Slow Summer Days

Embracing the ordinary

Hello. It’s been a while, much longer than I anticipated and for that I apologise. I found myself getting a little bit down about life, with the constant noise from social media and the dramatic, fear mongering media headlines. I know that the best thing I can do when I feel like this is to extract myself from the online world, and instead pay more attention to the small things that make me happy. I find joy in baking, reading, riding my bike through the forest, growing things and spending time in nature. So here is how I’ve been embracing simple, ordinary things this summer.

I returned to my pottery class, and even though I’m still not very good at making ceramics, I love the process. It’s a hand-building class, focusing on slab, coil and pinching techniques. This time I made a carved succulent planter, a bottle vase, a wavy edged bowl and a flower frog (pictured above). I love smoothing and shaping the clay, it’s so calming. You don’t think about anything else really, your mind simply focuses on the movement of your fingers back and forth, back and forth, until you feel satisfied with the shape or texture. This time, we had the opportunity to have a go on the potter’s wheel which was just so much fun, and I’ve definitely got the ceramics bug. I’m enjoying it so much that I’ve signed up for the intensive wheel throwing course in early Autumn.

The ceramics studio is located in the Crichton Estate, which has beautiful gardens, cafes and a wellbeing centre. After each pottery class, I would meet my husband in the gardens. He would bring us a packed lunch to eat and we would sit on a bench together enjoying the warmth of the sun on our faces and participate in a little Komorebi* time. I loved watching the camellia blossom heads falling into the upper pond, before gently bobbing down the tiny waterfall into the larger pond. Nature is beautiful.

*Komorebi is Japanese and means sunlight filtering through the leaves of trees.

I’ve been reading a lot. The slow reading group I joined back in January continues on Substack and we’ve finished Wolf Hall and are now on the final pages of the second part of the trilogy, ‘Bring up the Bodies’. I have thoroughly enjoyed reading the books this way, studying the history and the characters in a lot more detail. Every afternoon, come rain or shine, I head to our summerhouse in the garden and read a few pages.

However, I have pressed pause on my challenge to read the Women’s Prize for Fiction winners, because in all honesty, I didn’t enjoy several of the winning books. I’ll aim to go back to it later in the year.

I’ve read some brilliant books these past couple of months that I wanted to share with you here. First up is ‘Yellowface’ by Rebecca P Kuang which I’m about 3/4 of the way through. It’s the tale of a young struggling author and her friendship with a more successful writer. When the friend dies in front of her, the protagonist steals the unfinished manuscript the other writer is working on, and then passes it off as her own, and it becomes a huge hit. But it’s not long before her secret is uncovered by an unlikely source. Yellowface is a great read, and a good insight into both the world of publishing and toxic fandom.

My favourite recent read has been ‘Broken Light’ by Joanne Harris. I’m a huge fan of Joanne’s work, and in particular the St.Oswald’s series, rather than the more well known ‘Chocolat’ books. ‘Broken Light’ is about a menopausal woman who suddenly has the power to control other people’s behaviour and thoughts. It’s a fantastic book that I could not put down, and I urge you to pick up a copy.

I also picked up ‘Enter Ghost’ by Isabella Hamad, which was shortlisted for this year’s Women’s Prize. It’s an interesting, thoughtful and at times tricky read as it’s about a theatre company putting on a performance of Hamlet in Palestine. It is a beautifully written book and well deserving of making the shortlist.

I also thoroughly enjoyed ‘Fifteen Wild Decembers’ by Karen Powell, a fictional account of the Bronte sisters life, seen through the eyes of Emily. It’s a wonderful book, and made me miss visiting the wild moors that surround Haworth, a place we visited often when we lived in Yorkshire. Curtis Sittenfeld’s novel ‘Romantic Comedy’ is fun and easy to read, and is the perfect book for summer days. Eliza Clark’s ‘Penance’ is the complete opposite, as it’s a dark, difficult tale about teenager girls who murder another teenager and it is set in a seedy, oppressive seaside town on the North Yorkshire coast.

In the house we have finally finished painting the living room. The cornicing had been covered with some sort of vinyl sticky paint and although we tried to peel it off, it simply wouldn’t budge and we had to just cover it up with primer and emulsion. It took seven coats to cover the black colour. The walls needed a lot of patching up and repairing before we could paint them, but they are complete. We still need to paint the woodwork, take up the awful carpet and see what horrors lie beneath. Hopefully, there will be some original floorboards, although knowing all the botch DIY that has been done to this house over the years, I suspect it will be a much bigger job and more expensive that we imagined. I’ll share more on the living room soon.

In the dining room, I treated myself to a couple of pieces to help with storage. The first is the Scandi conical basket to hold natural firelighters, and the second was this green vintage enamel bread bin. Both are from Alice in Scandiland. I really like this corner with easy access to cookbooks and crafting titles, and it’s nice to see everything on display as we have a lot more space here than we did in Leeds.

In the garden, I sowed a few seeds for the new raised beds we built. I’m only growing cut flowers rather than vegetables, as I prefer to support our local greengrocer by shopping there every week. This year I’m keeping things simple and growing sweet peas, cosmos and ammi majus. I sowed the seeds late as we didn’t get the raised beds made early enough for transplanting the seedlings, but they are slowly getting bigger. They may never flower though with the lack of sunshine here this summer.

I’ll share more on our garden soon as we’ve made some good progress. You can read my old post ‘Bringing a garden back to life’ if you are interested in seeing what we did last summer. I’ve bought a few plants and ornamental grasses to start off my perennial bed, and it’s so lovely seeing green shoots poking through the soil and flowers gently blooming. So far I’ve planted alliums, a geum, a clematis, echinacea palida, verbena bonnariensis, cephalaria gigantea and two roses from David Austin - one a climber, ‘Clare Austin’, the other a shrub rose, ‘Emily Bronte’, a little nod to Yorkshire.

The birds (along with the neighbour’s cat!) are loving the garden too, and I have blackbirds, collared doves, house sparrows, blue tits, coal tits, chaffinches, sisken, goldfinches and most recently, a song thrush. I have never had so many birds in a garden before, it’s wonderful.

It’s exciting to see the baby birds arrive too, and we’ve caught little glimpses of a baby robin eyeing up the bird table and we’ve been hand feeding an orphaned baby blackbird, who thankfully is making good progress. He runs over to the kitchen door each morning for some suet and mealworm, then spends most of the day looking for bugs in the bark, or popping into my neighbour’s garden to look for worms. We were worried he couldn’t fly, but he has started to make short flights up to the fence and the hedges. Look closely under the picture of the water bowl above and you’ll spot him hiding. It’s wonderful to spend time in the morning just drinking a cup of coffee and watching the birds feed. Last year this garden was a desolate grey space, with nature nowhere to be seen.

In the kitchen, we’ve been making lots of nice things using this lovely vegan cookbook called ‘Joyfull’ that I found in our local bookshop. We’ve loved the Walnut-Lentil bolognese recipe, the sweet potato, cauliflower, green bean and cashew curry as well as the chilled soba noodle salad with sambal dressing. If you are needing some inspiration for cooking, this is a great book to have at hand.

And that’s all for now. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading. Jen x