Sorry I’ve been so absent. I’ve been really busy with real life. In my professional life there has been many exhibitions to see (Canaletto at the National Gallery and Shadow Catchers at the V&A are two really worth seeing) and shops to visit, ‘n’ stuff.

Just to whet your appetites these are the things I’ll be covering in the next few weeks in no particular order. This will also make me write about them…

Edible Christmas gifts: chilli jam, panforte, chocolate pave and amaretti.

The iPad. Yes yes I know it’s been covered in so many places, but I promised I’d do an entry for those still wavering.

How to make a Christmas wreaths, bath bombs (bath bombs are going to be our present/cards this year) and snow globes with the children or just with yourself.

The Nihola trike.

The best pens for every day.

The best diary in the world.

My special Christmas gift round up.

Good creams to give you a bit of omph for party season.

On my The Sour Side blog I’ll be looking at the new essences from Bakery Bits, bagels and pizza.

So now that I’ve chained myself to that itinerary, let’s begin with today’s entry which is about pashminas.

Look, I don’t care that pashminas aren’t fashionable. I never wore them when they were.  Here is me spouting on about them in the New Statesman.

Since then, I’ve added to my collection. Each of my girls has one – full size, pure cashmere. I ordered the one for my youngest before she was born and it’s been brilliant. The baby can’t of course fully appreciate what she has, but I use her pashmina when I get up in the night to feed her and it sits on her lap in the pram, or car seat.  The older one uses hers when we’re travelling, as a blanket, or puts it over her head for dressing up.  She treats it with real respect. But then my children aren’t brats and have been brought up to understand and respect a bit of luxe.

I have various pashminas in one or two ply, which I use every day in winter – as a big comforting scarf, or as a shawl in the office when I’m hunched, writer-like, over my Olivetti type writer (the latter a lie, of course, I use a Mac). At price per wear, they work out really well.

I get all mine from My Pashmina. And before you ask, and before you wonder, I’ve always paid full price for them and never got any sort of discount (not that that would ever influence what I thought, and therefore what I wrote). They are very good quality and the price is reasonable. You can also get scarves – the littlest size scarf is great for children and I was lucky to get one in the sale for my eldest (otherwise they’re nearly £25). But for pashminas, I urge you to go for the full size shawl in pure cashmere (£65.45 postage included) – not the silk/cashmere hybrid. The two ply is great for winter, the one ply makes for a lighter shawl/scarf but it’s not as warm by any means.

I love these little boots. I buy them every year for my eldest (the youngest is too small to fit into even the smallest size). They are the perfect boot for walking and mucking about; they’re well made and fantastic value: £21-£23 depending on where you buy them.  Easy for even the smallest children to put on (although the smallest size they come in is a four) and with a sturdy sole. Ostensibly they’re made for little children who ride ponies (mine don’t), but obviously that doesn’t stop you wearing them even if you aren’t that way inclined.

Anyway, I found them quite by accident a few years ago in our local country shop; of which we have several around these here parts. Last year we got purple, this year we got brown.

Unless you live near me you’ll probably need to get them from the internet: I found this site that sells them in every size (4-12) and colour (black, navy, purple, fuchsia) they seem to come in. I’ve never used this site, so on your own head be it.

My daughter wore hers straight out of the shop. As we got into the car I said to her “darling you can wear them when we go to the country” to which she very sensibly and correctly replied “Mummy WE live in the country.”

Three years ago,  during my first ‘country winter’, my friend Rosie, one of the moderators on I Want My Mum, the parenting website I co-run with The Analytical Armadillo, told me about Kiwi Sheepskin boots.  She fair raved about them, so much so that a rare (for me) thing happened. She ‘made’ me buy a pair.

Ever since I saw Pamela Anderson on a beach wearing a bikini and sheepskin boots, I’ve wanted a pair. Of sheepskin boots (I’ve already got the breasts, thank you).  I know, I know: makes no sense. Now that I live in the country I decided I positively needed warm boots. I mean, I have neoprene lined wellington boots, from  my days as Fishing Correspondent of the Independent (oh yes really).

Sheepskin boots have got a bad name in the last few years, mostly because you can get really cheap rip offs (i.e. not sheepskin at all). But you need to ignore all of this. If you need warm boots nothing beats sheepskin. Don’t think of them as high fashion items – they’re not, they’re not even a low fashion item, you missed the boat on that one; but rather think of them as what they are: practical, but nice, objects. To my mind, few things look more stupid than girls/women inadequately dressed on a very cold day.

And I thought this well before I became a mother, okay?

Kiwi sheepskin boots are really well priced. I got the Musketeer Ultimate Sheepskin boots and they now cost £107 odd including everything: P&P and customs. I think I paid about £90 for them. Who remembers. I got them in chocolate and they are rarely off my feet in the winter. They’re beautiful, much nicer than the website makes them look, although I never wear them with the cuff folded down, and I doubt you will too. But you can get simpler boots, shorter, different sole, for a shade under £68. That’s significantly cheaper than anywhere else I’ve found for real sheepskin.

A few things to note: I can’t walk long distances in mine. It’s all too ‘soft’ inside and your foot slips around. So for long walks, you really need proper walking boots. What they’re excellent for is cold winter days, leisurely walks, just being out and about. Not hiking.

The sizing: I got mine too big. The sheepskin compacts after a few wears so if you’re inbetween sizes, I’d counsel going to the smaller size. After a few season’s wear the sheepskin inside the foot chamber wears out, so buy new insoles for extra cosiness (these you can buy anywhere, they don’t need to come from there but do make sure you buy real sheepskin – not synthetic – or your feet will stink).

The service I got three winters ago was great.

Fantastic packaging and unfortunately what’s in them is just as nice.

A few weeks ago, my boyfriend spotted some biscuits in Waitrose. They were on special offer and instead of the usual £2.99 they were £1.99 (the offer has now ended, at least in my Waitrose, which is the only one that matters let’s face it).

The packaging was great, waxed semi-transparent paper and what looked like large wafery things inside (they are olive oil ‘tortas’ which just made me confused). I made a face and said “nah, they’re TWO QUID”. “But they might be great,” he retorted. I soldiered on with the shopping trolley and the purchase was not made.

But a week or so later, we did buy them, the Seville Orange ones. Even before we were out of the carpark I’d opened them and was sampling one.

My they were delicious. Flakey, but with sugar on the top and as more-ish as ‘stracci’ (Italian deep fried ribbons of pastry that are simply too dangerous to eat, they are the crack cocaine of pastry). I have no idea how Ines cooks her damn biscuits but they taste deep fried. On the website they go on about how olive oil is really good for you, so I reckon the must be. They’re odd though. I mean the Seville Orange ones were sweet, but not sure how you should eat them, with coffee? On their own.

By the time we got home I had eaten three of them whilst I pondered this. I still don’t know.

What I do know is that they come in various versions and you absolutely should never buy them.

M&S ‘Autograph’ gloves in black, lined in cashmere, which is turned back here so you can see.

Close up of the lining for those who are really paticular, like me. Although it looks thick, it isn’t and the gloves manage to be rather ‘fino’ as we say in Italian whilst also being very warm. Nice.

Two winters ago, I was in London for the day (that seems a sad sentence in a way, as I lived in London for most of my life and yet, and yet, it also makes me happy as I love Suffolk – where I live now. So I guess you’d call that a bittersweet collection of words) and got caught out on a day so cold, I couldn’t carry my bags. I had no gloves with me and in a fit of extravagant desperation, I walked into Marks and Spencer’s to buy some gloves.

In truth, I was after the same sort of gloves I’d bought in M&S  many years previously: sheepskin gloves. I have no idea why I’d bought sheepskin gloves. I wasn’t a sheepskin sort of girl (am now, watch out for my entry on sheepskin boots ‘n’ slippers in a few weeks’ time). But I had discovered that they were super warm when I rode my bike and also those particular ones had been fantastic value. But my lovely buff coloured sheepskin gloves had gotten a hole, you know the sort: the stitching had started to come undone and I’d done nothing about it until more and more stitches undid and as the proverb says, where once one stitch was needed, now nine were.

But M&S had no sheepskin gloves that day. They had simple leather gloves, which I didn’t want (not warm enough) or all manner of what I call Bridget Jones type gloves: knitted and full of whimsy.

Instead I spied some Autograph cashmere lined leather gloves. These were exactly the opposite of what I thought I wanted, but I tried them on and was sold. They fitted beautifully, they retained some sensitivity but they were so warm it was like I’d just put my hands in a warm bath. I bought them and, for an impulsive purchase, they ended up being a fantastic buy at £25 because they soon became the gloves I wore every day. Warm, practical  but just that bit posh. I like that because often my hands are the only posh part of me.

But then, one day last year, in a blur of getting the baby in and out of the car, I lost one.

I need to pause here to tell you about another fantastic discovery I made last year. A discovery that the loss of one of my gloves, in the same week that my eldest lost her beloved Mimi the Mouse, spurred me to make. You know those Cash’s name tapes? Well you can order them to say “If found, please call XXXXX”. I got some made and have both Mimi the Mouses (eldest’s was found in the laundry) are now ‘microchipped’, as are my beloved Pashminas (more on pashminas another day). Because my chocolate brown one ply pashmina is lost, lost, lost…

I haven’t actually, sewn them into my new gloves yet though.

Anyway,  miraculously, given that shops have a habit of making great things and never repeating them, M&S sell the gloves again this year. Here is the link to them on line, although on-line they only seem to sell them in brown. In real life they come in black, purple or chocolate brown. They are lined in cashmere and are really warm. They’ve gone up to £29.50. But still, you really can’t ask more of a glove.

So don’t.

Update October 2012.

Obviously the link above doesn’t work anymore. Here is the link to this year’s offering in red, purple or grey. Or here in black. They’ve now gone up to £35 which makes them a better investment than a savings’ account these days.

This is the time of year, apparently, when we have a glut of stuff and need to start preserving it. In Italy we’d be doing the tomatoes about now, cookin’ them up, sieving them, passing them through o’Moulinex and slapping the resultant sludge into bottles we’d been saving all year. The entire neighbourhood would smell of tomatoes.

I don’t do that. Mostly cos I don’t grow tomatoes and let’s face it, Cirio does passata for me.

What I do do at this time of year is get the dehydrator out and start drying out anything that takes my fancy.

What’s the point of dehydrating stuff? Well it’s a way of preserving things, if you don’t want to/can’t freeze it, or make it into chutneys ‘n’ stuff. For certain things – mushrooms for instance – it’s absolutely the only thing, as far as I’m concerned, to do with them. But the great thing about a dehydrator is you can also dry your own fruit in it, so you can make your own banana chips, apple chips, you can dry blueberries, pineapple, whatever you goddam well like. In certain parts of the world that will remain nameless (America) they also dry bits of meat to make beef jerky.

I don’t do this.

But you can also dry your herbs before they die off for the winter. Those that do. Apparently some don’t but that sentence alone has taken me to the very edge of my horticultural knowledge.

So much so that I don’t actually know if growing herbs is horticulture or something else.

Anyway. You can spend hundreds of pounds on dehydrators. And if you have an allotment, and lots of larder space and lots of jam jars and are that sort of person, then by all means spend hundreds on a dehydrator that has drawers and you can set the temperature etc. At the other end, you can easily do all of this in an oven, set very low. Disadvantages of that (unless you have an Aga, in which case you will already be a smug bastard) are that unless you have a very energy efficient oven (I do) you can end up spending loads on electricity cos you need to dry things out for about 12 hours.

And it also means you can’t use the oven for anything else, unless you have two ovens (I do, do you hate me yet?). I make fruit leathers in the oven and it takes FOREVER, in the dehydrator it takes half the time.

In between all of this are cheap dehydrators which is what I’ve got. You can get a really good one from Lakeland. It works really well. It’s big though, it has a footprint probably equivalent to an elephant’s. It has trays which you stack. It’s piss easy to use and clean and if you want to make fruit leathers (or meringues come to that) you just use some baking parchment over the trays. It only has an on/off button and only one temperature: 85 degrees.

A dehydrator really isn’t for everyone. But I’ve got small children who eat a lot of banana chips and fruit leathers and I just like making my own. You can chop up dried fruit and also put it on your breakfast cereal if you don’t want to just eat it as it is, but I love that too, it makes a great snack. Somehow naughtier than just eating a normal apple…I’m so sad.

You can also dry veg and just chop it up and put it into stews and sauces. I do this with aubergines and courgettes (you can also do beans, almost anything really, peas you can also do and use them in caterpaults). It’s handy when you’ve got some veg left that you’re not going to use, but don’t want to waste. Dried aubergine slices cost about £5 in deli shops just cos they look pretty and are presented in cellophane bags. Also it makes the house smell amazingly of whatever you’re drying so you know, like a two in one product..

Look at my little  jewels. Remember the little cherry tomatoes up top? Here they are under extra Catholic olive oil in my favourite jam jars, Bonne Maman. That’s my vegetable (raised) bed you can see in the background. Smell the smugness.

This isn’t going to be my last post with Christmas in the title. I warn you.

But this is just  a short little entry, without reference to my childhood about a good place to get cheap batteries.

7DAYSHOP is where I get all my batteries, and have done for years. Its based in Guernsey so lots of things are VAT free. I buy a box of 40 Duracell AA batteries for just over £13. Don’t even get me started on the price difference on CR2032s which are those ‘coin’ lithium batteries you need for so many things.

Postage is generally free, so when you next need batteries, just be a tiny bit more organised and get them from there.

I first came across this when I was writing a piece for the Guardian’s Education supplement about What to Take With You to University. Which I researched heavily because I never went. I was far too busy joining the army and learning how to strip down my personal weapon (a Sterling Sub-Machine gun, bullet capacity: 32, although only a numbskull would load it with anymore than 28) in my “noddy suit” (NBC suit – nucleur, biological, chemical suit) in a gas chamber with actual tear gas being pumped in. And interrogate people. And pick locks. And avoid assault courses.

So, to get to the point. You know how everyone is so obsessed with not getting their identity stolen theseadays? How you must shred everything that has any personal information on it whatsoever? Well, this is easy to do if you have an industrial shredder attached to a belt around your waist and have something you can do with the shredded paper (you can’t recycle it), such as keep a rabbit or a gerbil or run a mail order business (you can use if for packing, although be aware if you use a strip shredder – one which shreds paper into long strips – it is theoretically possible to piece together a document again, better to go for a cross-shredder).  But otherwise, it can mean you end up with lots of bits of paper hanging around for the mythical day when you lug the top-heavy shredder out from under the desk, plug it in, and shred everything you’ve saved up.

Obviously, you should shred bank statements (and wow, what’s that like, to not keep bank statements??) and just about anything if you’re Andy Coulson. But lots of things just need you to obliterate your name and address.

This is where the Gobbledegook Stamp (be aware this is the name I have given it) comes in. When I first featured it, Lakeland had just started stocking it (some of the reviews for it on the Lakeland site are not promising, saying you have to ‘stamp over the address a few times’, well der, yes, big deal?). They weren’t sure they’d carry on stocking it and I had to grapple with them slightly to let them let me feature it: it’s now a best seller. You just happily stamp over your personal details and then put the letter in the recycling as per. You can get replacement ink pads for it at any stationers although I’ve not had to replace mine yet.

And with just over 100 days til Christmas, it’d make a very unglamorous little gift for someone paranoid in your life.

I was born in Selfridges. Well not literally, but almost in that I was born just down the road and that’s where I lived til I was thirty. Most of my family have, at one time or another, worked in Selfridges. My First Holy Communion dress was made there (my aunt used to work in the alterations department). So I know lots about Selfridges, and Oxford Street. As I once said to a fishing ghillie, who asked me what sort of terrain I was used to, I’m comfortable with concrete and carpets.

Growing up a stone’s throw from Selfridges, in a two-bedroomed mansion block flat, didn’t teach me much about gardening however. I did have an impressive window-sill collection of plants. And when we went to Italy we had an orchard and my relatives had land. But gardens? Nope.

Three years ago, I bought me a house in Suffolk. We now have just under one acre of land. I have no idea what to do with most of it. The reason we bought our funny little 1960’s house (little being a good, descriptive word here) was because the garden that came with it was the best we’d seen. The former occupants were very keen gardeners. VERY keen. We have lawns, and a little formal garden at the back, and a woodland walk bit and lots of trees (which I’ve learned the names of, mostly) and borders n’ stuff, it’s all very magical and perfect for children to play in.

But I have no clue at all what to do with it. I am not exaggerating, not one single bit, when I say that I can tell a tree, I know what grass looks like and I can identify roses and daffodils. And moss. But that really is about it. People I know come round and say “but darling, look at your cornus controversia traversia fantasia tree, it’s divine, how did you get it so tiered?” and I think “do my gardening for me.”

When we first moved in, driven by keen enthusiasm and with only one child to look after (which let me tell you, is EASY, retrospectively) I decided one day to do some weeding of things that looked, to me, like weeds. To be fair to me, which I always try to be, I did check with my partner, who said “yes them’s is weeds”. So I pulled them all up.

Later I discovered they were poppies. Wild and rude poppies (rude cos they just go where they like) but poppies none the less. It’s taken them three years to recover from my frantic plucking. I like poppies.

In 2008 I could ignore the garden cos I was pregnant, and shuffling around like a Barbar Papa. In 2009 I could ignore the garden because I’d just had a baby (at HOME, a HBAC, yes it is possible people). This year I’m realising that unless we want to end up with a garden like that one in The Secret Garden (except without the possibility of staff, or a TV crew, to make it alright) I was going to have to do some work in it.

But, as I’ve mentioned in other posts. I’m a girl that needs kit before I can do anything. Growing up, I was forced FORCED to work in my parents’ cafe. One of the things I did was the washing up. There is nothing like doing washing up of un-known people’s dishes to really put you off washing up. I remember coming across bits of food floating in the water that, to this day, can still make me retch at the memory. I was too small to wear rubber gloves (are you crying yet?).

These days, when I am washing precious things, things that cannot go into the dishwasher, I will only do so if wearing rubber gloves. I need that degree of separation because I’ve been deeply scarred.

So of course, with gardening it is obvious I need lots of my own kit if I’m to really take any interest in it.

I have my own wheelbarrow, but that has since been stolen by my eighty-year old father who will insist on helping out in the garden. My partner also nicks the wheelbarrow. So I’ve lost interest in it.

I NEED really expensive secateurs, because we all know that will make me much cleverer and more capable in the garden. But until I’ve ascertained which those are to be, I make use of my three other pairs of secateurs, all of which have broken/rusted because I don’t take care of them properly because I haven’t bought them especially for me.

So finally we get onto gardening gloves. It is completely unfathomable that I could garden without them. So three years ago I bought some Briers gardening gloves from Chartwell, Winston Churchill’s old home. They were cream, and leather and really rather good. But they too got ‘borrowed’ and then they hung on the washing line until they turned brittle.

I bought some very good, green, leather gauntlets, reduced to a fiver (from lots more) in Johnny Lou Lou’s last year. But the mice ate them, goddamit, in the garage. Then I ignored my own advice and bought several pairs of cheap gloves from Homebase, all of which were totally rubbish.

Two weeks ago, I put out an appeal on Facebook for good gardening gloves and my online friend Vicky R, told me to try Atlas Gardening Gloves. I was suspicious because I’d only ever worn leather gardening gloves. And these were rubber nylon things. The pictures of them are a bit misleading, because they look like they’d be thick and unwieldly, like a beefed up rubber glove. But they’re not.

Blimey the look enormous. I promise I haven’t got Shrek hands. Photographed here on yet another stainless steel surface in my kitchen.

God they’re fantastic. I mean, I know it sounds completely mad to rave about a gardening glove, or anything, in that ‘they’ve changed my life way’. But they have. Here’s why:

They’re really sensitive, so you can do almost anything in them, from coaxing out a weed root, to handling really rough weeds. What the pics don’t really convey is that they’re really soft, you can scrunch them up in  your hand.

They scrunch up small, not particularly useful per se, but means they’re flexible, which is.

Because of this: they’re not so tough they’d be able to handle super hard thorns (you can get some others for that, which I’ve yet to try) and I have stung myself on the back of the hand with a nettle (although that’s good for you in the long run init, protects against arthritis) because the back of the glove is less protected to make the glove more flexible. But I lived.

They come in all different colours, which I like, so I know which are mine.

They’re washable.

They’re cheap compared to leather gloves. But actually, so much better I think.

Sizing: I have fairly small hands, and I got a medium, which fit fine, but with room. I may go to a small next time for uber sensitivity and pretend I am a garden surgeon. They’re not like rubber gloves in that hard to get off way if they’re too small, because they feel like fabric.

So the upshot is that I have been out in the garden pulling up actual weeds (since that is the only thing I am trusted to do) regularly.

Vicky gets them from eBay where they are cheaper. But I got mine direct where there is more selection.

So there you have it.