Weeknotes 7

We’re in Yorkshire spending time with our family in the run up to Christmas so please forgive the lateness of this week’s notes.

I was very excited to consult “Animated Knots by Grog” to fix a new loop of string onto a duster (a lovely bowline knot did the trick). I’d be remiss if I didn’t take this opportunity to mention my favourite web site: “Ian’s Shoelace Site”. It embodies exactly what I love about the internet: a true labour of love that is narrow in scope but extremely deep. I am yet to convert E (much to my annoyance as her laces come undone when we’re out walking) but I never leave home without tying a couple of trusty Ian’s secure shoelace knots.

Travelling north meant our very first significant road trip with C so we kitted out the car with a backseat baby mirror and tentatively set off up the M1. While we were nervous about C getting upset along the way, I got to indulge in one of my great, guilty pleasures in life: spending time in motorway services. I don’t just mean fancy, peaceful ones like Tebay but ones with appalling men’s health warnings on toilet stall doors presumably targetted at long haul drivers. I’m not sure what it is about them but I find them curiously relaxing places to be; there’s something about their transitory, incidental nature that is strangely freeing.

C met his great-grandfather and great-grand-aunt for the very first time who are 91 and 95 years his senior respectively (the latter worked at the Avro “shadow” factory in Leeds during the Second World War building Lancaster bombers). I’m mostly sharing this to use the term grand-aunt instead of great-aunt.

As we’re away from home in houses that actually have more than three rooms, we’ve been putting C down to sleep farther from us than ever before. We don’t have any sort of baby monitor but I’ve been using Live Listen with AirPods to turn my phone into a microphone and listen in. It has the added benefit of meaning I get to sit with a single earpiece in like some sort of cool dude.

Continuing my streak of recommending Felicity Cloake recipes in the past few weeks: we made a large batch of her perfect mince pies. To be honest, I’m just excited whenever we get an excuse to use our increasingly dusty bottle of orange blossom water.

I tried to make a loaf of bread with my sourdough starter (“Colin”) at my mum’s house but got a cracking migraine early in the process which meant a 40 minute autolyse unexpectedly became a 24 hour autolyse. Seeing as I had already used the ingredients, I decided to go ahead with the rest of the recipe and, while the dough was extremely difficult to handle, I was pleasantly surprised to end up with a decent loaf!

I’m increasingly inclined to agree with James Adam:

I bet if you just chuck all the ingredients in a bowl, stir it once, put it in an oven whose thermostat is triggered on and off by radioactive decay, you’ll get a normal loaf at the end of the process.

Spending time with my dad means catching glimpses of the two hour long miniature epics that are Turkish soap operas, or “dizi”: I never watch enough to understand the plot but you can guarantee there’ll be some smouldering looks and some fantastic facial hair.