Nearly Christmas!

Not blogged for a while, mainly because so many pre-Christmassy things were going on elsewhere and relatively little was going on on our allotment and garden. The garden continues to be a quagmire traversed by slippery duckboards. There is still a pile of wood in our driveway because the trunk pieces are just too large to split with my wood grenade and because I've demolished enough patio tiles and ceramic flower pots already, trying to hit a tilting, wobbling bollard-length chunk of wood with a mallet. Chainsaw training it is. Or wait until the spring and some of the wood has dried off a little. Right now it's soaked from the rain and every time I try to drive a wedge into a piece of wood, it bounces right back out because the inside of the log has the texture of a tight water balloon. I learn new things every day.

After much nagging, OH has kindly invested part of the household budget in a carbon monoxide detector. We had some leftover coal in an old bin and decided to use it when temperatures had dropped below freezing. It was warm and kept in for much longer than wood but I disliked the wet, greasy feel to the air and was paranoid about poor air quality. Suffice it to say we haven't used any more coal since. I used the new CO detector in my shed the other weekend when I was screwing together some wooden frames for the munchkins' paintings that I wanted to post to them last Monday. The gas heater was on and I've always suspected that the CO content in the air goes haywire after a while. 50ppm is apparently the most you can operate in safely, and it was sobering to see that when I checked every few minutes, the display started creeping up to 12, and then to 17ppm quite quickly. It was nice and cosy in the shed so it's a shame to have to open the door to let fresh, and cold, air in.

Right now, I am laid low by a mystery condition that started out as a little tightness around the achilles heels a week ago and now involves two inflamed, painful and elephant-sized ankles and a lot of shouty, sweary hobbling. Can't think of how I might have got that. Is it an injury? Wear and tear? Rheumatoid arthritis? Gout even? OH's mother thinks it's all that unfeminine wood-chopping I've been doing although for that I used my hands, arms, shoulders and back, all of which are fine. Anyway, I finally gave in and saw the vet about it after OH had prodded me for almost a week, and came away drained of what felt like a pint of blood for testing and a monster-sized prescription for naproxen. I'm not a pill-person at all -- I treat headaches not with aspirin but peppermint tea and a good sleep -- but inflamed-joint pain is evil pain, and this stuff is legend. One hour after taking it, a blessed coolness spread throughout my feet and I didn't feel a thing anymore. Unfortunately, by the end of the day, my painless feet had swollen over and around the edges of my shoes so it was obvious that all wasn't well. I'll find out more on Friday. Today, the swellings have gone down a little but every tendon in there is still supertight. I'm a bit miffed actually because I had taken today off to do some Christmas window- and food shopping with my beloved OH, and that's now a no. Ditto our planned trip to London on Saturday -- Christmas lights, ice-skating, honeyed almonds, photography exhibitions, Tate Modern, a restaurant dinner, possibly an overnight stay and a film at the Odeon if we'd found one of those last-minute secret-hotel deals for £60 a room... all meh and pants. Oh well, maybe it'll all have cleared by the holidays or if it's the sort of joint inflammation for which you have to keep the joint active, we can still go. For now, we'll both curl up in front of the Christmas tree that OH has put up and decorated, and the fire, and the lovely new log basket that OH had bought for us, and because I'm now officially injured, I get to stick my legs all over OH's sofa territory.

Other house news: Mr Tubby is now a regular visitor again, popping in through the cat flap several times during the day, usually to hoover up anything that Neuroticat has foolishly left in her food bowl. He then lies down in front of the fireplace, even when it's not lit, probably as if to say "Put that thing on for me, will you?" or occupies one of the dining room chairs. More cutely, he likes to curl up in the kindling trug, which fits him perfectly.

Neuroticat doesn't quite know what to make of his presence and has fallen back into the kind of loud nightly miaowing that you normally only get from small children who wake up from a bad dream with a newly discovered sense of almost cosmic alienation.

Our kitchen has been very noisy for the last few days. OH has started a new vat of elderberry wine, about, what, 25 litres? And that's now fermenting so vigorously in a plastic bucket by the radiator that every few seconds there's a loud wet multi-stage fart emanating from the kitchen and permeating the entire house. It's the CO2 bubbling through the airlock. Unrelenting. The kitchen smells of alcohol and yeast and decomposing grapes and elderberry and OH thinks this batch will sort out at least half our annual red wine consumption, "for about 60p a litre!"

We also got some lovely donations from friends: Neighbour P gave us a Tesco bag full of freshly landed prawns straight from the North Norfolk coast -- the kind that's too fiddly to use commercially. And another friend gave us 1 kilo of cranberries, which OH has turned into lovely cranberry jelly. Roll on, Christmas duck! I really hope the vet tells me that what I have isn't gout because if it is, with my culinary preferences, I'll be shit out of luck.