school gardening club and asked the kids if they wanted to plant up some boots.

I cut extra slits at the bottom and the children added gravel to the base for drainage.  Then it was simply a case of filling up with compost and planting the tulip, daffodil and crocus bulbs at the correct depths.

We will probably clean them up and decorate them when the flowers are ready to bloom.  Perhaps we could sketch on Nigel Colborn's face.  I wonder if that would contravene the restraining order?

Ofsted, bulb-planting and Schrödinger's cat

I'm a bit flustered this week.  It's all down to bulb planting combined with the scariest five letters in education.  Oh, hang on, no, I mean six letters.  See - that's what I mean by being flustered.

Yes, this week there are rumours abounding that Ofsted are on their way to our beloved pre-school.  I'm not really sure where I stand on Ofsted.  It's very noble that an organisation is trying to ensure high standards in our school system, but they do seem to have a reputation and fear-inducing quality unequalled since the Spanish Inquisition. In fact, they might be scarier than the Spanish Inquisition as they haven't even had a Monty Python sketch to lighten their image.

So anyway, we're overdue an inspection, and now, on the pre-school grapevine we hear they're in the area. This means that my weekly gardening club may well coincide with their visit.

This shouldn't matter.  The gardening club is going well.  I have an action packed session lined up.  I plan to plant a dual species fruit tree in the garden with some of the children, as well as having them create layered bulb pots with tulips, daffodils and crocus.

But, I am slightly nervous about the Hawthorne effect... or is it the Heisenberg uncertainty principle... or something to do with Schrödinger's cat?  I'm not sure which as I gave up physics in the third year and, hard as I tried to concentrate, Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time episode on quantum theory just gave me an almighty headache. But anyway, it's the one where the act of observing a phenomenon changes it, or as I like to put it, the certainty that someone looking over my shoulder will mean I cock things up - big time.

I'm not really sure how it will go wrong, but when I shut my eyes, I have visions of a Frank Spencer-style escapade which tends to end with a handbag full of compost, skid-inducing bulbs all over the floor and an Ofsted inspector falling head first into the tree planting hole.

Come to think of it, the weather is looking a bit dodgy.  And actually, my throat has been feeling a little scratchy.  In fact, it could be swine flu.  Probably, just to be on the safe side, we maybe, you know, ought to, well... cancel gardening club for a week.  Or two.