I’ve invented a recipe and it’s good!
You will need some chunks of baked butternut squash, some chunks of feta cheese, some pasta spirals (cooked obviously!), some finely chopped spring onions, some pieces of crispy lettuce and some shredded fresh mint leaves.
Bung it all in a bowl and mix.
Make your dressing out of olive oil, a little balsamic and a dollop of hot mango chutney.
Mix it together and wait a bit before eating it.
Eat it.
You’re welcome.
Here’s a new picture I finished this evening. (I say new, but it’s taken me nearly two months.)
I’ve been thinking this morning about the effect of city living on our collective psyche. I’m sat on a crowded train with two bags and a lap top on my lap. Although the train is always half empty when I get on, it never fails to get crowded two stops down the line and 20 mins in to my journey there’s standing-room only.
A man sat next to me about 20 minutes ago. There’s not quite enough room in the double seat for both of us. Our arms are touching. I’m squashed. He read his magazine for a while and then dozed off. He’s now snoring. In a few minutes his head may drop on my shoulder. This is pretty intimate. Yet he hasn’t looked at me at all, or wished me good morning or done anything at all to acknowledge that I even exist. This is of course, completely normal. But it’s also – well – rude!
Been getting quite a few requests from baby friends to do portraits of their little ones. Here’s Harrison, completed today. Got a few more in the pipeline. 
Since getting my evenings back, I’ve got my sketchpad out.
Drew this about two months before our beloved Percy met his maker.
Since getting my evenings back, I’ve got my sketch pad out.
And I’m not referring to elfin safety – just to get that out the way immediately.
When we arrived at Father Christmas’ grotto at 10am on Saturday, it had already been a bit of a morning. Leaving the house before midday with a baby and a four year old nearly always involves some degree of stress. On this occasion, we made it out the door at about 9.35, giving us 25 minutes to do a 35 minute drive. Plus we’d been told to arrive five minutes early.
Inevitably, the sat nav sent us to the wrong place. (It wasn’t until we got there of course that I read the bit in the ticket info that told you which post code to use.) We were nearly there when we witnessed a non-serious car crash. Someone made the grievous mistake of dithering too long while turning right. So the guy behind him, in a jeep pulling a trailer, decided it would be a good idea to overtake him while he was turning. The jeep made it round the car just in time but the trailer didn’t.
As it was clearly the jeep’s fault, I wound down my window and called out to the car driver that we’d seen what had happened. “We’re in a real hurry though. We’ve got to go.” I hastily scrawled our number on an old cassette card (I know, I know) lying in the door pocket, thrust it through the window at him and off we sped.
We needn’t have rushed – we were the first to arrive at Santa’s place. There was a female elf hanging about outside. She looked the part – pixie boots, stripey tights, red and green pom pom hat etc – but she seemed rather nervous. She ushered us into the visitors’ centre, aka the grotto, where tables covered in craft materials for making Christmas cards were packed into a fairly small space. On each was a plate with a “selection” of biscuits (five rich teas, one bourbon – sign of the economic times I suppose).
Jo blogs 