He even uses it in context. “Aww, aren’t you cute?” “Ndee!” “Are you talking to me like a clever boy?” “Ndee!” “Would you like some milks?” “NDEED!”

He is a pleasing child.

2. Miles has also taken up a sport. It is called Squelchy Belching, and he is its champion.

3. Tonight we had a housewarming, for no good reason. Most of the attendees had already visited the house, and we (sadly) had no major milestone to celebrate, like finishing the painting or unpacking all the boxes; but we had it all the same. Sadly the canister from the ice cream churn went AWOL, so the ice cream sandwiches turned into cookies dipped in chocolate and yoghurt; but worse things can befall a shindig. (Zombies, dysentery, demon possession, plague of bees… I don’t know. I don’t get invited to many parties.)

Anyway, as it does as such gatherings, the question came up: would you rather wear a burqa for the rest of your life, or go naked? (One vote each way with one abstention, all females.) Thoughts?

2. We are Moved In. More or less. Blimey. Words cannot describe. Moving house seems to be more of a major production every time we do it. Helpdesk Man and I have solemnly agreed not to move again until we wax rich and we can build our dream homestead/castle/commune out in the country.

As it now stands, the kitchen, living room and pig’s bedroom, are all nearly painted, and the hallway is partly painted. Nothing is entirely painted, a state of affairs we must remedy soon, before we get used to it and leave it masking-taped and blotchy for the next ten years. Still, the house looks vastly better. One small section of skirting board in the living room is still its original green, and it catches the eye something fierce as soon as you walk in the door. A whole room of it would probably have made Helpdesk Man run amok in a matter of days.

Speaking of running amok, this is the ideal place for it. We went on a recon mish the other day and snooped round the orchard. Not only is it far bigger than I had imagined… it is awesome. We kept coming across odder and odder things - a decomposing shed with a decomposing dinghy and kayak inside, a stagnant lake with a hide, a delightfully eerie sawmill, steampunky rusted contraptions of unknown purpose, with valves and dials and levers, skulking under apple trees; a small flock of rosellas; a creek with waterfalls; an abandoned van that looks like it belonged to the Lone Gunmen; and a bright red telephone box, falling apart in the middle of a field. The whole place is just begging to be used as the location for a gritty Kiwi film about hillbillies, zombies, raptors or (ideally) all three. And there’s convolvulus.

3. The wildlife here is equally fascinating. In addition to the rosellas and the resident sheep, we have discovered a kingfisher, a bird of unusual design dubbed Dennis the Quail-Bird, a hedgehog called Hapless, a rat named Howard Harley (the pig named him - I dunno), a creature called Mighty Mandible Moth, which bit Helpdesk Man when he tried to evict it, and a large spider which builds beautiful orb webs on the porch every night. At least, she used to; her latest few efforts have been a bit patchy. I think she lost the will to create after we accidentally destroyed her web for the fourth time, walking through it.

There have also been two slugs, but we shall not speak of those - they give Helpdesk Man the heeby-jeebies. And looking out the window, I see there is a cockroach on the porch. One moment while I bellow for the man of the house.

4. You should see the pig’s room. It is pretty neat. The pink and cream stripy wall pleases me more every time I look at it. I found an old round mirror I bought ages ago off TradeMe (only to have Helpdesk Man take one look at it and say “Ew… you bought that?”, whereupon I shoved it in the shed for two years) and covered the frame with cream ruffles. Then I covered a Styrofoam ball with folded circles of pink satiny fabric, to make a ruffly ball thing, and hung it above the pig’s bed on a ribbon. Sophisticated as hell. I’m going to do more of them, in cream satin and lace net, but the first one took a lot out of me - I had to cut out 116 pink circles, traced around a mug. The whole thing took two days. Still, it pleases me. And when I’ve covered the pig’s corkboard in green floral fabric, and made cream curtains with four layers of ruffles at the bottom, the second-bottom-most being pink, and found some vintage knobs to use as curtain tiebacks, and bought and distressed a desk and bookshelves, and made a teepee with thick dowelling, and finished the pig’s summer quilt, and put a cream ruffle around her mini-trampoline, and replaced the light shade, and made a nightlight… well, it will be the cutest wee room you ever did see. And then I shall take photos.

5. The garden is growing apace. We’ve been eating zucchini ever since we got here; we missed one, and it is now the size of Miles. I’m torn between leaving it, just to see how big it can go, or harvesting it before it gets too watery and making a bunch of zucchini loaf or soup or something. And I harvested a colander-full of basil the other day (the colander was lying around the back yard, being awesome) and made pesto. So there.

6. We have a wedding to go to on Saturday. Do I have anything to wear? No, I do not. Neither does Miles, but I’m making him a sweet Ottobre outfit - pants, a button-up shirt and a cute little short vest. We went shopping yesterday and I tried on five dresses, and fell into a deep depression for the rest of the afternoon.

7. Our internet, as the cunning among you will have surmised, is back up. This took some doing. Helpdesk Man threatened Xnet with litigation. Handy tip: it worked. Being without the internet, daily trips to my parents’ to check emails notwithstanding, was actually rather pleasant. I pulled weeds out of the front lawn and everything.

That said, I am now going to read a week’s worth of XKCD. Excuse me.

“A quick coat of paint.”

There’s this insidious myth that painting is a swift and easy panacea. “Quick lick of paint, she’ll be right.” “Nothing wrong with that house that a quick coat of paint won’t fix.” “Lovely well-made piece, just needs a drop of paint.”

It is LIES. Helpdesk Man, myself and my stalwart younger sister have been painting portions of our new house for three days straight - three rooms, to be precise. None of these rooms is entirely finished. Either we’re doing it horribly, horribly wrong, or Big Pigment has some kind of stranglehold over the media. For the record: painting is a mammoth, horrific undertaking. Perhaps it’s quick compared to putting up wallpaper, a particular form of torture I vaguely remember Mother engaging in during my childhood; but that’s a little like saying World War One was “the nice short one”.

And the indignity of it is, one spends so little time painting. Most of it’s preparation and cleanup - laying drop cloths*, hunting for the masking tape, washing out the rollers - and, in our case, passing back and forth a baby who is beaming and contented, but nevertheless undeniably there. Naturally it is important to mask one’s windowsills off accurately, but I always feel a bit impatient with the non-roller-wielding parts; just as I get peeved with the non-stitching parts of sewing (ie. the vast majority), and the non-seed-planting parts of gardening (also the vast majority).

Anyway, it is Getting There. The kitchen is a vaguely French dull yellow, of which Helpdesk Man and I are very proud because we conquered much Aspieness in choosing it. The living room is cream with a feature wall in a kind of purply blue, which we’re not entirely sure about, but it is a vast improvement on the previous hue - a rather lurid green which at the time of writing is still present on the skirting boards, shocking us whenever we look at it. Then the pig’s room is cream as well, with a dusky pink for the wardrobe doors and - thank you, Pinterest - wide vertical stripes on one wall. These are pretty neat, even though I was envisaging a sort of muted, dusky Victorian look and instead got an aggressively cheerful candy shop. Still, we feel skilly, and our enthusiasm was only slightly dampened when the landlord, upon being asked for his opinion of our colour scheme, grunted “Oh well, you’re the ones who’ll have to live with it.” (Well, my enthusiasm was slightly dampened. Helpdesk Man suffers from very little self-doubt, and immediately concluded that said landlord must be colour-blind.)

Oh, smeg. It is nearly midnight. I have to get up early tomorrow to paint again while the chaps load up the truck. My clothes aren’t packed. There is undoubtedly some awful evidence of my slovenly housekeeping hiding behind the fridge or under the couch, ready to shock the nice man from church who offered to help us move. I packed the peanut butter and can’t find it. One of my hand-written cookbooks is missing. The Christmas tree is still standing, half-decorated, in the corner of the lounge. I am covered in paint, but don’t know where the towels are. The freezer is defrosting itself all over the kitchen floor, because I couldn’t face it. Two of our ex-flatmate’s socks were welded to the bathroom floor behind the washing machine. Helpdesk Man hasn’t even started packing up his office.

I am going to bed.

*Helpdesk Man insisted on calling them “throw rugs” for a while; now he’s taken to calling them “drop bears”. They all have holes in strategic places.

Anyway, the Internet being the vasty and inscrutable place it is, some bod got it into her (certainly “her”) head to find photos of Mr Gosling and caption them… thusly. (Yes, I couldn’t resize the photos. I’m not… Wonder Woman. Scroll across, it’ll be fine.)

Or:

There’s a whole website of them. And they make me go “heh”; while at the same time, driving the point sadly home that Helpdesk Man (and indeed, surely all actual men) is unlikely to ever truly appreciate the difference between a store-bought duvet cover and a lovingly handcrafted one, or feel genuinely buoyed upon putting his mugs in a cupboard ModPodged with scrapbooking paper. This is OK. One can and, according to feminists, should do these things for one’s own satisfaction and fulfilment; but one should not endeavor to shoehorn them into the Good Wife category, any more than Helpdesk Man should claim that his proficiency at double-tapping virtual alien hordes makes him a Better Husband; because in fact, though I would like to feel crafting is vaguely morally superior, our hobbies are probably about equally as relevant to each other’s happiness (ie, neutral at best, and an irritating waste of time in less cheerful moments).

But he lets me do it, and does not complain when I spend ghastly sums on quilting cotton; and I watched the pigs for three days while he was at a LAN this week. So we tick along. And I have finished all 25 of the nine-patches for the snortlepig’s summer quilt. It was supposed to be 21, but by the time I got around to counting I’d already done 22, so I just decided to tack another row down the side and make it a square seven-by-seven, instead of a seven-by-six. The proportions are unlikely to correspond to any standard bed size, but the pig’s toddler bed isn’t standard anyway - it was handmade by someone’s grandfather, and we got it off TradeMe - and anyway, when she gets big enough for a real bed I can make her a new quilt, and this one can be a lap quilt.

The nine-patches were surprisingly successful. My usual method with quilting is to be careful and precise for the first ten minutes of every session, then go “Ach, she’ll be right” and fling needles and rotary cutters wildly about, with the result that my corners don’t match up and I spent the last half of the project wondering what I was thinking. I thought for many years that when I asked my mother (who is an excellent quiltress) the secret and she said “Oh, you have to be very accurate and careful” that she was holding out on me. It turns out, though, that when you actually do it it works. Who knew. I wouldn’t exactly call my nine-patches the apex of the craft, but I could show them in public without blushing, and that is a great improvement.

Heh. Heheh. (Look, it beats “Keep Calm and Carry On”, alright? Those are just getting ridiculous. People aren’t even trying. The Hermione “Keep Calm and Marry Ron” was kind of funny, but “Keep Calm and Have Coffee”, with the whole font? Please. Let it die.)

*Squafts is what the pig calls crafts. She also refers to skydiving as (the infinitely more awesome) “skyfighting”, and the Star-Spangled Man anthem from Captain America as the Speckled Man song. It is an awesome song, incidentally - Mother, you would like it. Here it is:

]]> http://smokeythemagnificent.com/2012/01/07/squafts/feed/ http://smokeythemagnificent.com/2012/01/07/my-tiny-panna-cotta/ http://smokeythemagnificent.com/2012/01/07/my-tiny-panna-cotta/#comments Fri, 06 Jan 2012 22:04:26 +0000 smokering http://smokeythemagnificent.com/?p=1204 Today the pigs and I were chillin’, and Tiny Miles let out a belch to wake the dead. The pig had been jumping about, not paying attention, but stopped and said “What was that, a growl?”

“It was a huge boip,” I said.

The pig started jumping again and said with satisfaction, “It was MIRACULOUS huge!”

So anyhoo, yup, that was awesome. Also, it is now 2012, an uncannily futuristic date. And this year I shall be 26. Soon I shall be dead, And Tiny Miles will be one, which is just absurd.

I celebrated New Year’s Eve with a shindig, at which I served ice cream sandwiches and won a game of poker. My method for success is to sit out most of the hands in order to milks Miles to sleep, thus preventing myself from frittering away chips; and then to come back and go all in on a straight. I recommend it. Sadly, everybody left the party at 11:30, and the pig woke up at midnight having flashbacks to ‘Nam from the fireworks, so it wasn’t a terribly auspicious beginning to January.

Nevertheless, I am full of new-yearly vim and resolution. I started piecing an Irish chain quilt of the pig’s, the fabric for which I bought two years ago. I made resolutions in a nifty list. I bought a diary (after the New Year, for the discount, though it pained my soul to wait) and filled it with reminders about church lunch, birthdays and the need to pull weeds out of the garden. I joined a challenge online to complete 52 crafting projects. I bought a new dress, in order to swish through 2012 chicly instead of slobbing around in an ex-maternity tunic that doesn’t allow me to breastfeed in public. (On second thoughts, I should probably have bought two dresses. I am extremely short on clothes.) I chose a colour scheme for our new interior walls in two seconds flat with Helpdesk Man, although I am now having second thoughts. Colour is not my strong point.

Also: we watched Green Lantern. My word. It was awful. Usually halfway through a terrible movie I can relax into a resigned torpor and just go with it, but not this time. Even five minutes from the end, I was casting longing glances at my sewing machine. It was almost as boring as this one time Helpdesk Man bought cable ties.

Also, I have discovered a new principle of life: there is no foodstuff which cannot be used as a term of endearment for one’s baby. Helpdesk Man and I have been testing it out, and it’s utterly true. Miles is my wee pumpkin muffin, my tikka masala, my little pierogi, my wee scrap of biltong, my fat wee haggis, my little can of beetroop, my schmear of cream cheese upon a bagel, my little stack of hotcakes, my fat moussaka, my wee chipolata sausage, my tiny crock of kraut, my suet duff, my little dob of wasabi, my boysenberry, my snickerdoodle, my little TV dinner, my hybrid tomato, my little garlic naan… I could go on. I defy any of you to come up with a foodstuff that doesn’t work. Venison pasties? Pan-fried dumplings? Carpaccio? Sashimi? See? It just cannot be done. Gape with awe.

.

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.

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.

]]> http://smokeythemagnificent.com/2011/12/28/leeches/feed/ http://smokeythemagnificent.com/2011/12/26/christmas-2/ http://smokeythemagnificent.com/2011/12/26/christmas-2/#comments Mon, 26 Dec 2011 10:22:14 +0000 smokering http://smokeythemagnificent.com/?p=1191 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.

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.

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.