Challenge Number 31 – Make and ice Charlotte a birthday cake

Challenge Number 31 was originally to take Charlotte on the North York Moors railway, but after the Snowdonia meltdown debacle, I decided that making such a trip could turn out to be an expensive and stressful waste of money. Besides, there were too many challenges on the list involving trains. The idea was to do something nice for Charlotte in Yorkshire, and so what could be nicer than baking her a cake at home for her 2^nd birthday?

I’m a complete birthday cake novice, and I’ve never iced anything other than occasionally pouring a citrus glaze over muffins. So this challenge was also about acquiring an entirely new skill, one which will hopefully serve me for several children’s parties to come. I found some cake decorating books in a charity shop for 50 pence apiece to get some recipes, tips and ideas. I had in my head a park theme, since we spend half our lives in Rowntree Park, whose duckponds, woods, willow trees and swings serve as our garden.

The whole process was a steep learning curve, from understanding the difference between vanilla essence and vanilla flavouring, to how long our oven takes to bake enormous cakes without burning them on top and leaving them raw in the middle, to how to make buttercream icing, to how to sieve apricot jam, to the different tastes of different coloured shop-bought ready-to-roll fondant, to how long defrosting and icing a cake actually takes when you’re trying to fit it in around a hectic toddler schedule and only have your exhausted evenings free.

This point about defrosting was because I had baked the sponge cakes a couple of weeks in advance and stored them in the freezer. This was to avoid a last-minute rush and (potential) last-minute disaster and subsequent trip to Waitrose to buy a replacement. I used a Victoria sponge recipe my aunt had told me about, which featured in Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall/ Fearlesslyeatsitall’s Guardian column a while back. The recipe’s quantities are based on the weight of the eggs used in the bake. However many eggs you use, you weigh them in their shells at the start, then use exactly that quantity of flour, sugar and butter. The theory being this gives you precise and perfect proportions. In this case, for each layer of cake, I used 8 eggs (beaten into the creamed butter and sugar individually), and 483g of the other ingredients, with a teaspoon or two of vanilla. It was scary putting the cooked sponges into the freezer without being able to taste them (I wasn’t ready to cut them up at that point because I hadn’t quite finalised in my head what I was going to do), and it was only once they had defrosted and I’d carved the top layer into the shape I’d decided on that I could have a mouthful and breathe a sigh of relief. The cake was, in a word, yum.

The icing process demonstrated my general scatterbrained cack-handedness, but next year I will be so much more confident and won’t forget crucial things like covering the sides in your carefully sieved jam before you have actually plonked the rolled-out icing on top of the cake. I covered as much of the cake with buttercream as possible, to stick the sponge segments together and create a topping, but didn’t make enough buttercream to do the sides as well, and had run out of icing sugar by this point to make any more.

I used ready-coloured fondant icing, but the ducks, pond and paving around the pond were all constructed by me. I managed to write Charlotte’s name in black icing. The flowers were shop-bought and attached with gin (a tip from a friend) to create a seal. The swing and slide are obviously inedible and a part of a Happy Land play park set from the Early Learning Centre, but the cake would have looked pretty feeble without them. So not too many fancy frills, and no proper piping – like the trip on the North York Moors Railway, these will have to wait for another year.

I used the cake trimmings to make a trifle, plus an extra cake with buttercream icing. (I’d bought some more icing sugar by this point.) The icing was coloured purple by me and covered with Charlotte’s favourite word of the moment, “sprinkles”. This was just to prove I could actually make coloured icing of some description by myself.

All that was left to do was light the candle and sing Happy Birthday, a song which invariably makes Charlotte wail in dismay. Daddy had to help her blow out the candle, but the swing and slide eventually distracted her from the accompanying music. At last it was time for the tasting. The guests at the party on Sunday (family from both sides) appeared to be truly impressed. It’s about the only food I’ve ever cooked for Charlotte that she has wolfed down and asked for seconds of. I am very proud of myself. And now I more or less know what I’m doing, hopefully next year’s cake will be even better.

Challenge Number 18 – Have a crazy hair-cut/colour

Now, don’t hold your breath on this one.

My friend Sarah set me this challenge. I think it comes under the guise of “You’re getting old, so go wild and show abandon.” A couple of other challenges on the list fit into this category. Sarah added, “It’ll always grow out.”

Lottie's ringlets

I come from a family of curly hair. Friends just laughed when they spotted a row of my cousins at my wedding. Charlotte thankfully has inherited the curly gene, as I wouldn’t have a clue what to do with straight hair. I say “thankfully”, but truth be told, I grew up hating the fact that I had curly hair. And I hated hairdressers. Partly because my parents would only pay for me and my brother to go to the cheapest place in town (an old lady perming salon), partly because my mum thought it would be a good idea for me to have my long ringletty locks all lopped off into a crop at the age of ten (though to be fair she did splash out for me to have it done at a “trendier” hairdresser’s called, hmm, Scarecrows) and partly because once I hit puberty, my curls just turned into a dried-out frizz ball. Any hairdresser that I saw had no idea what to do with me. Apart from one, when I was eleven, where my aunt took me as a special treat before I was bridesmaid at her wedding. The hairdresser told me over and over again what wonderful hair I had, and made it look – well, a very 1980s Lady Di kind of nice. I was still so much in shock at this that I passed out during the marriage service and had to be revived by my mum flapping her order of service in my face and stuffing my mouth full of orange Chewits. As a result, in the official photos, I am ashen pale, and look like I’m wearing orange lipstick. Which kind of detracts from the hair-do.

But as for the rest of my childhood hairdressers, they always prodded at my dandruff and scab strewn scalp and held up my curls at arm’s length, before cutting them all off and blasting me with a hairdryer, therewith trebling the size of the frizzball. I got so sick of this that I refused to get my hair cut for two years in my teens, before my mum eventually relented to let me go to the poshest place in town, Crouch and Haskins. (Though it was known locally as Crotch and Foreskin.) They had to hack off half a foot of split ends. Thereafter, things improved. I learned that curls don’t need a hairdryer ever. Or even a hair brush. Which actually makes life pretty easy. By 1989, a decade of bad perms had meant that some decent frizz-taming products had come onto the market at last. Like, er, mousse. But every little helps.

A brief moment of straightness in 2000

Nowadays I generally manage the curls pretty well, and I wouldn’t be without them. They are very much me. I did have my hair straightened once in London and it made me look so different that my father walked straight past me at Waterloo station, but within hours, the curls had fought back, so I never bothered again. Other than that, I’ve kept more or less the same style for years, with variations in length depending on forthcoming weddings, being pregnant (which made my hair wonderful) and my thyroid disease (which can make it fall out in handfuls).

I found some excellent hairdressers during my years in London, but seldom found them again whenever I tried to return. They were always part of London’s transient society, people from Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, Finland, who had found a job that gave them a passport to travel, and hardly ever stuck around for more than a few months.

When we moved to York, I just picked the one salon that used the Aveda products that I now swear by and thus adopted a perfectly nice but not especially good hairdresser. I’ve never loved anything she has done to my hair, but I haven’t hated it either. But she was always so sweet and friendly that I felt I couldn’t go to anyone else in the salon. This whole tale is a story of my Britishness. I can’t be assertive about what I want or what I think about the end result, yet it’s my head that a haircut has to sit on until my next trim. A hairdresser holds up a mirror to the back of my head and I always say, “Mm, yes, that looks a lot better,” just as I always tell a waiter serving me a meal that I’m loathing that it’s “very nice, thank you” when he asks me if everything is OK.

And this carries on into my “crazy hair-cut/colour”. At my last haircut, I explained to my hairdresser about my 40 challenges and what I wanted to do, and booked an appointment for a couple of months’ time so we could complete the challenge. The week before the appointment, she rang me to say that she had opened her own salon, so could I go there instead. As she was no longer going to be using nice organic Aveda but rather very 80s-sounding Wella, I should at that point have run a mile, but instead just meekly agreed to switch venue as requested.

My main aim was the crazy colour. I’m nearly 40, but am lucky enough to not actually have to dye my hair, so never really have. I had a misdemeanour with lemon juice when I was 22 which left me very blonde for a few months, and also had a brief spell of purple a couple of years later after getting drunk with my university housemates. Otherwise I’ve just been brown. So I decided to go for a new experience and have some highlights. Crazy highlights. As Sarah said, they’d grow out.

Technically, this could be described as a crazy hair-do

The day of the appointment arrived. My hairdresser showed me her palette of colours and I pointed to the more exciting ones on display. But then she said “Leave it with me” and went off to mix up some bowls and cut up some foil. It was only when she’d painted half my head of curls that she told me the colours she was using. Red, orange and...brown. "Brown?" "Brown?!" My hair is sodding "brown" already. What is “crazy” about "brown"? When did anyone ever get excited by or stop traffic with "brown"? What’s the point of paying someone 70 quid to dye brown hair "brown"?

The salon was very nice, and had special massage chairs at the sinks. She also had some 43-year-old Woman’s Weekly magazines to read, which were highly entertaining with their doll’s clothes knitting patterns and plentiful adverts for cheese. But I won’t be going back. I asked my hairdresser to make the angle of my current bob a bit more exciting. She just cut it all the same length. The red and orange she’d chosen just turned out the colour of old man’s boot polish and - I realised to my horror - a very close match to our front door. Plus it very quickly washed out, which I don’t think it was meant to do. Apart from the brown, that is. Oh, right. That’s because it was BROWN...IN...THE...FIRST...PLACE! And the dye has made my hair so dry that the frizz has returned, and this has remained, even though the colour has largely gone. I can’t moisturise it out enough.

In perfect harmony with our front door

Sigh. All in all, an expensive waste of time, and I don’t have the budget to give it another go. But I tried. Charlotte, rightfully, seems to have inherited my mistrust (in her case manifesting itself as abject terror) of hairdressers. (Though history is also repeating itself: I take her to an old lady perming salon.) May she always scream “No, no, no!” and never mutter “Yes, that looks very nice thank you” if she doesn’t like the end result. 

Challenge Number 39 - Learn to count to 100 in Welsh (and three swear words)

My dad set me this challenge, to tie in with "conquering" Snowdon. My friend Sarah also set me the challenge to learn some swearwords in a foreign language, so I combined the two.

When I was a teenager, it slowly dawned on me that I was quite good at learning languages.  I never had a problem memorising vocab or verb endings, could mimic accents, and always seemed to do well in exams without even trying. I did a school exchange to Germany and realised how quickly I was absorbing the new words and phrases around me, and that I wanted more, more, more. I'm not quite sure who I inherited the skill from - it must have skipped a generation somewhere. My parents only took me on holidays abroad once I hit adolescence so I could do all the talking for them. Not that Little Miss Stroppy Teen was willing to oblige, of course. I also benefited from having a couple of particularly good teachers at school. My A Level French Literature teacher was somewhat eccentric, immensely talented and intolerant of fools, which made her both terrifying and awe-inspiring. She owned a battered old farmhouse in Provence long before Peter Mayle made it fashionable, and spent every summer there, studying Impressionist art and pottering about with the locals. She was as passionate about Star Trek as she was Maupassant and her classes on Racine's Phedre made me go home and try to write French poetry in rhyming couplets. How on earth did she do that? It's true what the adverts say - no one ever forgets a good teacher. (You don't forget a bad one either.)

I set myself the typically rational teenage ambition of learning every single language in the world and decided that one day I would be in interpreter at the United Nations. It's quite depressing to see how far off the mark I've ended up. It doesn't help that I didn't end up completing a degree in modern languages - I started one at the University of Sheffield in 1992 but left after six months because it was - not to put too fine a point on it - crap. I chose Sheffield because the course would enable me to study four languages at once and because my boyfriend at the time told me not to go there. But the course ended up being rather different to the one described in the prospectus - all the literature and history classes were taught in English and when we did get to speak some French and German (about once a week), most of my fellow students could barely string a sentence together. I suddenly realised how good the language teaching at my school must have been. I ended up taking myself off to Germany to go to university in Heidelberg for a year in a bid to get the German fluency I craved. I then came home to do a degree in Linguistics at the University of York. I loved Linguistics, but it didn't set me up for a job at the United Nations, alas. My degree did involve a year and a half of Mandarin Chinese, which is as exotically near to my teenage ambition as I've got so far. Otherwise, I've only managed reasonable French and German, GCSE level Italian, a few words of Polish picked up when I taught English at a summer school on the Baltic coast and a bit of Danish from a couple of extended holidays there and watching too many episodes of The Killing. Regretfully, all my languages are horribly rusty now, as I never get a chance to use them. I also tried to learn Spanish when we moved to York through the university's Languages For All scheme, but I just got it muddled up with Italian. I also didn't get on with the class at all, as the teacher was desperately trying to make it "fun" for a bunch of disinterested 18 year olds. I was the annoying one in the corner tutting "Stop making me sing pop songs and tell me how to form the pluperfect tense instead." Get rid of the games and bring back grammar, I tell you! (That is the short version of my treatise on foreign language teaching in this country.)

So Welsh, eh? Well, I'd never had a go at any of the Celtic language either, only laughed at them on signposts. Here we go. I promise you I am writing all of this out from memory and haven't just copied and pasted it in from the Internet:

1 = un (pronounced een)

2 = dau (pron. die)

3 = tri (pron. tree)

4 = pedwar

5 = pump (pron. pimp)

6 = chwech (pron. [x]wear[x] where [x] is a voiceless velar fricative like in Scottish loch)

7 = saith (pron. sigh-th)

8 = wyth (pron. oith)

9 = naw (pron. now)

10 = deg (pron. day-g, though the vowel is more like Cardinal 2 [e] for you phoneticians out there...)

11 = un deg un

12 = un deg dau

13 = un deg tri

14 = un deg pedwar

15 = un deg pump

16 = un deg chwech

17 = un deg saith

18 = un deg wyth

19 = un deg naw

20 = dau ddeg (the dd is a voiced alveolar fricative, like at the beginning of that)

21 = dau ddeg un

22 = dau ddeg dau

23 = dau ddeg tri

24 = dau ddeg pedwar

25 = dau ddeg pump

26 = dau ddeg chwech

27 = dau ddeg saith

28 = dau ddeg wyth

29 = dau ddeg naw

30 = tri deg

31 = tri deg un

32 = tri deg dau

33 = tri deg tri

34 = tri deg pedwar

35 = tri deg pump

36 = tri deg chwech

37 = tri deg saith

38 = tri deg wyth

39 = tri deg naw

40 = pedwar deg

41 = pedwar deg un

42 = pedwar deg dau

43 = pedwar deg tri

44 = pedwar deg pedwar

45 = pedwar deg pump

46 = pedwar deg chwech

47 = pedwar deg saith

48 = pedwar deg wyth

49 = pedwar deg naw

50 = pum deg

51 = pum deg un

52 = pum deg dau

53 = pum deg tri

54 = pum deg pedwar

55 = pum deg pump

56 = pum deg chwech

57 = pum deg saith

58 = pum deg wyth

59 = pum deg naw

60 = chwe deg

61 = chwe deg un

62 = chwe deg dau

63 = chwe deg tri

64 = chwe deg pedwar

65 = chwe deg pump

66 = chwe deg chwech

67 = chwe deg saith

68 = chwe deg wyth

69 = chwe deg naw

70 = saith deg

71 = saith deg un

72 = saith deg dau

73 = saith deg tri

74 = saith deg pedwar

75 = saith deg pump

76 = saith deg chwech

77 = saith deg saith

78 = saith deg wyth

79 = saith deg naw

80 = wyth deg

81 = wyth deg un

82 = wyth deg dau

83 = wyth deg tri

84 = wyth deg pedwar

85 = wyth deg pump

86 = wyth deg chwech

87 = wyth deg saith

88 = wyth deg wyth

89 = wyth deg naw

90 = naw deg

91 = naw deg un

92 = naw deg dau

93 = naw deg tri

94 = naw deg pedwar

95 = naw deg pump

96 = naw deg chwech

97= naw deg saith

98 = naw deg wyth

99 = naw deg naw

100 = cant

Phew! Now, even though I can't pick up languages as easily as I used to, this all struck me as surprisingly logical. Which isn't what you'd expect from a language that has mutating nouns, starts every sentence with a verb and thinks Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch is a sensible village name. Unfortunately, it turns out this logic is deliberate. These are the new decimal Welsh numbers, devised after Welsh language schools became widespread and they needed an easy way to do maths. The original Welsh numbers were on a vigesimal system, which is apparently still used in telling the time and in counting money, and by older speakers of the language. A vigesimal system has a base of 20 rather than of 10. You see remnants of one in French, where 99 is quatre-vingt-dix-neuf, literally "four twenty nineteen", or in traditional English phrases such as "four score years and three", meaning 83. (Incidentally, the French-speaking Swiss have wiped out the vigesimal in their numbers too - 70, 80 and 90 are septante, octante (or huitante in some cantons) and nonante.)

So this meant that I had to learn a whole other way to count to 100 too. I'd like to think my dad knew this and was deliberately setting me a really hard challenge, but no. He just got lucky.

1-10 are the same as above.

11 = un ar ddeg (so we're more old-fashioned here, literally "one and ten")
12 = deuddeg
13 = tri ar ddeg
14 = pedwar ar ddeg
15 = pymtheg
16 = un ar bymtheg (one and fifteen and look, that noun just mutated at the beginning)
17 = dau ar bymtheg
18 = deunaw (two nines)
19 = pedwar ar bymtheg
20 = ugain
21 = un ar hugain
22 = dau ar hugain
23 = tri ar hugain
24 = pedwar ar hugain
25 = pump ar hugain
26 = chwech ar hugain
27 = saith ar hugain
28 = wyth ar hugain
29 = naw ar hugain
30 = deg ar hugain (ten and twenty)
31 = un ar ddeg ar hugain (eleven and twenty)
32 = deuddeg ar hugain
33 = tri ar ddeg ar hugain
34 = pedwar ar ddeg ar hugain
35 = pymtheg ar hugain
36 = un ar bymtheg ar hugain
37 = dau ar bymtheg ar hugain
38 = deunaw ar hugain (eighteen and twenty)
39 = pedwar ar bymtheg ar hugain
40 = deugain (two twenties)
41 = un ar deugain
42 = dau ar deugain
43 = tri ar deugain
44 = pedwar ar deugain
45 = pump ar deugain
46 = chwech ar deugain
47 = saith ar deugain
48 = wyth ar deugain
49 = naw ar deugain
50 = hanner cant (half a hundred) when on its own, otherwise deg ar deugain
51 = un ar ddeg ar deugain
52 = deuddeg ar deugain
53 = tri ar ddeg ar deugain
54 = pedwar ar ddeg ar deugain
55 = pymtheg ar deugain
56 = un ar bymtheg ar deugain
57 = dau ar bymtheg ar deugain
58 = deunaw ar deugain
59 = pedwar ar bymtheg ar deugain
60 = trigain (three twenties)
61 = un ar trigain
62 = dau ar trigain
63 = tri ar trigain
64 = pedwar ar trigain
65 = pump ar trigain
66 = chwech ar trigain
67 = saith ar trigain
68 = wyth ar trigain
69 = naw ar trigain
70 = deg ar trigain
71 = un ar ddeg ar trigain
72 = deuddeg ar trigain
73 = tri ar ddeg ar trigain
74 = pedwar ar ddeg ar trigain
75 = pymtheg ar trigain
76 = un ar bymtheg ar trigain
77 = dau ar bymtheg ar trigain
78 = deunaw ar trigain
79 = pedwar ar bymtheg ar trigain
80 = pedwar ugain (four twenties)
81 = un ar pedwar ugain
82 = dau ar pedwar ugain
83 = tri ar pedwar ugain
84 = pedwar ar pedwar ugain
85 = pump ar pedwar ugain
86 = chwech ar pedwar ugain
87 = saith ar pedwar ugain
88 = wyth ar pedwar ugain
89 = naw ar pedwar ugain
90 = deg ar pedwar ugain
91 = un ar ddeg ar pedwar ugain
92 = deuddeg ar pedwar ugain
93 = tri ar ddeg ar pedwar ugain
94 = pedwar ar ddeg ar pedwar ugain
95 = pymtheg ar pedwar ugain
96 = un ar bymtheg ar pedwar ugain
97 = dau ar bymtheg ar pedwar ugain
98 = deunaw ar pedwar ugain
99 = pedwar ar bymtheg ar pedwar ugain
100 = cant (same as above)

And now the swear words. My pronunciation guide on the numbers was a six year old girl, so obviously I couldn't ask her about the rude stuff. And somewhat disappointingly, despite being called Street Welsh, my phrase book didn't contain any swearwords. But unsurprisingly, there's plenty of websites devoted to the subject. Scouring through them, I picked three insults that were spelled consistently across pages and which would keep their English translations free of f-words. This also probably makes them more authentically Welsh:

1. Cer i grafu (pron. kerry-graffy) = go and scratch

2. T'in coc oen = (tin cock-oin) you are a lamb's male appendage

3. Dos i chwarae efo dy nain (dossy [x]wa-ray efo dee nine) = go and play with your grandmother

I'm still a long way from the United Nations, though if a Plaid Cymru member who can only speak like a Numtum with Tourette's ever ends up on the Security Council, I'm sure I'll be the first person they call.

Challenge Number 21 – Attend A Live Sporting Event

It being 2012, this had to be the Olympics. But by the time my friend Clare set me this challenge, the Olympic ticket ballot had been and gone. I hadn’t bothered applying because getting ourselves there seemed like a logistical nightmare. Even though we do have friends that we could have stayed with, after 9 years of living a capital commute, I didn’t trust Transport for London to be able to get anyone to Stratford, let alone over 300,000 people trying to get to a major sporting event all at the same time. The sweltering temperatures on the Tube in the height of summer (they can hit 50 degrees Celsius, I kid you not, and all TfL can do about it is tell you to carry a bottle of water) was one of the main reasons I wanted to leave London, and the thought of being trapped with a young child on the Central Line in meltdown in conditions illegal for animals was enough to trigger a massive meltdown of my own. If we hadn’t had Charlotte, I’m sure we’d have been keener to give it a go.

However, the good news was that football tickets had yet to go on sale. And attending a football match meant that we could avoid going to London altogether, but still see an Olympic event. Now, Dave is a massive football fan, and has spent his whole life following his home team, Carlisle United, through numerous trials and tribulations, and even the occasional moment of glory. But I grew up largely oblivious to the game. I was never allowed to play it school (girls did netball at my primary school while the boys did football, and I went to a very old-fashioned all girls’ secondary school, where football definitely wasn’t on the curriculum). My dad and brother had no interest in it. I remember watching my brother playing in a match at primary school and he could be plainly seen running away from the ball.

But then I moved to Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Football on Tyneside is an obsession. A religion. A way of life. There is no escaping it. The locals live and breathe it. It’s all they talk about. The crowds descending on the stadium at St James’ Park on a Saturday afternoon are a sight to behold. Every match is a sell-out. You see the black and white stripes of the Magpies’ kit wherever you go. Everyone has a Newcastle United top, young and old. A teacher friend of mine there said that even Santa wore black and white stripes in her pupils’ Christmas drawings. For me, it was astounding, even alienating.

The year I lived there, Newcastle United, under the helm of Ruud Gullit, were doing very badly. Even though I was doing my best to avoid football and took a while to become properly attuned to the Geordie accent, it was impossible not to know this. Striker Alan Shearer had been out of action pretty much ever since he’d cashed in his whopping transfer fee, thanks to a nasty knee injury. But he was still revered. He was God. His photo was in every shop window. If you think I might be exaggerating, here is what the bar is called at St James' Park today:

And then, unexpectedly, Newcastle United got to the FA Cup Final. They lost, of course. The city erupted in riots. All those shop windows with Alan Shearer’s photo in were smashed. But the team still had a victory parade the next day. I was there, watching from outside the university library. I saw Alan Shearer on the open-top victory bus and have a photograph somewhere to prove it.

I had a wonderful year in Newcastle. When my head of department in York suggested I think of doing my Master’s degree there, I was sceptical. But then I travelled up to Newcastle on the train, sweeping over the river Tyne on one of its stunning bridges on a glorious spring day, and my heart skipped a beat. Hopping on to a shiny Metro train to Haymarket and the university campus, it felt cosmopolitan and buzzing. The Georgian squares and terraced hills looked grandiose and important. The RSC did a season at its theatre. Magnificent, beautiful Northumberland was right on the doorstep. The Department of Speech offered me a big fat cheque to study there. It was just impossible to say no. Thanks to this ERSC scholarship, I was financially independent from my parents for the first time, which meant I could go out and have a lot of fun guilt-free. I was also properly single for the first time in years, which meant I could go out and have even more fun. It is slightly ironic that I met my future husband at the end of my second week in Newcastle, but if you’d told me that then, I’d have probably laughed in your face.

Bridges over the River Tyne

But anyway, let’s not digress too much from the subject at hand. Football. That summer, when I was writing my Master’s thesis (I did eventually decide to do some work), the World Cup was happening in France. Beckham got famously sent off, England was eliminated, and after everyone in Newcastle had calmed down, it was safe to go out again. I gradually learned, desperate for a break from the library, that going to drink beer in the right pubs while watching international football was actually a pretty enjoyable way to spend an evening. I slowly got hooked. I handed in my thesis just before the night of the final, Brazil vs France. I was exhausted as the adrenalin of writing and nervous energy of the past few weeks faded, so planned for a quiet evening at home, a couple of beers, and watching Brazil trounce France.

Those of you with football memories will know that that didn’t happen. But I have said ever since that I would love to see Brazil play live. And here we were, looking through the Olympic football schedule, and Brazil were due to play New Zealand at St James’ Park in Newcastle on 1^st August. Tickets were available. The challenge was saved.

Charlotte loves kicking a ball around the park at the moment, so we’d bought her a ticket for the match too. It only cost a pound. But then we got all the security information through with our tickets, realised we couldn’t take a push chair, were going to be seriously discouraged to bring any sort of bag or liquids and were expected to get there two hours in advance (was this a football pitch or an aeroplane?), and the prospect of taking her suddenly seemed very daunting indeed. Thankfully, our good friends in Gosforth offered to look after her for the afternoon and she had a lovely time playing with them and their two children. So our live sporting event also ended up as a bit of a date! How about that? Dave did take me to see Carlisle United play once (it was early on in our relationship), but this was going to be loads better. Cattle weren’t burning in the fields all around us for starters.

Out for a date

How St James' Park dominates the Newcastle skyline

St James’ Park is awesome. The sheer scale of it is unbelievable. The atmosphere inside is electrifying. I can’t imagine what it must be like to see Newcastle play on home turf. The stadium wasn’t as full as it would be on a normal match day, but was still pretty packed. We had an excellent vantage point. A man, who was sort of an Ant and Dec metamorphosed into one, was shouting into a microphone to get everyone pumped up for the occasion. The teams came out, there were announcements in French, anthems were played. We were at the Olympics and it was time for kick-off!

Look, it's me at the Olympics!

National anthem time

Kick-off

The match was very one-sided, as we could have expected. A grumpy New Zealander behind us yelled, “Who’s putting money in your pocket, ref?” (Only he pronounced it “riff”.) But the Kiwis were never going to be a match for mighty Brazil. A Brazilian band was marching along the stands, and Mexican waves started rolling around the stadium. A blue man appeared at one point. No one knew why. The game seemed to fly by in this party atmosphere. Truth be told, however, the match wasn’t quite as exciting as I had hoped. We weren’t seeing Brazil at their best. We didn’t need to. They were treating it all a bit like a walk in the park. One of their players got sent off for diving. But I only found myself wishing I’d brought a book along once. And Dave only rolled his eyes a couple of times at my ignorant questions. And at one point I did correctly manage to identify when the ball went off-side, so gold star please. Final score - Brazil 3, New Zealand 0.

The match gets briefly exciting when a stretcher comes on

The blue man

Final score

As it turns out, the Olympics aren’t the embarrassment we’d all feared. The opening ceremony was genius. The venues look stunning. The empty seats at events aren’t the fault of Transport for London. It isn’t even that hot. Team GB are currently fourth in the medals table. And now that it’s good after all, I wish we’d been able to go to London. I’m feeling very nostalgic about the city that was my home for the best part of a decade.

I may never be the world’s greatest football fan. But thanks to this challenge, at least I can say, “The Games of the 30^th Olympiad. In London. I was there. In Newcastle.”

Challenge Number 29: Make jam or marmalade

Well, this was an unmitigated disaster.

One of the many things I miss about my mum is her raspberry jam. It remains the finest I’ve ever tasted. She also made delicious marmalade, though it was advisable to be out that day as it always put her in a bad mood.

I’d never made jam myself, despite my friend Becky having bought me the Best-Kept Secrets Of The Women’s Institute: Jams, Pickles and Chutneys book for my 30^th birthday. I think her implication was that I was hitting middle age, which makes me worried about what I might be hitting now that I’m nearly 40. I did have a go at courgette chutney three years ago, when our allotment-owning neighbour left a marrow the size of an airship on our front doorstep. And though I say so myself, the chutney came out rather well. Even my dad liked it. This inspired me to ask for a jam pan the following Christmas. But soon after Christmas I found out I was pregnant, felt like crap, and the jam pan has remained in its box ever since.

So to celebrate the start of the Olympics, I decided to have my very first go at making jam. I chose the very British flavour of raspberry and rhubarb. I was even going to go and pick the fruit myself, but Charlotte woke up from her afternoon nap in such a foul mood that it was just easier to drive to the farm shop, show her their pet goats and chickens, grab some punnets of fruit, buy her a chocolate car, and leave as quickly as possible. She was marginally cheered up when the Red Arrows suddenly flew over, at least.

Waiting for the BBC coverage of the Olympics opening ceremony to stop being boring interviews and start being Danny Boyle, I weighed everything out and started cooking. And I was really quite surprised by just how much sugar is in jam. I thought I was following the Women’s Institute instructions very well. And I managed to sterilise some jars without smashing them. But then the jam would not reach the right temperature, and it continually failed all of its setting point tests. At the point it was about to boil over the side of the pan and a stench of acrid sugar began to fill the air, I gave up and just poured it into jars. It looked like jam. I’d made jam. Unfortunately, it’s disgusting jam. Unless you like burnt caramel with a slight tinge of raspberry. In which case, it’s probably all right, and you’re more than welcome to a jar. Even Dave, who is ever the diplomat and always tries to be complimentary about my cooking, said on dipping his finger into it, “Well, it was just your first attempt.”

I’m spending this morning trying to clean the black beyond-goo that’s stop-welded to the bottom of the jam pan. My mother and grandmother are probably turning in their respective graves at my hopelessness. I wish they were still here to tell me what I did wrong. The internet has provided some answers (and some helpful hints on cleaning jam pans) and it’s clear that this sort of outcome happens a lot. So I feel a bit better about it. The Women’s Institute didn’t bother to tell me that I might need to STIR the jam at some point. Or that I should maybe warm the sugar first. Or that I should cook the fruit very very gently before adding the sugar. This must be why I am not a member of the Women’s Institute. You’re just supposed to know this stuff.

What was stuck to the bottom of the pan

It’s annoying to have wasted quite so much delicious Balloon Tree fruit. I’d have been better off just mashing up the raspberries to smear on my toast instead. And now I understand why my mother always ended up in such a bad mood on marmalade-making day. Hopefully, if I brave a marmalade marathon during Seville Orange season, I’ll have a bit more clue what I’m doing.

On a more positive note, here’s some more bread for challenge 34 (= bake 40 loaves of bread in a year):

Loaf 13: Honey and sunflower wholemeal loaf

Loaf 14: Another honey and sunflower loaf, baked overnight to greet us the next morning

Loaf 15: Cheesy courgette loaf, a staple on our summer menu (baked in the oven)

Loaf 16: A rapid-bake white loaf

And here is my broad bean crop (from challenge number five - grow something new) in action, mixed into mushroom and pancetta pasta with home-made pesto and crème fraiche:

Challenge Number 22 – Read A Novel By Dickens

I’ve spent the past month ploughing through Hard Times and finally finished it at the weekend. I chose this challenge just because 2012 is Dickens’ bicentennial year, and I’d never read a complete one of his works. We read the first few chapters of Great Expectations at school, which meant we didn’t get further than Pip meeting Miss Havisham for the first time. And reading anything with my English teacher was made to be about as boring as boring gets. We just sat round in the classroom taking turns to read a paragraph aloud (and most of the class applied a dull monotone to their voices), and then would be set a waffly essay question to answer for homework. I didn’t read novels for years once I’d finished my English Lit GCSE and I still can’t bear the thought of Thomas Hardy. How much time this teacher led me to waste when there are so many wonderful books in the world!

Writing literary criticism brings back too many memories of my hated English Lit GCSE coursework and completely kills a book for me so I’m not going to attempt much here, but I do need to demonstrate to you that I have actually read Hard Times properly, so here goes...

I concluded that choosing his shortest novel wasn’t necessarily the slight cheat I’d hoped for and was in fact probably a mistake (but hey, I made some effort – it could have been A Christmas Carol or The Mystery Of Edwin Drood, which even Dickens didn’t bother to finish), and I might preferred one that was a little less didactic. I found it tedious to process the discourse attempting to portray a lisp (“a thplendid thoot of armour”) and a bad northern accent (“I ha’ fell into a pit that ha’ been wi’ th’ Fire-damp crueller than battle. I ha-read on’t in the public petition, as onny one may read”). Where’s the IPA when you need it? Oh, not invented yet.

There is too much trying to get certain messages across, and not much plot. There is a bit of excitement – a bank robbery, a near affair followed by a divorce, and a dramatic pit rescue – but otherwise it all felt a bit worthy. And the fact that he was apparently restricted by the available magazine space in Household Words for the novel’s original publication means he’s somehow condensed everything to focus on getting said messages across. But that’s not to say that Dickens’ messages aren't important or relevant to these, our current hard times. Particularly his beliefs that education shouldn’t be allowed to stifle creativity and that all bankers are evil. And then there’s the thought that the mighty industrial north of which he writes really no longer exists. Coketown’s mills (Coketown apparently having been based on Preston) would now be either derelict or yuppy flats.

Claire Tomalin, in her massive biography of Dickens, of which I have read only the relevant three pages, describes Hard Times as “close to [a] parable or fable” which “fails to take note of its own message that people must be amused”. But in Dickens’ defence, certain passages did make me laugh out loud. He is incredibly witty when he chooses. There are some typically Dickensian comedy names – Gradgrind, Sparsit, Bounderby, M’Choakumchild. Here are some of my favourite lines:

“If he had only learnt a little less, how infinitely better he might have taught much more.”

“No little Gradgrind had ever associated a cow in a field with that famous cow with the crumpled horn who tossed the dog who worried the cat who killed the rat who ate the malt, or with that yet more famous cow who swallowed Tom Thumb: it had never heard of those celebrities, and had only been introduced to a cow as a graminivorous ruminating quadruped with several stomachs.”

“A sunny midsummer day. There was such a thing sometimes, even in Coketown.”

“[Coketown] had been ruined so often, that it was amazing how it had borne so many shocks. Surely there never was such fragile china-ware as that of which the millers of Coketown were made... They were ruined when they were required to send labouring children to school; they were ruined when inspectors were appointed to look into their works, they were ruined when such inspectors considered it doubtful whether they were quite justified in chopping people up with their machinery, they were utterly undone when it was hinted that perhaps they need not always make quite so much smoke.”

“Any capitalist [in Coketown] who had made sixty thousand pounds out of sixpence, always professed to wonder why the sixty thousand nearest Hands [=workers] didn’t each make sixty thousand pounds out of sixpence, and more or less reproached them every one for not accomplishing the little feat.”

“The bank had foreclosed a mortgage effected on the property...by one of the Coketown magnates who, in his determination to make a shorter cut than usual to an enormous fortune, overspeculated himself by about two hundred thousand pounds. These accidents did sometimes happen in the best regulated families of Coketown, but the bankrupts had no connection whatever with the improvident classes.”

So there you go - teachers aren't allowed to use their imagination, play and song are important, the weather is grim up north, business owners don't like government interference, Thatcherism 125 years before she came to power, and dodgy mortgages. If that ain't relevant in 2012 Britain, nothing is.

Hard Times, despite the effort it took to read, has not put me off Dickens, and I’ll be looking to take on another. It will be A Christmas Carol next, however, just because it’s our book group’s chosen text for September. But after that... All suggestions welcome from Dickens fans out there.

Challenge Number Six – Drink Cocktails In a Glamorous Dress and Non-Clumpy Shoes

I can’t do dressing up. It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s just that I seldom get an opportunity to do it. And I don’t really know how.

I’ve never had a job that required me to look smart. (Apart from a Christmas job in a gift shop when I was 18, when I got told off by the manager for wearing pantaloons.) I worked in subtitling for nine years in London, which is very much a casual clothing environment. Any client contact was usually done over the phone. As in “Dude, where’s the tape for the programme you’re planning on broadcasting in 20 minutes’ time that we need to subtitle?” or “Hello, you need to put in warnings for strong language and sexual content for Late-Night Countdown” or “Hi, yeah, we’ve decided to edit out three minutes in the middle of this DVD extra that you’re delivering 38 language streams for tomorrow. Will that affect the subtitles at all?” As clients plainly had no regard for our sanity, they probably had little interest in what we looked like either. And living in London, if we went out for drinks or dinner after work, we just went straight from the office, as it was always too far to head home to change first.

Then I worked for three years in a baby language lab at the University of York. No point in skirts here either – I spent half the time crawling round the floor playing with stacking cups and mopping up dribble.

And now, as a full-time mother, when I’m still crawling round the floor playing with stacking cups and mopping up dribble, my appearance has definitely ended up taking a back seat. Permanent bags under the eyes and hair in dire need of cutting are the norm. And frankly you should just be grateful that I’ve even remembered to put clothes on, so please don’t complain about the fact that they are unironed and covered in dodgy stains. None of my clothes fit me any more as my torso is a completely different shape post-childbirth, but I can’t afford to replace my wardrobe as I’m not earning any money, and anyway, if I did, everything would just end up smeared with Petits Filous.

I can’t walk in heels, and am crap at doing make-up. It doesn’t help that I have a predisposition to knee dislocations. But how do women learn to do these things? Do they get lessons somewhere that I somehow missed when I was growing up? I guess my mother never wore make-up or heels either (despite being only 5’2” tall). And I started my teenage years in the ‘80s, so that was not the best influence on the make-up front – blue eye shadow, bad blusher, hair gel. My first boyfriends seriously disapproved of women with painted faces, and being young and foolish, I let them influence me.

So my friend Beth from Book Club set me the challenge of drinking cocktails in a glamorous dress, à la Carrie Bradshaw in Sex And The City. I added the non-clumpy shoes part, since I live in trainers. It’s a shame that this had to be a challenge rather than a normal thing to do. Nights out are a very rare commodity indeed these days. I’m always exhausted, and we hardly ever get a baby-sitting opportunity.

I do love cocktails. The best cocktail nights I’ve known were my hen night in Covent Garden (though this was understandably marred by the fact that my mum was diagnosed with cancer three days before it) and one during a trip to New York in 2002, where our friend Jessamine took us to some underground bar in the Lower East Side that I’d never be able to find again in a million years, and we ran up such a huge bar bill that we just had to hand over a credit card, shame-faced, at the end of the night. But I wasn’t wearing a glamorous dress for either of those. I’m no Sarah Jessica Parker – or any of the other members of the Sex And The City quartet. In fact, I was the one usually asking the embarrassing spelling questions whenever I had to subtitle it for Channel 4.

I did wear a fairly nice white dress a fortnight after my hen do, however. And I got a fake tan, a pedicure and manicure and various bits of me tanned, waxed and plucked for the occasion. And I paid someone to do my make-up for me. But I very determinedly wore flat shoes. (No falling flat on my face halfway down the aisle for me!)

Beth also decided to help me complete this challenge, even though she is pregnant so unable to drink any cocktails herself, and arranged a night out for us. But I had nothing to wear! I had no shoes that weren’t trainers! I’ve spent the last few months comfort-eating cake! Oh, what the flip. So we had a little clothes-swapping soiree at mine to get us in the mood. No, that sounds dodgy. I invited everyone over to mine and asked them bring their smart dresses that we could exchange for other smart dresses so that we all had something new to wear. Except I was far too fat to fit into anything anyone brought. But we had fun. I scoured the York charity shops for glamorous dresses, but without success. (I’d never realised just quite how many charity shops there are on Goodramgate.) Then a passing glance into TKMaxxxxx or whatever it’s called on Coney Street caught sight of exactly the sort of dress I had in mind at a justifiable price. So I bought it. And then I remembered I did have a pair of slightly glitzy shoes that I’d once worn as a bridesmaid. I managed to remember to shave my armpits and paint my toenails. There wasn’t time to diet. I was set to go.

We (those of us who made it, and hadn’t ended up ill, stuck in Manchester or giving birth) started the evening in 1331 on Swinegate, where Beth had booked us a table. But it was the epitome of why York on a Saturday night is a bad thing. The stag do. We hadn’t even sat down before a group of men dressed as cowboys and reeking of booze leered over and began fondling us with a giant donkey. I just feel way too old to humour this kind of thing, or even find it remotely humorous. We told them to sod off. They wouldn’t. Eventually, just as we neared the chucking water at them phase, they moved on somewhere else, though not before they’d loudly dismissed us a “bunch of lesbians” because we wouldn’t respond to their advances. Mm.

By this point the music in the bar was so loud that we were growing hoarse trying to have a conversation above it (I know, I’m sounding even older now) so we moved on to the Biltmore round the corner, which was a much more glamorous dress and cocktails sort of place (though bizarrely, it has excellent baby-changing facilities, I discovered). I removed my frumpy sandals, got my glitzy shoes out of my handbag and put them on. (You didn’t think I was going to attempt to walk anywhere in them, did you?) We had a lovely time.

I drank three cocktails in the course of the evening, a Woo Woo, a Rococo Fizz, and a Godfrey. We left for home at twenty past ten. Very tame, you might think. But I knew what was coming. True to form, Charlotte was up at six the next morning. This is the way of the world at the moment. Nights out always come with a price. Hangovers are no longer an option. It’s nearly two years since I last had a lie-in.

A Woowoo - vodka, peach schnapps, cranberry

Rococo fizz - Moet Chandon, strawberry vodka, passionfruit

Godfrey - lots of blackberry stuff. Very strong.

And I’ve still no idea how to do make-up.

Oh, and if anyone would like to help me repeat this challenge, I’m very open to offers.