Cultural convergence

Wherever in the world you live - different countries, different continents - few experiences can instantly unite two seven-year-olds better than the chance to peer down a medieval castle toilet.

When I was young, the craze at school was for having a penpal abroad. You would fill in your details on tiny little forms, and within weeks you'd have received a letter from a strange foreign child with whom you had absolutely nothing in common.

All the ridiculously high hopes I had as a child, filling in those forms, have been answered so many years later by blogging. This week we met the Speechless family for an unbelievably lovely day touring a castle and walking in the sunshine. The adults talked about everything under the sun; the children threw stones in a stream, got their feet wet, played with gravel and brandished sticks.

Tess was right. That my blogging friendships can also give my children such joy is incredibly precious. No filling in forms for Littlest - no letters from strangers. She's from the Skype generation. She's planning video clips, online conversations. The world is getting smaller, and I'm all for it.

Rise and shine

It's been a long time since I moaned to you about how difficult breakfast-time can be in the Coffee House, and I'm sure you've missed my rants immensely. Last week was a breeze - SATS exams meant that for three days out of five, Eldest went early to school for a special pre-test breakfast, leaving me free to serve Littlest her endless rounds of toast. (Those Hobbits wanting their second breakfast? Littlest makes them look like amateurs.)

Recently Kellogg's sent us some of their Mini Max cereal to try. A new cereal, it claims to be low in salt, high in fibre and wholegrain and have less sugar than many other popular kid’s cereals. I checked, and it has 18g of sugars per 100g - not bad when you consider that even Bran Flakes have 20g, and Coco Pops a whopping 35g. And it looks pretty, which made the Lattes think they were getting a big treat after weeks of Rice Krispies and a box of Weetabix knock-offs from Lidl. Mini Max got a big thumbs up from the Lattes, who were even happy to eat it at weekends (weekends are traditionally the time when we cave in and give them chocolate cereal in order to have a minute's peace).

Kellogg's didn't stint on the cereal - they sent us quite a few boxes. It seemed greedy to pile them all up, so we gave half away to the school's breakfast club (Littlest was very angry about this move) who reported that the children at the club thought they were delicious. This is where we would pause to admire the handmade Thank You card that the children at the breakfast club made for us - except that the card was given to Eldest, who is not the most reliable of messengers and who had lost it before the end of the school day.

(This is where the famous plea 'Don't shoot the messenger' begins to make sense to me.)

Since we're talking about breakfast and free stuff sent to me which I was supposed to review and then never got around to, it seems like a good idea to send a vote of thanks to Douwe Egberts, who made a big difference to Team Coffee when they sent an entire boxful of ground coffee just before Eldest's surgery last winter. (Last winter! I know! Not only is time flying by, but I'm failing to keep up!)

We worked our way through the whole range - House Blend, Time Together, Café Milano, Flavourful Decaff, Morning Americano, and Fired Up. (In truth, I gave away the decaff to another mother on the ward. She seemed very pleased with it, but I have never seen the point of decaffeinated coffee. If you don't want caffeine, to my mind, you should just drink wine.)

Our favourites were Morning Americano, with a strength of 5, which worked equally well black or in my ridiculously milky lattes - and Time Together, (strength 4) which I took with me for the first - and worst - week of the hospital stay. And I'll say this - if a coffee can be made fresh, then left in a plastic lidded tumbler for an hour whilst you conduct an indepth conversation with a physiotherapist/ consultant/ nurse/ hospital dinner lady before warming it up via a blast in a 1500w industrial microwave and it still tastes good, then that is a very, very good coffee indeed.

Living the dream

So. I thought things were going pretty well, till I went into the Barnados shop and came out with three self-help books. I never buy self-help books. But I waltzed straight past the racks of clothes and found myself overcome with a previously buried urge to lose weight, become happier, and Close the Gap between myself and my Ideal Life.

One of the self-help books I didn't buy had huge spaces in which you could fill in answers. As I browsed, I realised I didn't actually have any answers to fill in. What was holding me back? How could I achieve my dreams? Difficult nuts to crack, especially if by 'my dreams' you mean 'finish painting the back wall' and 'mow the lawn'.

There have been some changes here: some unavoidable, some to be welcomed. Less paid work for me; extra help from a lovely lady who comes to spend time with Eldest. The house has started to look like a home rather than a place where we throw things dejectedly on the floor before sitting down with our heads in our hands.

But all this released pressure and contentment and extra time has left me rudderless. The advantage of being a headless chicken is not having anything to ponder with - no head to wonder where you are going. The other day I heard Tim Minchin on Desert Island Discs talking about how ridiculous the idea of eternal paradise after death seemed when people already couldn't work out what to do with their Saturday afternoons.  And though I don't wish to deny anyone their dreams of paradise, I'm having much the same problem with my Thursday mornings.

(Tiredness doesn't help. In addition to our regular middle-of-the-night appointments with Eldest's orthotic legwear, Littlest has decided that now is the time to start waking up a full hour-and-a-half early, and shouting the house down with demands for toast. Yesterday at 8am, for want of anything better to do, the two of us were fully dressed and breakfasted and doing Zumba. Combined with going back to my Ashtanga yoga DVD the other night, today I find myself having difficulty moving my arms.)

So. Today I am baking a birthday cake, reading my self-help books and - by the looks of the rain outside the window - definitely not mowing a lawn. And I'm wondering, how do you even come up with the dreams you're supposed to be dreaming?

Eating the elephant

May is traditionally the month where I begin to feel an overwhelming sense of hopelessness about my garden. On a rare sunny day in March, Littlest and I usually plant things, channelling our inner Mr Bloom; and we water them and care for them and wait with bated breath for their arrival.

By May it is clear that none of them are going to grow. The spring onions - last year's sole success - have refused to play out at all this year, and the salad leaves I sprinkled boldly into a strawberry pot on the advice of a vegetable gardener are nowhere to be seen. Some pea plants have grown a centimetre tall, but they will not be joined in their stab at life by the neighbouring tomatoes. Or even the sunflowers. And this year, we have absolutely not even attempted any carrots.

Our garden is entered via a ramp and concreted area with walls which are turning green with moss. And not in a pretty, rambling countryside kind of way. They're doing it in a 'let this carry on, and all the rendering will fall right off' kind of way.

We're growing weeds. And bamboo - invasive, huge, waving, threatening bamboo, rampaging wildly in a head-height border at the side of the ramp. It looms over us as we enter, rustling its leaves ominously.

In Blogland, the world is filled with colourful flowers, but my garden resists them. All except two tulip bulbs, which have sprouted up merrily from the same pot that houses my inexplicably dying blueberry bush. I can't tell you why they did this. I didn't put them there. These tulips are even more interesting because the gazillions of tulips that I did plant a couple of years ago in a border nearby have never even bothered coming up.

My patio pot cherry tree leans queasily to one side.

The lawn can be described in one syllable - peh.

It would be easy to become completely dejected. But yesterday I took advantage of a brief sunny spell to de-moss and paint several metres of wall. Just a small start. It's all about eating the elephant, I've decided. You do it in little chunks.

Because let's face it, it looks like elephant is the only thing we'll be eating from our garden this year. Elephant, and possibly a few peas.

What about you? Are you eating any elephants this year?

The big freeze

I always thought you had to have a fancy machine to make ice-cream. Or stir it every five minutes. Or faff in some other, unspecified, way. And since cooking, for me, has to be combined with filling in forms and answering the phone and asking Littlest to stop climbing up the damn bookshelves, I don't really go in much for faff. (I'm using 'faff' in accordance with the British definition, having discovered recently on Pinterest that it's easy to misunderstand. A poor woman got very insulted by my comment on her pin because apparently in Australia, 'faff' means 'rubbish', whereas here it means 'too much effort for me to be bothered with'. Luckily bloggers are very reasonable, and we all parted friends.)

The other week I bought a Tana Ramsay cookbook, and though I'm not sold on every recipe (some of them involve insane quantities of ingredients such as a full kilogram of frozen peas or 250g of parmesan) we did rather like the look of the mint and chocolate ice-cream. And since fresh mint is the only herb that doesn't die horribly on my windowsill, we were already partway there.

Here's what you do. You put half a pint of milk into a pan, and heat until just boiling. Beat together three egg yolks and 125g of sugar (see how I veer wildly between metric and imperial here. I'm a woman trapped between two generations) and then whisk in the hot milk. Then, transfer the mix back to the pan and stir until it has 'thickened slightly and coats the back of a spoon'. Or, you could do as I did, and leave it heating for absolutely ages whilst cooking a spaghetti bolognese, and lose all hope of it ever thickening, and then accidentally bring it to a slight boil when you weren't looking and whip it off the heat smartish. This approach works too, though it's probably not for the purists.

Leave it to cool, and then gently mix in half a pint of softly whipped double cream. Throw a handful of chopped fresh mint into it and put it in a tub in the freezer.

After approximately three hours (or, again, to use my method, just when you are dropping off to sleep and have forgotten all about it and have to get up and stub your toe in the dark) give it a good stir and then put it back to freeze solid.

Eat with melted chocolate drizzled over it. It's gorgeous! It's really minty and natural-tasting, so much so that it could almost convince you that it's healthy, even though it is just a big bowl of double cream with some flecks of greenery added.

We costed it out, and it also comes in cheaper to make than the ice-cream I occasionally find falling inexplicably into my trolley when I'm in Lidl.

I got so excited that I immediately followed up with my own strawberry and vanilla version, making the same custard but with some vanilla extract added, and stirring in some chopped strawberries. Now, it's highly probable that every single one of you could have told me this beforehand, but this didn't work at all. What I got was frozen shards of strawberry-flavoured pain, surrounded by what would otherwise have been a perfectly delicious vanilla icecream. You live and learn, at least.

To the lifeboats

I'll be honest with you. My mental health at present is not what it could be.

Luckily, the cupboards are not bare of inspiration this Easter. My ambitions for the holiday were simple:

1. to stay afloat.
2. to make some kind of a dent in the stock of craft kits we managed to amass over Christmas and a couple of birthdays.
3. to keep up with Eldest's programme of intensive physiotherapy - no mean feat without the back-up of school and its fantastic army of Teaching Assistants.
4. to stay afloat.

The scale model of the Titanic is presented to you with no sense of irony.

Still. We have made it to the Easter weekend, and whilst we may not be emotionally intact, no-one has been (seriously) hurt.

We've painted. We've stuck. We've made ice-cream.

Bank Holidays bring reinforcements, in the form of Mr Coffee. "Fresh legs", as they say in football.

A series of smiles begin to peek through.

Signs of spring

You can keep your cherry blossom. Yours is lovely - and yours - but still.

For me, the most glorious sign of Spring is the huge space in my bathroom where the clothes airer has been standing since Autumn.

Hello, old friend.