Perspective: Spiders vs South Dakota

Like many people I'm sure, I am often lacking in a sense of perspective. I have a tendency towards drama and exaggeration.

"There was this spider in my house and it was literally about twenty feet across and had laser eyes and napalm breath!"

Well, look at the sucker. I wasn't that far off...


Sorry for the gigantic spider image. That should maybe have come with a warning...

I woke up today convinced that the next two years were going to be difficult and terrible and miserable, and that I would genuinely be better off staying in bed all day.

Then I got hungry, so I ate two banana maple oatmeal cookies and had a cup of tea, and life didn't seem so bad. I did some research into various things that have been troubling me, and read some magazines, and dealt with a couple of business issues. I took a step in arranging to catch up on the classes I've missed over the last few days (due to certainty that bed would be a better place to be - thanks, Black Dog).

Then I read about South Dakota and the snow storms. To those of us living in cushy little England where it barely dips below freezing and there's a Tesco's on every corner, understanding just how devastating and destructive the weather has just been is a little difficult.

Dating a cowboy means I can see how the loss of a vast proportion of your livestock would be damaging both financially and emotionally. Many ranchers put their cattle before themselves time and time again, sacrificing lazy lie-ins to go and feed and check up on their animals. Whole families revolve around the cycles of cattle: brandings and sortings and shipping.

I've started to see my future with Cowboy as having a large element of cow in it - he'd like to run a small herd of cows one day, alongside our horse business. That means I will probably have to help with the round-up, the branding, the sorting, the shipping. It means I will have to get up early to help feed (if only to help feed the hungry humans who go and do the real hard work). It means we might have to put our bedroom on the ground floor of the house so that when there's a sick cow or a difficult calving, Cowboy can go out every two hours without disturbing the kids or having to negotiate the stairs in his exhaustion.

Reading about those who have lost their cattle, and some who have lost their lives, was rather more emotional than I expected. It certainly put my problems a little more in perspective, made me rethink what was really important, and gave me a kick up the backside that I sorely needed.

Heart-warming broccoli and cheese soup

First up, here's a heart-warming, romantic exchange that Cowboy and I had early on in my trip out there this summer. I had asked him what he wanted from Walmart, and he said he needed shower gel.

B: What kind do you like? Irish Spring?
C: That's worked so far. If you want to get me something else, go ahead.
B: Do you want me to get something else?
C: If you want me to use it, sure.
B: It's nice that you're making an effort when I'm around...
C: That's what I'm saying - if you want me to use something else, you buy it and I'll use it. I'll let you make my effort for me.

See? Who says romance is dead? In the end I bought him the same shower gel he's always used (because it's cheap and I like the smell of it these days).

Soup! I had some broccoli pining in my fridge and some onions arrived in my vegbox today, plus soup is always a comforting thing to have in the freezer. I also really wanted something comforting in my stomach today. It's been one of those days.

Being conscious of the fact that I can't afford to buy new jeans and I need to stay the size of my current jeans, I like to steer away from recipes involving cream. This soup ends up a creamy consistency, and packs a lovely flavour, but is a touch less sinful than the cream varieties.

First up, slice up an onion and set it frying over some low heat in a little oil. I had half a courgette (that's zucchini to my America readers) hanging about in the fridge too, so I threw that in.



I love making soup in my one Le Creuset saucepan. It's indestructible and orange.

Chunk up the broccoli, stalk, leaves and all. It's all good nutritious stuff.



Throw it in with the onions and give it a good stir.
Then dice up some potato - I used a small baking potato, because I'm not educated about the differences between varieties of potato, and didn't care - and throw it in too.



I also suck at chopping, so I tend to use big chunks of stuff.

I only had the remains of a chicken stock cube, so that's what I used! Throw it in the pan, and cover with a little over half a litre of boiling water. Essentially, enough water to just cover the veg and make sure those potatoes cook through.



Add freshly ground black pepper, and some freshly grated nutmeg. There's nothing more marvellous than nutmeg.

Look at those fabulous stripes. I don't know about you, but I sort of see Totoro in them...

What was I saying? Seasoning! Don't worry too much about amounts just yet. The tasting and refining comes later.



Look at that lovely goodness... Mmmm... Let it simmer on a medium-low heat.

Cheese! Get your cheddar out. Grate a good handful or two.



(Side-note: there's a traditional soup recipe which is broccoli and stilton. Blue cheese isn't really my bag, plus it's expensive... Feel free to use stilton instead of cheddar if you love that blue cheese thing)

I like to use strong cheddar - at least a 4 or 5, because that way you get more taste from less cheese, and that's cheaper (in my head). This cheese came from Aldi. Don't dismiss Aldi when you're shopping - they have some wonderful products that I fill my stores with, and they are wonderfully cheap.

Once the potatoes are soft, blend your soup up. I use one of those stick blenders because I like how little washing up it generates. I don't like how much it splatters me, but you can't have everything.



It will be this gorgeous light green colour. Put it back on the low heat. Throw in your cheese!



Stir it around so it all melts in and becomes smooth and glorious. Taste, and add more seasoning if you need it. Mine needed more pepper, and, due to my low stock concentration, a little salt.

Serve it up. I ate mine without bread because I didn't have any to hand and was too hungry to defrost any. I didn't even need any - this soup is filling and delicious all by itself. I actually went back for seconds...



Enjoy!

Banana and oat cookies

I'm useless at eating bananas when they're fresh and ripe and just the way I like them. I leave them too long and as soon as they get a little bit brown and spotty, I have to find an alternative method of using them up. Wasting food gives me guilt.

I had bananas in my vegbox this fortnight, and forgot all about them. Guilt.

I often turn old bananas into cake, but that's usually when they're good and black and have a lot of sweetness and mushiness to them. This time I decided to make a slightly less sinful treat, and combine them with oats, which are my friends (wheat isn't really my friend...). I found this recipe on Pinterest a while back, and I'm still working on tweaks and improvements.



What's even better, is that this recipe is vegan, which means my best friend can also enjoy them. If I decide to share them at all, that is.



They take hardly any time to put together and cook in 10 minutes, and if you make a double batch like I did this time, you end up with a quick and simple glut of 80(ish) calorie goodness...



Mmmm. Hello, darlings...

You will need:

1 cup oats (I use quick cook oats and they are just fine)
1 ripe banana, mashed
2 tsp ground flaxseed (I use the ground flaxseed with extra berries and nuts added for some more flavour - if you don't have any flaxseed, you could substitute with one beaten egg to bind the mixture)
1 cup flour (I use whole wheat self-raising flour, but any other kind would do)
1/2 cup maple syrup
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 tsp lemon juice
1/4 cup raisins (if you fancy)
1 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp allspice
1/4 tsp nutmeg (freshly grated, please. Unless you don't have any whole nutmeg. In which case I'll forgive you)
1/2 tsp each of salt, bicarbonate of soda and baking powder

Combine ground flaxseed with two tablespoons of water and set aside to thicken.

Combine oats, flour, baking soda, baking power, salt and spices in a large bowl. I adore spice and banana, so I throw in a bit of everything, but if you're not sure about all the spices, go easy on the allspice and nutmeg, or leave it out. They give a lovely warm wintery taste.

If you're adding raisins (or mixed fruit, or chopped nuts), stir them in to the flour and oat mix.

Add maple syrup, lemon juice, vanilla and mashed banana to the flaxseed mixture and combine well.

Pour wet mixture into the dry ingredients and stir gently to combine.

Drop by heaping tablespoons on to greaseproof paper on baking tray and flatten the tops slightly. I usually get 12-15 cookies from a batch.

Bake at 190C/375F for 8-12 minutes until they are just golden around the edges. Set on a cooling rack to cool.

Perfect whilst still warm, with a cup of tea.

I have frozen most of this batch in bags of 6 cookies, in the hope that I won't eat them all at once. I've never frozen them before, so I'll let you know how they turn out once they're thawed...

Confession Time

I have a confession to make. I decided I should make it now, whilst I don't have many (any) readers and it's less terrifying.



I suffer from depression. That's not a bad mood, or a sad mood, or any kind of mood. It's a mental health condition. It's an illness. It's chronic, and it doesn't go away. Sometimes it's "in remission" and sometimes it's crippling.

I went to my doctor a few years ago whilst I was working at an office in London, concerned about my lack of sleep, my poor appetite, my unruly digestive system, my fatigue and my general sense of dread about life. I'd actually gone to see her about something else entirely, and added on a nervous question about stress as an afterthought.

"I wanted to ask you about managing stress," I said as she scribbled me a prescription for something else. "I mean... I'm not..."

I burst into tears. She offered me a box of the finest in NHS-funded flimsy tissues.

I was lucky that my GP was so kind and attentive and listened to my garbled sob story (literally) as I tried to explain that I couldn't get up in the mornings, that I felt like an observer in life, that my guts were churning over every single worry and fear I could think of, and that I was thinking of a lot of them lately.

She smiled sympathetically and said, "I don't think it's stress that we need to address here. I think it's your very obviously low mood."

Low mood. That's how the medical profession label it to start with. It sounds innocuous enough, as if it's just a little deflated and needs some air. My GP offered me antidepressants, although even she admitted they were little more than a chemical scratch for an itching sore, which I declined for exactly that reason. If my mood was low, I needed to find out why, and I needed to fix that.

She gave me a leaflet for a counselling service which had a sliding scale of fees depending on your income, and suggested they would be better than NHS therapy which would only be a few sessions, and likely wouldn't be of much use in managing a long-term condition like mine.

I went to weekly therapy for six months back in 2012. If anything, it gave me a morning off work once a week, and a place to go and say things that I thought were too idiotic to say to my friends and family. For the first few weeks I would sit and cry and talk about how I couldn't stop crying even though I didn't know why I was doing it. After that I began to struggle a little with what I wanted to say.

That's the problem with depression. It isn't about anything. I wasn't sad. I wasn't angry. I wasn't frustrated or tired or embarrassed. I wasn't anything. I felt like a big void was inside me, and I was drifting through each day just hoping to make it to bed so I could at least be unconscious for a few hours and not have to think about how empty and useless I felt.

Then I met Cowboy and my life changed direction entirely, and my demons took a pretty decent break. I no longer had the office drudgery, I lived somewhere new and quiet and pretty, and I met a whole new bunch of people. Gosh, I even had some fun.

In January and February this year, I had some low days. I had days when I couldn't get out of bed - I just couldn't do it. I hid away from people, convinced they didn't want to see me anyway, and certain that if I saw them, I'd only make the emptiness worse.

I still get those days sometimes, and I've noticed them sneaking back in more and more since I've come home from America. I need to take a stand, and writing this post is part of it.

A young man on my course took his own life over the summer, having battled his demons for some time. His counsellor came to speak to us to explain how good he had been at recognising his low moods and suicidal thoughts, and how diligent he had been at seeking help. It made me realise that I am no good at seeking help when I need it.

It feels like a failure to admit that I am in a place where I can't help myself, where I can't just snap out of it and get on with it. Even though I am one of the millions of people enduring the long battle with depression, I am all too quick to pass judgement about it, and deny myself the help I need.

Not any more. This week, I'll be going back to therapy.

Adjusting

I have scurried back to the Oxfordshire countryside for the weekend, trying to stay away from the bright lights of London and get my body clock back on Greenwich Mean Time. I've experienced a double-dip jet lag coming home, where I thought I had it conquered by Tuesday, but overslept until noon on Wednesday, and still struggling to go to sleep at night time and wake up at day time.

Cowboy is doing his best to help. At 7.30am this morning, he spammed my phone with messages:

You awake yet?
Wake up woman ;)
It's morning
Rise and shine
Wake up!!!!!!
Quit sleeping!!!!
Do I need to come pull the covers off you?

It took seven messages to rouse me from my dream, in which I was receiving messages from him telling me to search for something on Youtube but I didn't understand what it was I should be searching for. I was a little confused when I eventually came to.

I'm currently enjoying the wonders of... compression! That is tubigrip from my left ankle all the way up to above my knee. Swelling from my torn knee ligaments (long story) was apparently pooling in my calf and behind my knee, and needs to be encouraged to get out of there. I tend to view it as a nice excuse to put my feet up for a few more days.

I started to sort through my photos from Washington and Montana, and immediately began pining for my trip.


Doesn't seem like that long ago that I was sitting with my feet up, a cup of tea and a good book, with this glorious sight spread before me.

So it's only natural that, upon returning to London and to university, stricken with jet lag and PMT, my first impulse is to hide in my dad's man cave and research preserving jars. The adjustment phase is an interesting journey.

Returned

I've been returned to London. Cowboy drove me from the US, over the Canadian border (much, much easier than driving into the US from Canada) and to the airport where I picked up the long flight home.

After a day in the Oxfordshire countryside, I drove back to my home in London. London had a distinctly autumnal smell to it in the dark and chilly night air. Before too long I'll be wearing a scarf and my sheepskin boots again, watching fireworks and drinking vast amounts of tea just to keep warm.

But not yet. First, I spent a jet lagged afternoon in my parents' garden, which couldn't be more shamelessly English if it tried.




Then this morning, I returned to university. With jet lag so severe that I thought I was going to vomit, faint, and die, I sat through several pointless lectures introducing us to year 2, and slept through one actually useful lecture about something I will need to know in the future (lumbar spine dysfunction).

Whilst away in America, I had various adventures and learning experiences which I will share in due course, but the most foolish thing I did out there was to buy something that literally eats money... But she's so very pretty...



This is Sunshine, she's a 4 year old quarter horse mare with no breeding or papers to speak of. She's not worth much money, and she came to us with a little too much jiggle in her jig, having been living the easy life for a while. Cowboy loves her. He's turning her into a dream horse.

I get to deal with the sleeplessness and the jet lag for the next few days. Funny thing about the insomnia - it's not because I'm not tired. It's because it's too quiet. I imagined I'd be glad to have the whole bed to myself and not have to endure Cowboy snoring down my ear, but the reality is I miss the sound of him being there. I miss his warm, solid presence. At night I feel exposed and alone without him.

"I ain't sleepin' for sh*t right now," he said over the phone yesterday, which is Cowboy code for: he feels the same way.

He's coming over to England for Christmas, just as soon as he gets his dates worked out with his bosses and I can book his tickets. It's exciting beyond measure.

Powerless

Sometimes in life, we are powerless. The media and marketing moguls would have us believe that we can have anything, do anything, be anything, any time that we want (provided we can pay for it, of course), but the reality is that some things are just the way they are and there isn't much to be done.

As I lay awake last night until around 6am, fretting that I wasn't sleeping at the correct time and agonising over how this would ruin the rest of my entire life, I eventually shrugged and said to myself, "So, you're wide awake. You'll catch up eventually. Just be awake, then." Of course, the moment I let go of the angst I had pinned to my insomnia, I fell asleep.

I have an exam scheduled for tomorrow morning, which I'd very much like to have done already so that I can get on with my life without having to think about it, but there is nothing I can buy that will make the exam move, or make time go quicker. I could sit and fret, or I could sit and wait. Either will work, but one is more stressful than the other.

This morning, I heard from Cowboy that one of his employers doesn't think he's pulling his weight - opinions are like arseholes: everybody has one - and I get very defensive about him when people put him down. He doesn't deserve it, he works harder than anybody I've ever met, often for difficult people, and I am the only lucky soul who gets the brunt of his frustrations. There is nothing I can do about this, though. I can't snap my fingers and make people change their minds, nor can I magically whisk up the money and wherewithal to get him out of this job and in to a well-equipped ranch of his own so he can work for himself. Right now, I can't even give him a kiss and rub his aching back.

Powerlessness is an uncomfortable feeling, and many people would demand to try everything possible to avoid it. Some might say "There's always something you can do about your situation." They'd be right, but in cases like these, the only thing you can do is accept the situation. Be patient. Be forgiving. Be resilient.

There is a curious strength in giving up the fight against something you cannot overcome.