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New-style summer slaw

I stole this pic off the internet. Sorry :(

In our house we reserve our most arch and nasty sneers for writers who cite writer's block. We are pragmatists! If either of us displays any preciousness about the process of writing (although not about what happens to our words afterwards) we leap on each other like Veloceraptors.

If I ever see Giles dare to make a few notes about a forthcoming piece I will shriek in high falsetto "Dear Diary, today was a really good day. Saw Polly in the coffee shop, I think she really likes me. Did 40 press-ups today. My arms look amazing!" Then I have to stop because I am falling about laughing and cannot speak and then have a coughing fit.

If I ever dare to mention this blog, or the e-book spin-offs, in anything except totally derogatory terms, I get a machine-gun ribbing complete with flopping hand-gestures, questions about how much my last royalty cheque was for (£39.50) and so on. 

It is not personal, we're just not terribly nice people and both grew up in houses where mealtimes were a fight-to-the-death with put-downs and schools where everyone was foully mean to each other all the time. To be seen to be making an effort was the worst crime in the world. We've also both worked in newsrooms where you just sit down and write any old shit most days and just file it on time. In the end, when commissioning editors are casting around for writers, they mostly just want someone to file the fucking copy on time. When I started writing for magazines I could never get used to how long deadlines were. "Could you file it for… hmmm…." the comm ed would say "the end of next week?" and then pause, audibly grimacing at the short notice. I would shout with laughter, my pen still hovering over a  piece of paper, poised to write "4 PM". 

So the idea that you don't just sit down at a laptop and start writing, not stopping until you are finished is anathema to us. "Do you read each other's stuff?" people say. Giles sends me his copy sometimes, just so that I know in advance what completely made-up things I will be appearing in The Times as saying. But I almost always only say "It's brilliant! It's the best thing I've ever read! They are so lucky to have it!" because if I don't say that, he will snap "I don't write by committee!!" and then throw a chair out of the window and burst into tears. 

I never show Giles my copy, ever, because he prints it out, reads it line by line with a ruler and gives it back to me covered in red scribble. "Serious problem with tenses," it will always be will have saying. 

And yet… and yet… there are only so many words in the world, only so many things one has to say, only so many things one is inspired to cook. 

This is a roundabout way of saying that I have an e-book deadline for the end of July, which I am finding time-consuming. The new book is called "The Bad Mother" and I haven't especially mentioned it because I am so used to not really discussing ongoing projects, because in our house you are so busy writing and writing and writing that you never stop to mention what you are writing because you are writing it and not just fucking talking about it. My favourite thing ever is when Giles opens the paper and there's me in it with a massive pic and a huge headline and he goes "Wow!" and I think "BOSH" because he never saw it coming. Plus, if I tell him that I am expecting something in the paper and they don't run it and I look even a tiny bit disappointed, Giles drives at 400mph to the editor's house, shoulder-barges the front door and throttles them - and that's one hell of a responsibility I tell you. 

Anyway although a lot of the posts here can be semi ripped-off for this "book" and are all very good memory-jogs, the fact is that I am having to write this "book" mostly from scratch. And I've never been ace at that - I'm brilliant at starting books, but not so terrific at finishing them. That's why I'm a journalist - a sprinter - and not a novelist - a long-distance runner. But the plain fact is that I have to finish it and the only way to do it is to spend all spare writing time when I am not putting clean pants in the right place, making Kitty's packed lunch, heaving Sam around the place or applying St Tropez Gradual Tan (Light/Medium), writing it and not, alas, this blog. 

But I feel sorry for you, because that's the kind of patronising person you have decided to hitch your cart to, and so here is a recipe for a new kind of summer slaw. I actually totally forgot to take a photo of it, so I'm sorry about that. But it looks like a slaw just with no revolting claggy mayo or yoghurt dressing on the top.

I gave this for dinner to my friend AC and her husband Matt, who doesn't eat much and never says he likes something if he doesn't - and he called it "noteworthily good", so you may proceed with confidence. 

New-style summer slaw

I have called this "new style" because I think it sounds very modern

for 4 as an accompaniment 

1/2 red cabbage

1/2 white cabbage

1 tsp grated onion (if you've never grated onion before, it comes out as a kind of gloop)

4 radishes

1 small fennel bulb

a handful combined of chopped mint and coriander - these are quite important so do go to some effort to source them

for the dressing

Chinese vinegar

juice of one lime

1/2 tablespoon (ish) grated fresh ginger

fish sauce

toasted sesame oil

1/2 clove garlic grated 

1 either slice with the grating attachment of your food processor or with a Japanese mandolin the cabbages, radishes and fennel bulb into a bowl. Add the grated onion and mix well. 

2 Take a small bowl and put in the lime juice, fresh ginger. Now add about a teaspoon each of the fish sauce, toasted sesame oil and Chinese vinegar and taste. Now add more of these sauces judiciously until you have something you like the flavour of. This is not because I cannot remember how much I put in of each! This is just because not everyone likes a dressing like this the same way. (It is because I cannot remember.) Anyway look you can't really go wrong so just go for it. Pour the resulting dressing over the slaw and mix well. 

Now write your novel. 

Chicken and dumplings

This looks horrible but honestly it was delicious

I have been asked to do a bit more on the feeding of small children and I do, as it happens, have some new things to say on this fabulously tricky subject.

So the situation is this: Sam will be one next week, (which is staggering considering he's still such a massive, fat, melon-bummed baby who can't crawl or anything), and will no longer eat puree and isn't especially terrific at feeding himself. Or so I thought.

Because I am not terribly bright, I have always thought that one day babies go from being spoon-fed puree, to sitting down and eating giant Sunday roasts totally competently, on their own, with a knife and fork.

I thought there was something wrong with Kitty when she failed to do this. In fact, I now see that there is a torturous in-between stage where you have to put aside your bourgeoise expectations of keeping your children and their terrifying barbarism at arm's length and get your hands dirty.

It has always struck me as bizarre that although as a species we live entirely unnatural lives - we fly in airplanes, have central heating, electric lights - when it comes to babies people go wild about everything being natural. You must co-sleep because it is natural, you must breastfeed exclusively because it is natural, you must chew up your kids' food and spit it out of your mouth into theirs because it is natural. I'll tell you what else is natural - dying of diphtheria, headlice and being murdered by Vikings.

But in this instance, I concede that if Sam is going to eat, I have to drop the fucking attitude.

So feeding Sam is now a three-pronged attack. I give him something large to hang on to and gnaw at, like a corner of bread, a triangle of hamburger, a ball of sausage; other small pieces of stuff are placed on his highchair tray, a bit of potato, pinches of chicken, pre-chewed (hurp) bits of serious meat like stewed beef or spare rib or whatever. Then from a bowl of meat, veg and carb I pinch together little combinations of food and feed him by hand.

For example, at lunchtime today I bought a chicken and avocado sandwich from Pret and gave him that; I tossed away the salady leaves, gave him some of the bread to chew on, pinched tiny bits of chicken up and put them on his tray and then mashed up marble-sized combinations of chicken, avocado and bread to post into his gob with my fingers.

It's a very slow, rather messy process but the fact that he's eating it, (and with the sandwich meaning I haven't had to bloody cook anything), outweighs everything.

I also find that most mealtimes have a sort of arc of speed that you have to respect and have patience with. It takes Sam a while to get going and warm up - he spat out the avocado a few times and turned his head away from the offered chicken for a few minutes - then he decides he's hungry and things descend into a sort of orgy of gobbling, finger sucking, licking, gaping mouths, trembling tongues. He wants to feed me, jamming things into my mouth and going "maaaah", (just to check, I suspect, that I am not trying to poison him).

yes the bib is from Ikea. yes I know you have the exact same one

Then he slows down and starts launching things off his tray onto the floor, hanging his head over to see where it has gone. I usually take this as an indication that the savoury part of lunch is over. Today he got for his pudding half a slice of Pret banana cake (no icing), which he poked down with a speed and alacrity I haven't seen since his father left for America. Then a yoghurt, then a 5oz bottle, then bed.

All this might seem obvious to everyone else, but I would never have believed you when Kitty was Sam's age that I could have bought a sandwich and fed that to her for lunch. It would have halved my blood pressure. Or she might have refused to eat that, too.

A great success last night was a meal of chicken and dumplings, inspired by the song She'll Be Coming Round The Mountain ("Oh, we'll all have chicken and dumplings when she coooooomes…") Sam liked it a lot. He likes especially to hold on to a chicken bone like Bam-Bam and chew on it. Kitty was more reluctant about the dumplings, but she ate the chicken and I provided on the side some chopped cucumber and carrots for her to have with it.

Chicken and dumplings with gravy

6 chicken wings or 3 chicken thighs
85g self raising flour
40g beef suet
salt
parsley if you have it
about 150ml chicken stock
1 tsp plain flour

1 Roast the chicken pieces at 180 for 40min in a small tin that can also go on the hob.

2 Meanwhile make the dumplings - mix together the flour and suet with a large pinch of salt (if you want) and a sprinkling of parsley - then add some dribbles of water and bring this dough together until you get a soft consistency, not too dry. Shape them into four or six balls.

3 Steam these in a steamer or in a sieve over a pan of boiling water for about 20 minutes. They can sit in the steamer to keep warm until you're ready for them (just turn the heat down).

4 Take the chicken out of the oven and put the pieces aside to cool. Sprinkle a teaspoon of plain flour over any juice or grease in the tin (there won't be much, don't worry about this) and mash it about until there is sort of a paste. Then pour over a splash of the chicken stock and mix this in. The pour over the rest of the stock and whisk over a medium heat until you get a gravy. You can add a dash of soy to this for a bit of extra flavour.

If you are thinking that this seems to be an awful lot of hassle for kids tea then you are right, it is. But once you've done it once, it will seem less of a hassle the next time - and the dumpling dough can be made in advance.



Try not to worry, if you too are at this stage of weaning, about waste. It's just one of those things with kids, it's impossible to get amounts exactly right. It's also difficult to cook very tiny amounts of things, so compost and use leftovers where you can but beyond that, just put it in the bin and forget about it and make a donation to Oxfam to assuage your guilt.

Don't not try out new things because your heart sinks at the idea of waste (as mine did with Kitty, which is why her meal repertoire is a bit thin). Children obviously have things that they'd rather eat than not and no child should be expected to eat everything - or, some days, to eat anything - but at the same time they will just eventually eat things if they come across them often enough.

For example Kitty and Sam eat toast with quite bitter marmalade because that's what we eat; Kitty will drain the dregs of your espresso if you look the other way for a millisecond, because that's what there is lying about the house. She will even, one time in three that it is offered, eat an entire floret of broccoli. I've always put it in front of her and not said a word about whether she eats it or not. Not like I'm so fucking brilliant, but it does work. Sometimes she'll fancy it and nosh it down, other times not. I'm the same really.

Other things:

- To save time I will quite often cook a batch of rice up at either breakfast or during Sam's lunchtime naps, which can then later be quickly fried off in a pan with some butter and frozen peas.

- New potatoes will cook in 20 min in an oven at top whack, and they can then be roughly mashed with butter and you don't have to bugger about boiling anything. NO SAUCEPAN TO WASH UP.

- I hammered a nail in to the wall next to my sink and hang on it a special j-cloth, to be kept chemical-free, to wipe small faces and hands so that we don't go through 40,000 wet wipes every mealtime.

- I always keep handy for Sam a lot of yoghurt, Ella's fruity pouches and rusks in case dinner is a total disaster and he needs to eat something else just for my own neurotic peace of mind.  I personally don't think that a child under about 18 months will be canny enough to reject food because they "know" that you will give them something else. It is hard with your first child to understand that, but they are terribly dim - if they can't see it, they don't know it's there. Or rather, they can't be sure enough to hold out for it.

- Now Sam isn't eating mainly pureed veg and is drinking cow's milk, I give him Abidec vitamin drops every day. Kitty has chewable vitamins, like a fortified Haribo. The "sweetie fairy" leaves it for her on her Trip Trapp every morning and she gobbles it down. Sucker.

-I read to my children at teatime. Pretty much the only thing Kitty is not allowed to do is eat her lunch or tea in front of the telly. If I let her she would sit and eat everything on her plate, but I just can't do it. Everyone's got a line they don't cross and that's mine. So instead we read and it means that she will keep eating after she has satisfied her basic hunger, rather than running off, and also she will distractedly stuff things in her gob that she might otherwise be suspicious of.



On an entirely separate point, it's my birthday today. I know how you all like to keep up to date with important events in the Rifle Calendar.

Since you didn't ask, I am 34. I don't feel at all old. The oldest I've ever felt was when I was 25 and although at times it hasn't felt like it, life has improved every year since.

Ham and cheese croquettes

You know those times when you actually feel, despite everything, quite organised? When the house seems reasonably tidy - old sandwiches do not fall out of jigsaw boxes etc - babysitters have been booked in advance for important events, everyone has enough clothes of the right size, one's phone is charged and you know what everyone is having for tea tonight. That feeling?

I am having the opposite of that feeling. I feel like I am in a vortex of vague, a fog of ummmmm. I look at the clock and I am baffled as to how it's that time already, or Oh Fucking Christ it's only 8.20am. I look in the freezer for food for Sam and realise it's all gone. But didn't I only just cook up a massive batch of thingy to put in here? I sit down to do an Ocado order and realise I didn't bring my shopping list to the computer. So I get up to go and find it but then the doorbell rings, and I deal with whoever it is and then I shut the door and turn and I find myself in the hallway wondering what to do next.

So I stand about humming a bit, eyeing some cobwebs in high, far corners and then remember "The Ocado!" and dash to my computer and sit down… now *pat pat pat* where is my little list…. it's like this all the time. I feel drunk, unsteady on my feet - what is that bloody pile of junk doing there, still? - I feel like I am slurring my words but I'm not. I can't describe where things are, I forget what month we are in, what day it is. I'm like Johnny 5, but not alive. Show me a rorschach and I will say "Who's going to clean up that fucking mess, then? Me?!"

Meanwhile Kitty, on holiday from nursery, sits in a corner with no pants on "doing stickers" with a painless nosebleed that has gone unnoticed by everyone including her and she has smeared a scarlet streak across her face from nose to ear. My stomach lurches as I pluck out wet wipes to dab at her face while she claws me away. Tiny sticky ballerinas, flowers, bumblebees are scrunched in the crevices of her tense restless grubby hands; a pirate swings crazily about, scaling the rigging of her fringe - a bear holding a briefcase is plastered to her vest.

I smell, again, that faint but unholy stink in the air that everyone has decided is a dead mouse under the floorboards. They look at me accusingly. Why have I allowed the mouse to die and decompose under the floorboards? What am I doing to rectify this situation?

What have I been doing? What it feels like I have been doing for the last three years is tidying up the kitchen only for it to be a total fucking dump the next time I look at it. WHO IS MAKING ALL THIS MESS???? Is it me? Is it Sam who now wants to feed himself with a spoon and is actually quite good at it but also dumps a reasonable amount on the floor, too? Is it my husband, who is back from America briefly before he goes again on some day in the future, the distance away from now a thing I cannot possibly compute? Who is it? WHAT IS HAPPENING???

I think it is a combination of my husband being back from America and Kitty being at home from nursery. Neither of them are particularly troublesome on their own but I am the lightning rod, the buck stops with me. The tiny cogs that turn and make up their lives - that's me, too. Loo roll, toothpaste, lunch, clean pyjamas, clean pants, shoes in the right place, a rucksack with water, snacks and spare pants to take to the zoo. Me. Enough detergent to wash the pants. Me. Dinner tonight, me. So one extra person around during the day, let alone two, means about 4,000 more cogs to attend to.

I don't want to sound like a martyr, it's fine, I don't mind doing it, but I don't seem to be able to do it properly. The thing is that when you spend your life dealing in tiny details, ("are there anymore bulldog clips so I can close this just-opened packet of pasta?", "mum can I have another sticker page?", "could you post these letters if you're going up the road?", "can I have some water?", "we need a babysitter for Thursday"), you live your life in five minute chunks. And when you do have an hour alone, you so expect to be interrupted any second now with a request, an emergency, a doorbell, a phonecall, that you cannot settle to anything. You rack your brains to think of what you ought to be doing right now and you cannot think. You just cannot think. You stare out of the window at the sunshine and then turn back to the clock and it is fifteen minutes later. Fuck!

Then just as your husband walks in the door with your three year old a cold hand squeezes your heart as you remember that you forgot, on your little sally up the road for a few things, to get anything for lunch.

My husband comes off worst at times like this, as husbands tend to, and while he was back briefly from America I have him a series of panicked dinners that were so terrible that I really felt quite sorry for him and guilty, even though my husband will eat anything.

Then he went away again and Kitty went back to nursery and Sam, sensing that it was his role, now, as man of the house, to shake things up a bit, decided to go from slurping down any sort of puree you danced in front of his nose to eating only an assortment of exciting and complex finger food, the catch being that he is not especially brilliant at eating it.

I have ended up making for him the sort of dainty dinners that Giles would fall and weep with gratitude to receive from my cirrhotic hand. The other catch is that Sam will only eat it if I have fucking chewed it once first. Yes you heard me. Any challenging mouthful he points at me like "fucking chew it you mother then give it to me". He looks at me intently, flaring his nostrils, the tips of his fingers quivering in anticipation, high on power, while I chew his bloody food and then hand it to him.

Anyway I don't care. It goes against my entire parenting facade to do this, but there's no-one to see.

The other thing that I have been doing while my husband is away again is trying to get both kids to eat the same bloody thing, which is harder than it sounds. But tonight they had ham and cheese croquettes with broccoli on the side, which went down really well and I recommend them to you.

I am grateful to Becky B for suggesting this to me.

Ham and cheese croquettas
makes about 6


(I've got no idea how echt a recipe this is, I just made it up. It works fine but the croquettes come out quite fragile - there might be a trick to making them a bit more solid but I don't care what it is so don't tell me.)

here we go

2 potatoes smaller than your closed fist
a handful of cheddar, grated
2 slices cheap ham, diced
garlic granules (if you like) or a very tiny amount of freshly squeezed garlic
about 25g butter
fresh breadcrumbs or medium Matzoh meal
1 egg, beaten
oil for frying

1 Chop, boil and drain your potatoes for 20 mins. Pass through a masher or a potato ricer. My husband got me a potato ricer for Christmas but I only used it for the first time yesterday and it's AMAZING.

2 Mix the potato immediately with the butter, cheese and ham, season with the garlic and salt and pepper (depending on how you feel about giving this to kids) and then leave to cool down a bit.

3 When cool enough to handle, shape into sausage shapes, roll in the beaten egg, then in the breadcrumbs then fry for a bit each side until golden brown. There is nothing raw here that needs to be cooked, except the egg but, really, come on, so just until they're brown will do.

Give them to your kids and watch them VANISH like a magic trick. No pre-chewing required. Then stop starting every sentence with "Has anyone seen my….?" because it's annoying.

Chickpea, tomato and cucumber salad

My husband has gone to Canada to make a television programme for the W Network and is away for most of two months. He is back for two weeks in the middle but then away for three, so we're all saying to ourselves that he's away for 2 months because that's pretty much what it amounts to.

He went away once before, for a week, when I was pregnant with Sam and it was entirely fine, although I had been dreading it. I missed him, of course, but in fact quite enjoyed myself. I ate dinner with Kitty at 5pm every night and then after she had gone to bed I gorged on bad telly and very small, watered-down glasses of wine and rang people I hadn't spoken to for years and had long gossips.

This time it is not as amusing. The house is empty, spooky and creaky. I feel strangely exposed and vulnerable here on my own - I do not look forward to the long, silent evenings at all. There is nothing I want to watch on TV and I can't think of anything to gossip about. I feel like some sort of doomed Lord of the Rings character; stricken, frozen, pale by a small stream in some lonely dark forest waiting, waiting, waiting for my husband to return.

I keep the house tidier than I normally do even when he is here, I have grimly adopted his chores, devotionally taking out the compost, doing the recycling, putting shoes away, switching off lights, asking no-one in particular why the milk is out of the fridge, closing doors, locking windows. I have already cleaned and edited the fridge twice, even though my husband is the only one who cares what state it is in. We are suspended, set in aspic. Waiting.

Things were not helped by Kitty almost immediately coming down with a nasty virus that gave her a temperature close on 104F and a weird blotchy rash, which wouldn't have bothered me especially, but nursing her through it while hefting super-clingy, whine-machine Samuel "Grabby" Coren and his massive fat arse around at the same time drove me fair out of my wits.

Anyway Kitty recovered remarkably quickly, (whatever sort of virus can survive a temperature of 104F, it wasn't this one), and I have had time to reflect how often I kid myself that I am the one in charge of this house, of this family. My husband is in fact the one who keeps things together, sorting out boring stuff like leaks, infestations, rings on the doorbell after 9pm, stolen cars and emergency dashes to the hospital with floppy infants.

The only thing I seem to be responsible for in this house, it turns out, is making sure everyone has clean pyjamas and pants. (And sometimes even that falls to piss.)

And dinner, I suppose I do most of the dinners. But without my husband here I am absolutely adrift when it comes to evening meals. I know from experience living on my own that you really do need to do something for dinner because otherwise you end up drinking too much and eating a lot of salty snacks, which is fine one or two evenings a month, but as a daily dinner plan it won't do. But when I start to think, at about 3pm, what I am going to have for dinner that night, my heart really plummets in a way it never does when I think about what Giles and I might have. I can just think what would Giles like?

And I can look forward to Giles asking me "What's for dinner?" so I can say "IT'S A SURPRISE" and then present him with something he either really loves, a boring old trusty tummy-pleaser, or something new and crazy. Sometimes the surprise is that HE is going out to get a takeaway. And occasionally, if I am feeling sadistic, I make something he doesn't like but that he has to eat anyway because I made him his freaking dinner.

But me, what would I like? God, I don't know. A pizza? A dozen Krispy Kremes? I don't know.

I have been ordering a lot of takeaway sushi and picking up Franco-Viet treats from Cardigan Club Cafe at the top of my road. And anyone who wants to see me, I immediately invite them round for dinner. I have decided that I am going to give each faithful pilgrim to my lonely look-out post a roast chicken (I can survive on the leftovers for the rest of the week) with a healthful salad that can be knocked up in 3 minutes - something where the heavy lifting is mostly in the shopping.

What makes a salad delicious? To my mind it's crunch, moreishness, zing and mild spice. And an element of… you know… ballast. We eat a lot of leaf-based salads in this house because, we just do. But a leafy salad with a vinegary dressing, it's so Seventies! Plus eating a large leafy salad can be so aesthetically awkward, levering spiky fronds into the gob - so reminiscent of a cat eating a large spider.

To come across as a really electric, fascinating and modern cook, one also only needs to use a lot of fresh herbs, (such a bore to get hold of), and maybe scatter some pomegranate seeds here and there and people whisper to each other at parties "She does this amazing salad". But in fact I don't have a failsafe wow salad, (which is in fact just an assembly job). The thing I do when I want to knock people's socks off is Jamie Oliver's Winter Coleslaw which is terrific, but a right fucking pain in the bum to put together I tell you.

Moro is a restaurant to which I have never been, can you believe it? But I am assured that it is the sort of place that one gets a showstopper salad. Sam and Sam Clark have obligingly written many books containing recipes for these creations and I am grateful to Anna Bateson for drawing my attention to, and personally recommending, this one.

Chickpea, tomato and cucumber salad, from the first Moro book
For 2 as an accompaniment

This is not the exact recipe, this is how I did it:

1 400g can organic chick peas, de-canned and rinsed
small bunch mint
small bunch coriander
1 tbsp vinegar
3 tbsp olive oil
juice 1/2 lemon
salt
1/2 garlic clove, grated or crushed
1/2 tsp grated onion
1/2 tsp dried chilli flakes
4 medium tomatoes - the best you can find - de-seeded and chopped
1 small cucumber or half a large one, chopped - and peeled if you like

1 Chop the tomatoes and cucumber up reasonably small, aim to get the pieces absolutely no bigger than 2cm x 2cm and if you can get them smaller than that, great!

2 Whisk together the olive oil, lemon juice, chilli flakes, vinegar, salt, garlic and grated onion

3 Put the tomatoes, cucumber, chick peas and herbs on a plate and scatter with the chopped herbs and then pour over the dressing and serve

Steak tartare

A friend of mine has just got pregnant and she was worried that she was feeling suspiciously well. Go and have a viability scan, I said. You can do that from 6 weeks, they stick a wand thingy, like a light sabre, up your whatsit and can see what's going on before 12 weeks.

And I've just realised that I never found out if she had the scan or what's going on (this is the kind of really on-it friend I am). So I texted her to find out what was happening and it suddenly crossed my mind that she might have had a miscarriage.

Which of course led me to thinking about my own miscarriage, a few years ago, that I never mentioned.

I never mentioned it because I did not want sympathy. I didn't want sympathy because I didn't need it or deserve it.

There I was, lying in the dentist's chair of Handsome Richard the dentist, all the way back in June 2012, getting my teeth done before going to see Alison at Ultrasound Diagnostic Services to get the light sabre as I was, in theory, six weeks up the duff.

I sat up in the chair and something felt terribly wrong.

"Are you alright?" said Handsome Richard, handsomely. He knew about my condition (we don't keep things from each other).

"I'm okay," I lied, although I'm sure Richard would have dealt with the situation like a pro. I raced wobbily out onto Bishopsgate and hailed a cab, ringing UDS on the way to see if they could see me early. I sat on a free newspaper to save the cabbie's upholstery.

After getting the light sabre treatment from Alison, who dealt with the unholy torrents of effluvia with complete stoicism ("It happens all the time"), my obstetrician came to see me. It was all over. No Baby. There never had been, it didn't look like - it was most likely a small collection of cells large enough to register as a pregnancy but it had stalled there. Fail.

"The most important thing," said Guy, my obstetrician, "is that you don't blame yourself for this."
"No, no it's okay," I said, suddenly feeling slightly high and mad, "I blame you."

To his credit, Guy thought this was hilarious, (he's mostly very straight-faced), but he actually slapped his thighs and laughed. Good old Guy. Almost enough of a dear to have another baby just to see him again. NOT FUCKING REALLY!!! HAHAHA.

I went home, where it was very quiet, everyone was out - though I now can't think where. I sat down in the living room and cried. Not because I was sad but because I just felt sorry for myself and lonely. And irritated - I was keen to get on with another baby because being pregnant is so shit. Now I had to start all over again.

The strangest feeling was that I now had to just sit there and wait. When one thinks "miscarriage" one thinks about drama: hospitals, grey faces, drama drama drama! But it was just me, sitting there still in my blood-stained leggings with no husband and no toddler - no baby - weeping for all the wrong reasons.

Later I texted Becky B saying "I'M HAVING A MISCARRIAGE RIGHT HERE IN MY HOUSE"

and she texted back "OMFG I AM COMING OVER" and she came round and we had tea and biscuits and went "God!!!" at each other and it was actually quite jolly.

Do not misunderstand me: miscarriage when there is an actual baby there, or when it is your first go at getting pregnant or have been trying for a long time to get pregnant or when you have suffered multiple miscarriages is … well, I can't  imagine what that must be like. But having a very early miscarriage when you've already got one baby and you're just speculatively having a go at another one - it's not anything. It's just annoying.

So I didn't want to bandy the M-word about willy nilly because when you tell people that you have had a miscarriage, they go quite bonkers with sympathetic grief - in a perfectly charming way - but you mostly have to spend the next 30 minutes talking them down off the ceiling (I would be the same) and it's perfectly exhausting.

Now, with a lot of critical distance, I can give you a run-down of the whole thing in a de-mystification of this awful, awful word, knowing - hint hint - that you won't all go bonkers in the comments asking me if I'm okay. YES I'M FINE NO I'M NOT NOW I'VE GOT TWO KIDS AND NOW IM FUCKING OSRRY.

And I learnt why you mustn't tell a soul that you are pregnant before 12 weeks, because if you do miscarry, it's not just the weight of your own feelings, (whatever they might be), that you have to deal with - it's everyone else's, too.

We're going to move on now, gear change! Gather up your skirts, "ladies".

I may have mentioned before how the new butcher up the road has changed my life, but I thought I would tell you again. It's changed my life! We can have exciting things for dinner, like steak tartare.

I absolutely love steak tartare but we've never had it at home, not once, because I rarely get hold of good enough fillet steak to do it with. You need the best fillet steak you can get your hands on - nothing from a supermarket will do. It must have been handled with care and never known plastic, let alone shrink-wrap.

Steak tartare is, to my mind, the only and very best thing to do with fillet steak. You must worship it and the sacrifice the animal has made, by eating it raw, simply, devotionally, praising each mouthful. To apply heat to it would be sacrilege. We normally get by on eating offcuts and odds and ends here - I do not believe in encouraging the damaging and wrong practice of intensive farming by eating best cuts, but we are happy to eat the bits of animals that no-one else wants: marrow bones, sweetbreads, wings, feet, ears with a clear conscience. I don't care if the best stuff is going to Gaucho Grills across London. (When I am Queen it will all be different.)

Anyway because I know where this butcher gets his meat from - small farms with a range of exciting extra-curricular activities and complementary therapies for the animals - I decided we could have steak tartare and bore it aloft to the table, accompanied only by a few pink fir apple potatoes baked for 30 mins, humming Mozart's Requiem. It was out of this world.

I took inspiration for this from Nigel Slater

Steak Tartare - for 2

200g best fillet steak
1/2 a small spring onion
4 small cornichon
2 tsp capers
6 drops tabasco
2 tsp worcestershire sauce
1 egg yolk
salt and pepper

This arrangement of seasoning gives you a very mild tartare, which I like - but I think it is customary to present on the table with the steak the bottles of Tabasco and Worcestershire sauce, plus more salt and pepper so if anyone wants to really blow the back of their head off (there's always one - maybe it's you?), they can.

1 You must chop the steak with a very sharp knife, not mince it or blitz it. This is an almost religious act of worship, here. Chop, chop and chop again until the pieces are small then put in a bowl.

2 Chop finely, too the small spring onion and the cornichon and add them to the steak, along with the capers, the Tabasco and the Worcestershire sauce, a bit of salt and a few turns of the pepper grinder.

3 Form this into a neat shape the best way you can see how, then make a small well in the middle of the steak and put into this a single egg yolk. Mix this together just before serving.

Lamb sweetbreads with a parsley salad

Sam is on the mend, though still so fragile, poor mite - and so I had 20 minutes to myself this morning while my husband looked after both children downstairs.

Surfacing after a baby's illness, (your ass entirely belongs to them as long as they are unwell), always reminds me of when I was out in Namibia with Raleigh International and every three weeks we would come back to base camp after being out on expedition.

You would unpick your hair from whatever hideous collection of clips, bands and sticks were holding it together and try and make sense of it with a hairbrush. You got actually clean with an actual long shower - with shampoo!! - in the showerblock. You dealt with neglected areas of your body - your toenails, fingernails, eyebrows, underarms. You put on clean clothes and weighed up whether or not to try to get the clothes you had been wearing for three weeks clean or to just burn them on the nearest campfire.

We would all unpack our bags and lay them out on groundsheets "Kit explosion!" we would all shout as karabiners and water steriliser sachets and walking socks and sunglasses went everywhere. I was reminded of that as I took everything out of the bag I had hastily grabbed in my flight to the Royal Free on Friday. I relocated my usual handbag and sourced from various corners of the house my wallet, my keys, lip balm, hand cream and put it in its usual spot by the front door.

A thing I did during this illness was to assiduously use hand cream. When your child is unwell an awful lot of hand washing goes on for one reason or another and your hands take the hit badly. I also have the regrettable and pretty awful habit of cuticle-picking. Pretty much at all times unless I am typing, I am harassing my cuticles. My husband hates is more than anything else in the whole world and thinks if I love them then I should stop. I tell him that it is compulsive, pathological - he says that I am just not trying hard enough. If we ever get divorced I am confident that he will cite it as unreasonable behaviour.

Anyway so if my hands actually get dry and there are bits of snaggly hangnail to actually get hold of then I can, within about 30 minutes or so, if I am anxious enough, reduce a finger or a whole hand to a bleeding, painful mess. A well-moisturised hand is harder to pick at but when there is an ill child somewhere I am likely to skip the hand moisturising part because I just can't be bothered. Anyway this time I made sure there was a pot of moisturiser next to every sink and it made a real difference to the post-illness clear-up I tell you.

I suppose I was able to focus on this act and do it because I was less stressed by this illness than I have been about previous ones of Kitty's. It is not that I am less anxious and concerned about Sam than I am about Kitty - it's that I am so much less anxious and concerned about myself. I have given up fearing for my own sanity, my own free time, my own sleep, because there is no point.

The next thing I do is gingerly open the fridge and assess quite how big a shop I'm going to have to do to re-stock its ravaged contents.

My new butcher is closed on Mondays, so I can't have the steak tartare tonight that I was thinking about having all weekend. But I can tell you about the sweetbreads we had the other week, which were terrific although I understand that this is useless to anyone who doesn't live near a really good butcher.

I have written about sweetbreads before, but it was a long time ago and they are worth mentioning again. If you feel really squeamish about offal then I'm not going to force you to have these but to anyone inexperienced but curious, they don't taste offall-y at all. They are very creamy and luxurious and it is good to eat the whole animal, not choice cuts - are you with me? (Though I draw the line at kidney.)

Lamb sweetbreads with a parsley salad

Some lamb sweetbreads
Flour
salt and pepper
large bunch parsley
a very small onion or shallot
lemon juice
capers


1 Rinse the sweetbreads and put them in a pan of cold, unsalted water, bring to the boil and simmer for five minutes. Set aside and leave to cool. Once they are cool enough to handle you can cut any very big sweetbreads in half if you want

2 put about four tablespoons of flour in a bowl and season heavily with salt and pepper then dust the sweetbreads in the flour and set aside

3 heat about 6-7 tablespoons of flavourless oil in a frying pan and get it nice and hot then fry off the sweetbreads for about five minutes (use a timer) until they are golden brown. you don't have to worry about undercooking these as they have already been cooked in the hot water

4 For the parsley salad, chop up the parsley finely with the capers and a small amount of onion - add lemon juice, salt and pepper

5 This is also nice with a thin, crisp slice of sourdough toast