Smokey the Magnificent

This is Miles.

.

You will notice Miles is a catfish.

Miles mocks you with his eyes.

No, I jest. He likes you.

Miles don’t take no guff, though.

Miles fears no Commies.

Miles fears nothing.

Yet this tough exterior cradles the soul of a poet. Sometimes, for instance, Miles feels a pang of melancholy in the produce section, because he gave up brassicas. For Lent.

Miles is a delicate soul. Sometimes things that amuse coarser mortals shock him to the core.

Then he silently judges.

Take, for example, his large, tiny sister.

His sister has body art and drives a motorbike.

She is pretty hardcore.

Miles recoils from some of her lifestyle choices.

But he still likes her.

Today, in view of the impending house-move, I cleaned out the pantry. This is an event filled with wonder and horror at the best of times, but this time it was particularly exciting. For one thing, Flatmate Man had left behind a number of items, allowing me to play the little game of “Did I buy this two years ago and forget, or did Flatmate Man leave it here as a long-game practical joke?”

For another, I cleaned out my vitamins. I was just going to biff them, but then I thought they might do some good on the garden, returning much-needed if slightly stale nutrients to the soil. I’m not entirely sure what effect breastfeeding-incompatible women’s multis, expired St John’s Wort and thermogenic slimming tablets (it was an angstier epoch) will have on a tomato plant, but I watered them in well and added some four-year-old sheets of nori by way of a mulch, and we shall see. My plants get a fair dollop of human food as it is - coffee, swished-out cream cartons, the odd bit of breastmilk I left in the fridge. I was tempted this year to dig placenta powder under one of my pumpkin seedlings, just to see if it would outperform its fellows, but it seemed like a waste.

Yesterday I went to the new house with Father and sundry aunts. We explored the orchard a little further than I had before. It is pretty awesome. There is a bath lying dead by a tree, and an old green wringer-type washing machine, and what looks like the fuselage of a small plane but presumably isn’t. There is a shed full of awesome apple crates that I want to pinch and make into a bookshelf, only I can’t because they’re used for, you know, storing apples. There is a fig tree in the back yard, and the beginnings of a fence put conveniently close to the veggie garden, so I can grow my runner beans up it. There are plum trees and apple trees and a white lamb and a brown one. It will be nice, I think.

What colour would you want to be, if you were a lounge in an open-plan area next to a kitchen in a cottage? We have to paint over a very bright green, and the only thing Helpdesk Man and I have come up with is cream, which is hardly going to set the Thames on fire. Thoughts? And does anyone know of any really nice posters based on either typography or classic literature, to go on the wall?

Also: tempest prognosticators. I want one.

Sewing for the snortlepig is more complicated than it was. I spent the past few days frantically finishing a summer dress for her Christmas present. I tried to be subtle about it, hiding the pattern and so on, but she’s no fool. Before I’d even sewn the bodice to the skirt, she said “Mummy, will my dress be finished at Christmas?” I said in a jolly tone, “You know, this might be a dress, but it might not. It’s a surprise, you won’t find out until Christmas”. There was a moment of tactful silence, and then she said “Mummy, will my dress be finished at Christmas?” I miss the days when I could be binding her quilt right in front of her face while she capered around going “Is it a skirt? Is it a pretty dress?”

Fortunately, it turned out pretty cutesome. And I even managed to get her messenger bag finished in time as well. It wasn’t quite all I’d hoped, but she likes it. In fact, she was pretty enamoured of all her gifts - and well she should be. Gran and Grandpa bought her a sand and water play table. Nana and Grandpa gave her a wooden magnetic ballerina with costumes, like a paper doll. Helpdesk Man and I gave her the summer dress and bag, a sweet wooden Noddy stool, and a complete set of Beatrix Potter books, as well as some craft supplies. Various other friends-and-relations contributed a Disney princess puzzle, Where the Wild Things Are, a lovely wooden Noah’s Ark, hair clips and sundry other items of delight.

Miles was less impressed with the socks and onesie the pig gave him, but liked the taste of his zebra. Christmas seemed to inspire him - he celebrated by eating an entire egg yolk, sitting up (albeit briefly) unassisted, and saying “Dada” on cue. He then went on to say “Dada” loudly and constantly while we were trying to watch things, and threw up all his egg yolk flamboyantly over the sheets, two pillows and his own head; but still.

It is now rather late on Boxing Day, and as usual after Christmas I am feeling twitchy and inspired. Today I forced Helpdesk Man to help me write out a list of 52 things we could do next year to make us Better People, which I then typed out, cut into strips and put in a jar. Then we sorted through both pigs’ old clothes, dropped two bags off at the op shop, swapped round the pig’s clothes baskets with Miles’ chest of drawers, baked a chocolate cake, cleaned the kitchen, did crafts with the pig, filled two boxes with paper and cardboard for recycling, and made a vague attempt at turning the pig’s old jeans into shorts (which failed, because Helpdesk Man couldn’t cut straight. I will fix them tomorrow, but they might be more Daisy Duke than originally intended). I also made a rough draft of my New Year’s Resolutions and finished a truly fascinating book called Who Wrote Shakespeare? - so, a good day.

Also, the other night the snortlepig met the nieces of Helpdesk Man’s best friend, and one of them was five. And they were all watching a nature documentary and a bunch of flamingos came on. And the five-year-old stared at them and said “Are those eagles?”, and the pig, who is normally coy and standoffish around other small children, said scornfully “No, they’re flingos“, thus establishing herself as the alpha female and inspiring a Helpdesk Man-and-Smokey-composed song to the tune of Copacabana, beginning “Her name was Lola/She was a flingo”. The pig is pretty awesome, really.

Also, I bought Helpdesk Man a steampunk Nerf gun, and he’s been stalking around shooting us with it ever since. When he shoots the pig, she looks affronted and says “Excuse me?”

Also, our car died.

Also, we will be moving house in slightly less than three weeks, and I still have to dig all the dirt from the raised beds into garbage bags and take them to the new house, and resow grass at the old one. And, I suppose, clean the oven. This will be the third time I’ve moved house since getting married, also the third time I have cleaned an oven. Then again, that is like, infinitely more often than I have killed a man.

Merry Christmas all! Or a moderately decent Solstice, because I am broad-minded, but not, you know, very.

My life at the moment is dominated by gardening. A motley collection of seventy-odd pots is lining my deck, and I have developed a routine of taking them to the new house once the seedlings have sprouted, planting said seedlings, tipping out the dirt into the new flowerbed, and returning the pots home to start the cycle again.

It’s fun. Sweet peas and sunflowers, which germinate quickly, are particularly gratifying. Nigella takes longer, but looks pleasingly feathery; gypsophila and dianthus have uninspiring seedlings, but will presumably pretty up later on. I’m not entirely sure my Californian Thai Silk poppies are planning to make an appearance at all.

Planting the garden is also fun, at least when I can do it in the cool of the day and Helpdesk Man is around to hold the baby. I am trying to follow the advice of the gardening books from the library and plant in drifts, but the assembly-line process of seed-raising has made things a little patchier than intended.

In fact, the more I read about garden design, the more I realise I am an utter gardening yokel. The writers of garden design books are a scathing bunch, and do not suffer folk like me. To start with, I should have aimed for three structural plants for every interest plant, and relied much more heavily on perennials. Good advice, if a bit late for this year, but I trotted off to the Warehouse and got six white geraniums, and took a few cuttings from some pink ones a friend had as well. Then in the next book I read, the author described geraniums as a “shapeless heap of leaves” - apparently they are the stretch pants and ill-fitting hoodies of the perennial world. So that was depressing.

Then in the next book, I learned that persons of true taste and refinement select only wild, heirloom-type plants, in which the flowers are in naturally-occurring proportion to the foliage, rather than modern bloom-smothered hybrids with doubled flowers. I like doubles, but apparently they are garish and bland, suitable only for redneck philistines who like “a lot of colour” in their gardens. Colour, it turns out, is the first pleasure of the vicious. True devotees of nature revel in textures, a combination of Spires and Umbels, and especially grasses. One whole book, the author just kept on bringing up grasses. Apparently wild grasses are “indispensable” to any garden – she waxed particularly lyrical about the kinds which all bend in the same direction in the wind, which gives Movement to the planting, because heaven forbid one’s planting just sits there. (I suppose that’s how triffids were originally marketed, though, and they did well.)

There’s more. One should not plant too many species - “rip out half your plants and double the rest”, is the advice, which I can see now is good, but I’m not about to follow it after all the time and money involved. One should not combine hues, tones and shades (which are all different things – who knew!), lest the planting be unbalanced. One should use native plants wherever possible. One should plant for year-round interest, so something is always in bloom or providing structural beauty due to seedheads or interesting branches. One should plant veily tall plants in front of others, so the viewer cannot see the entire garden at a glance. One should echo the architecture of the house in the design and materials of the garden bed edging. One should blend the garden in with the surrounding environment. One should use a colour wheel. One should choose one’s colour scheme based on the time of the day at which the garden will most often be seen (reds are bad in the evening, apparently). One should not over-use hot colours, especially in a small garden. One should divide one’s garden into “rooms”. One should always – or never, according to another author – have a large, plain section of lawn.

It’s fascinating, but somewhat intimidating. With this year’s selection of (horror) annuals only half planted, I’ve already started planning next year’s garden, which will be Better and Classier and More Mature. Lemon-yellow “Moonwalker” sunflowers, large drifts of English lavender (perennial, ha!), and something shortish and dusky pink at the front, interpersed with occasional ornamental alliums. Do you think?

In the mean time, I planted three rows of broccoli seedlings out. And the snortlepig, who was helping me, asked if she could “smulch” them. There are whole piles of smulch just lying around, presumably made from the corpses of apple trees. And today after we finished planting the piggie and I picked some forget-me-nots, little purple flowers and pretty feathery grasses to take home. There will be benefits to living in the country.

1. How can teddy bears still be “unawares” when they get attacked by bananas in pyjamas every freaking Tuesday? Isn’t that the sort of incident that might stick in one’s mind? Don’t you think after the fifth or sixth horrifying incident, one of them might say as he contemplated his own fluffy viscera, “Y’know, old sport, I’m beginning to think these attacks aren’t random”?

2. This is a portion of my small sister Ruth, along with some biscuits I made her. The photo was taken by my larger sister Betty Scandretti, because she knows how.

I’ll be interested to learn if she remembers us taking this photo. She wasn’t exactly firing on all cylinders at the time. Mostly just lay there, seeping. I don’t mean to criticise, but a true hostess would have made us a cup of something.

3. By popular demand, by which I mean, Trish asked me: here is a photo of the cake I made for the fiftieth wedding anniversary of the parents-in-law of a friend.

It has a slightly angsty history.

See, I had done a cake or so for the friend in question before, and as a result, she rashly trusted my judgment on the decoration front. “Whatever you like; I’m sure it will be lovely”, quoth she, and I, in a fit of sentiment, responded with “Was there a particular Bible verse or something they had at their wedding which I could pipe on the cake?”

Friend - Mrs K, I’ll call her, because she is, sort of - said “Ooh, that’ll be lovely” and went to find out. Apparently fifty years of marriage had destroyed both the orders of service and the memories of the bride and groom, so we never did learn which verse they had: but Mrs K still liked the idea, so decided to go with a bit from (brace yourselves) 1 Corinthians 13.

Which was all very well, except I couldn’t think of a way to decorate the cake, and now I’d locked myself in to covering much of it with a piped verse, which rather limited my options. So I masked the cake, and then sat and stared at it for a few hours. Eventually I hit on the idea of using more fondant to create a textured tone-on-tone picture of a little wee church-house on a hill, with a spreading tree and a path and a demure little bride and groom standing at the bottom, and then I could write the verse around the edge.

So I tried that, before remembering that I am too autistic to create credible representations of the human form. Every bride and groom I created looked like American Gothic crossed with Tim Burton’s idea of a Waldorf doll. It was unnerving. I toyed with the idea of merely suggesting the bridal pair with a dress and long gloves, and a suit and top hat, hovering in the air, and had actually gotten as far as cutting out the dress before I reluctantly acknowledged the idea was a bit too Picnic at Hanging Rock for a wedding anniversary. (It was rather late at night by this time, you understand.)

So in the end I thought: stow it all, I’ll just leave the bride and groom out altogether. Just have the church-house and hill and tree, and write the verse in the empty space on the sky and grass.

And thus I did. And it was pretty nice, I thought. But then, at about six minutes to midnight, as I stared tiredly down at the finished product, my fondant-addled brain went “One sec”. And I realised that sans bride and groom, the white church-house on its white hill with its white tree looked rather… well, stark. And “Love always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres” was suddenly seeming a tad more poignant than I intended.

In short, I had accidentally created in glorious ivory fondant a picture which tastefully suggested to the loving couple, “One of you has DIED”.

I tried to fix it. I got up early next morning and put some tiny hearts around the church - the kitsch factor was regrettable, but I hoped it might indicate that Joyful Events were Happening Within. It could have just indicated extreme religious fervour, though. And then I thought a couple of birdies might indicate spring and fertility and general canoodling, so I made one, and it turned out looking like a raven. I nearly decided to just go with it and make some vultures and a little fondant graveyard, but rallied and eventually produced two slightly less sinister birds. Then I waited with some trepidation for Mrs K.

Fortunately, she liked it. And apparently, so did her parents-in-law. I don’t know if they were all just being polite, or if the symbolism of the thing simply did not occur to them; but it was a great relief. Personally, I’m still not sure. But here is a (somewhat rubbish) photo, so you can decide for yourselves.

It is 16:51. At 17:00 a representative from Nosh will either ring to inform me I have won one of the categories of the pavlova competition… or not.

There’s a lot riding on this. I accidentally left the baking paper and red food colouring up in Auckland (we were icing cookies at the hospital), so I had to buy more this morning, as well as raspberries and some yoghurt to replace the stuff Helpdesk Man callously used up in a smoothie. Once you factor in three blocks of chocolate, seventeen eggs (’cause of the practice pavlovas) and a $10 thingy of vanilla paste, I’ll need at least a runner-up prize to break even.

Worse yet, we dropped off the pavlova today at the exact moment some reporters from Hamilton Press were having a slow news day. So the lady took a bunch of photos of me holding my pavlova aloft and beaming at a point beyond her shoulder (for the light - I know, seemed odd to me too); and the chap, who didn’t seem to be much of a culinary whiz, stared dubiously at the pavlova and said “So, did you use, like, a recipe?” and “How did you do those swirly things?”

Which is all very well. Fame comes naturally to me - I once served a chap at Rialto who I later heard was an All Black, and Harry Sinclair himself once gave me a dirty look. If I win, this will just be another gilded paving stone on my road to immortality. If I win.

If I don’t, they’ll probably select the most manic-looking photo of me and publish it with “LOSER” written underneath in 72-point type. And I’m not sure I could bear the shame.

17:01. Silence. Hmph.

17:05. Oh, come on. Seriously, people? There were raspberries stuffed with yoghurt and melted chocolate on that thing. I invented that. (Quite nice, in case you were wondering.)

17:09. Maybe the judges are still in paroxysms of delight over the beauteousness of my pavlova.

17:13. You know what? Nosh has an underwhelming selection of sharp cheese anyway. That’s right, I said it.

18:24. Well, I took the pigs and went to view the contestants, and it turns out I won runner-up for Best-Dressed Pavlova. A somewhat hollow victory, but I did get a nice basket of smeg out of it, containing (among other things) some rather nice olives and a fancy-looking bottle of olive oil, which pleases me. In the interests of Class I shall refrain from muttering about my competitors. Nosh really does need to get more tasty cheese in, though.

1. At this very moment, as we speak, my large, smallish sister is being laid open on a gurney, having bits of her spine chipped off and packed back in and augmented with metal rods and whacked back into shape, in order to render her less wonky. She asked them to take photos. I want to be that awesome when I grow up.

2. The pig and I have made cinnamon salt dough cookies to go on the Christmas tree. We brushed some of them with gold powder, and iced the others with white icing.

3. I am in the throes of creative angst. This Friday I am entering a pavlova competition at Nosh, a gourmet food store which sells unpasteurised cheese and strawberry balsamic vinegar, and other items too classy to come within a mile of our fair city, until now. The prize is Nosh vouchers, and a fair chunk of them too: so I am determined to win.

There’s only one slight problem: while I can churn a mean batch of sorbet and poach an egg without breaking a blood vessel in my eye, I’m not much of a pavlovier. I made a nice one a while back, but I can’t remember how I did it. And with Nosh vouchers at stake, I can’t risk presenting the judges with a mere white-on-white, strawberries-and-passionfruit monstrosity like eveyone else. My pavlova has to speak. To sing. To dance, if you will. To fly, to swirl, to plummet, to skim the moon-limned clouds of glory and come back to rest feather-light like a dove on an unsuspecting beetle, &c.

So last night I started experimenting. Pavlova 1.0 - theoretically a mocha pavlova with coffee-infused cream and the potential for adding hazelnuts later - was something of a disaster. Too much cream of tartar, cornflour and vinegar, and not nearly tall enough. Plus, interesting fact? If you heat cream and infuse coffee into it, it won’t whip no more. I’ll turn it into panna cotta, so it’s no great loss, but still.

Nothing daunted, I am preparing Pavlova 2.0 for dessert tonight. This one will be pink (potential pitfall: browning in oven. Maybe I should omit the initial 10-minute high-temperature in favour of preheating it high and then cooking it for longer at a lower temperature); covered in chocolate curls and strawberries (raspberries for the real deal, but they’re expensive), and possibly dusted with gold. A girly pavlova. I need to find a big star-shaped nozzle for the cream, though. Would rosewater be a pleasing addition? No, possibly not. And I’ll need to put the dehumidifier on - this is the worst pavlova weather ever (although at least all the other contestants will face the same problem).

4. Today the pigs and I went to a hangi at Playcentre, except we were the only ones who showed up. I think it was an elaborate plot to scam me out of my contributory pumpkin - which was not cheap, let me add. $3.99 a kilo is very different to $3.99 a pumpkin, but I didn’t want to disappoint the nice grocer lady.

5. I am becoming quite the gardener. (Gardeness?) Our soon-to-be new landlord rototilled me two enormous patches of dirt for veggies, and there’s also a huge flower bed out the front of the cottage. So for the past few weeks I have been dragging Helpdesk Man and the piggies out to the new house to plant, water and mulch my tiny seedlings.

During this process I have learned a very important lesson: no matter how many dozens of pots you have on the deck, and how many trillions of seedlings you think you’ve planted, a really decent-sized plot of earth will take about four times the quantity you have.

So in an insignificant section of the flower bed I’ve planted nigella, sweet peas, echium, cornflowers, snapdragons and a few other punnets’-worth of flowers I can’t even name; and I have fifty pots on the deck containing seedlings for sunflowers, Canterbury bells, dianthus and poppies.  But that still won’t be enough… which is super, actually, as it justifies my new impulse purchase habit. Seeds. $2.99 a pop and very fulfilling. I got clary sage, gypsophila and dwarf sweet peas last time I was at the supermarket, and I plan to sneak off to the Warehouse today to buy more. And for the first time in my gardening career, I’ve actually used up an entire packet of seeds at one go (partly because they’re stingy with sweet peas, but still). It feels marvellously profligate. I even borrowed some rooting hormone from a friend and am trying to grow geraniums and roses from cuttings.

[Later]

1. Sister is out of surgery - apparently minus a good dollop of blood, but still in the land of the living.

3. Pavlova 2.0 refused to crisp up on the outside, but was pleasingly shmallowy and a tasteful shade of pink. With some minor modifications, it should be suitable.

5. White geraniums, dwarf lobelias and a perennial petunia. Or was it a primrose? Pink and bushy. Miles disgraced himself by ripping off half the plant when I wasn’t looking, and then beaming gummily. Probably my fault for letting him fight trees when he’s bored.