Swing cardigan

Originally uploaded by Sladey

Yay! I actually finished something. This has taken months. I was worried it wouldn’t even fit Charlie any more, but it does. Just. And she likes it, which is more than we could say for the last thing I knitted her.

Despite having a proper kosher knitting satchel now, any project that finds its way into the satchel usually ends up mouldering in the bottom, under sketchbooks, diaries, emergency food supplies for small children, umbrella (damn you English summer!), pencil cases, makeup bags…

There’s some room on the bus home from Canada Water, but usually I’m being squeezed by some young person listening to mediocre R&B on their phone speakers. When you think of the days that Timbaland or whoever it was spent finding the right samples, programming and revising the acoustic layers, getting the vocals and actual instrumental bits right; only to have the target audience playing it out of some tinny little microspeaker on their crappy 3G phone on the P12…why bother? You might as well record something off the radio and mix it in ProTools with somebody singing (or shouting about guns and ‘hos) in the shower.

…sorry, got carried away there.

CenterParcs (yes, CenterParcs) was great again, though I don’t think we’ll be getting the Executive accommodation again. It’s alright, but we never get around to playing with the sauna, or the barbie. Charlie had her first ever pony ride. She also went down the slightly smaller flume with her father and loved every nanosecond (chip off the old block), and I got over the fact that they have Starbucks when we realised it was the only way we’d get a half decent coffee. We took our own bikes this time, and I discovered the joy of sneaking out at dawn and bombing around the park on Mildred. It was fab. I scared rabbits, squirrels and mountjack deer. The woodpeckers were a bit harder though…

28 July: old cooker

Originally uploaded by Sladey

I’m supposed to be getting a new cooker delivered today - though it’s now 6pm and no sign so far. Anyway, a nice man called Phil disconnected the old one and left it in the patio, ready for the men from John Lewis to take away.

It’s not a bad little cooker. The ignition is about to die, and the oven doesn’t cook things evenly. I bought it for £200 about 10 years ago, when my old cooker suddenly got dangerous the week before Christmas. It was only supposed to last a year or two, but we never got around to replacing it with something nicer.

Until now. The problem was finding something narrow enough to fit into the cooker gap, and complied with a new government directive on cooker safety. Now all new cookers installed in flats or multi occupancy dwellings have to have a device fitted to cut off the gas if the cooker flame fails inadvertently. All very well and good, but cooker manufacturers only started marketing flame failure devices about a month after the law came into action, so there aren’t many about.

Some of you may know that we were late-but-avid Buffy fans, though we didn’t think the musical ep was all that much cop. Anyway, Buffy creator Joss Whedon got bored during the Hollywood writer’s strike, and decided to create a Supervillain musical on a shoestring budget, and release it on the Internet.

So here it is. Acts I and II are available free, and Act III will be made available on 19 July. Then they’re going to close down and do some stuff that actually makes money.

There’s also a Captain Hammer (Dr Horrible’s nemesiesis) comic on MySpace. But I dislike MySpace for some unexplainable reason. Maybe it’s the horrid layout, I’m not sure…

Anyway, download the eps while you can. They’re grate.

Charlie in her Clothkits dress

When not opera-ing (first night on Tuesday…eek!), I managed to finish off the Clothkits dress. I screwed up the buttonholes and just sewed in some press studs (need buttonhole masterclass from Mum).

But Charlie seems quite pleased with the results. Apologies for the rubbish picture, but I didn’t have much time yesterday. In fact this (6am on a Sunday) is the first day that I’ve had some unstructured “me” time for a while.

Yesterday we were mostly collecting new beautiful new bike from Evans in Canary Wharf, struggling to fit bike transporter that looks like something out of Star Trek onto the back of Brian the car, getting lovely Brazilian bloke from Evans to refit bike transporter, realising that we’d taken over three hours to buy a small watermelon, some sausages, a pretty Oasis top and a Star Trek bike transporter, dashing back to Peckham, picking up opera stuff and then dashing off to Blackheath for first full dress rehearsal.

Martin and Charlie forgot about the birthday party they were supposed to attend at two, and the community barbie at 5-ish. So, I whisked Charlie off to the community barbie and spent a very pleasant few hours drinking Pimms and gossiping with the neighbours. Charlie ran with the pack of small children and wondered why bestfriendJ was ignoring her (clue: he’s a boy)

Ingredients for 6 servings

Ingredients for lamb and sweet pepper sauce

In the interests of Waste Not Want Not, I used some running-to-dodgy organic lamb fillet in an unusual pasta sauce that I found in the Fat Free Italian cookbook (ISBN:1-84309-006-6). I’ve never seen this book in any shop or on Amazon, but it is rather good.

15ml olive oil
250g boneless lean lamb neck fillet, diced into 1in chunks
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
2 bay leaves, torn
250ml dry white wine
4 ripe plum tomatoes, skinned* and chopped
2 large peppers, deseeded and diced
salt and freshly ground black pepper

1. Heat the oil in a medium frying pan or saucepan. Add the lamb and a little salt and pepper. Cook over a medium to high heat for about 10 minutes, stirring frequently, until browned all over. Though I have just left it and spent 10 minutes hanging out the washing without any discernable ill-effect.
2. Sprinkle in the garlic and add the bay leaves. Pour in the wine and let it bubble until reduced by half
3. Add the tomatoes and peppers, and stir to mix. Season again. Bring to the boil, and then allow to simmer gently, covered for around 45 minutes, or until the lam is very tender. Check occasionally,and give it a stir. Add some water if the lamb becomes too dry.

Serve with maccheroni alla chitarra or any long thin pasta.

New bag!

My first new bag in…ooooh…ages…

It’s a Jordana Paige Knitter’s satchel, with plenty of room for one’s latest knitting project, knitting notions, La Boheme scores, sketchbook, diary, purse, etc. And it stays on your shoulder! My trendy meeja type friend pronounced it very Sara Jessica Parker-ish. Which might mean that I’ve started looking like a horse and wearing stupid shoes…

Peeping out of the top is the last-but-one stage of Ceej’s new cardigan.

Some horrible murders taking place in south London right now. Two French students were tortured, killed, and then their flat set alight on Sunday. I remember seeing the news stories on Monday and thinking: “Ooh…another mysterious New Cross fire”. Then the full story came out.

A kid was stabbed around the corner from my grandmother’s old house in Thornton Heath, a few streets away from my cousin’s home. There has always been violence around Thornton Heath and West Croydon, but sometimes the area feels like a Wild West frontier town.

Yesterday was our annual community festival: usually a village-style fete with extra jerk chicken, delicious Nepalese food from our favourite local restaurant, and performances from local musicians, schools and the Southwark Tigers cheerleader groups. We even had Scouts doing the teas.

I was on the Livesey Museum stall, but kept getting called away to chat with friends and neighbours. Apparently we didn’t do as well with new members as the Nunhead cemetery day; but then the cemetery is famous all over London, and Brimmington Park is a tiny local park in a neglected part of Peckham, I think we did pretty well. The mayor was very interested in the campaign too.

Aaaanyway, after the Festival, some local musicians put on a recital in the community garden. Juliet put together a wind quintet; Manuela sang some lovely arias, and a couple of other people performed violin and guitar pieces. It was magical. Everybody who was involved in the daytime festival got a chance to wind down together, and have a gossip over Pimms and cake.

It was a lovely evening. Some passers-by wandered into the garden for a listen. One woman heard the music from her kitchen and ran around the streets, looking for the source. The Friends of Brimmington is thinking of doing something much bigger after the Festival next year, and calling it the Peckham Prom. Maybe we can get the Blackheath gang involved somehow…

Call Me If You Feel Too Happy is a play about living with bipolar disorder, and was written by Sophie Pelham and Nikki Albon.

Nikki’s one of my oldest friends (and Ceej’s godmother). She’s a really good writer, and this is her first proper full length play. They’re taking it to Edinburgh in August, and there are previews in London (I think: I’ll be too busy rehearsing the opera to attend, but I recommend it as a good night out, and it’s important to keep non-starry theatre going too). Anyway, the Reduced Circumstances web site will have all the details…

Finished Dolly

Originally uploaded by Sladey

How to relive your childhood pt 275.

During the 1970s I, along with many other hippy kids, got to wear clothes made from Clothkits. These were dressmaking kits that had the pattern printed directly onto the fabric, so it made the whole business of cutting out patterns and matching grains/patterns/etc much easier for busy mothers etc etc. The clothes were also very cool - though not if you’re nine years old and you want to wear pink crimplene trousers from C&A like the other kids in your class. I had a couple of Clothkits things that I absolutely adored, and they went very well with my Laura Ashley smocks.

Well, riding the do-it-yourself wave, Clothkits have relaunched on a smaller scale, with a range of childrens’ clothing and doll kits, modelled on the 70s original. So I just had to try them out.

I ordered a pinafore kit for HRH, and a doll with one outfit on Sunday. They arrived on Thursday, but had to wait at the sorting office until I picked them up on Saturday morning. Everything was beautifully packaged and there was a set of Useful Instructions with each kit.

We were very hungover on Sunday (thank you Luce/Sheonaidh/Matt/Richard/Jenna/Emma), so couldn’t spend too much time in the sun. So what better thing to do than haul the sewing machine out of the cupboard and start playing with your new toy?Charlie helped me with the stuffing and sewing, and we finished her in an afternoon. I screwed up a couple of times, but it was a very satisfying thing to do.

Her name is…umm…Dolly, which is odd because she does look a bit like my friend Dolly.

5 June: The return of Anna Wintour…

Originally uploaded by Sladey

Toni & Guy this time. A severe-looking woman called Luda refused to cut it all off, and instead thinned out the back (”ooof! it’s so theeeck!”), and showed me how to blow-dry it straight. I’ve been doing it all wrong and burning the hair, which is why it gets frizzy…