Words on Wednesday

Thistles and Kiwis

Well, it has been a busy day, with Pilates, packing and pottering down memory lane. The day began with tea and toast, followed by packing up the dolls’ house (which I have never featured on the blog for some reason – will need to wait for a while now for that as we are moving) before heading off for Pilates.

I had lunch at Dixon Street Deli, enjoying my favourite toast with avocado, pesto, tomato and halloumi, and taking the chance to read for a moment. It was then time to drop some books off and pick up some bread before heading home for clutter clearing, packing and soup making.

Packing can raise questions, amusing issues and dilemmas. For example, I found so many greetings cards – birthday, Christmas, no message – that I have now got a box dedicated to such things. As I said to a friend, I could almost start a shop! There were also what I will grandly call the family papers (something else I haven’t written about in the blog), finding tucked away my great grandfather’s membership of the National Liberal Club (which you can read all about here), and a snippet from a newspaper (probably the 1970s) sent by my mother’s cousin about a house for sale that cost £550 in 1928 (and probably £500,000 now).

I also found this portrait of me as a child painted by my mother, unfinished, because, as she said, I was the worst person to paint as I could not sit still. You can see she has tried to change the hairstyle a couple of times over the years. My brother Peter could be bribed with money to sit still, but me? No…. I do sort of remembering being told to sit still and getting very, very bored very, very quickly.

I finally had to escape to the kitchen to make a soup for dinner, using broth mix (split peas, lentils, barley for those of you who don’t know), carrots, silver beet and leek, and then adding a little spicy sausage as a garnish. Just the thing after an afternoon of discovery in the box room.

Thistles and Kiwis is a Wellington, New Zealand based blog written by Barbara, who likes cats, summer, good food and pretends to garden.

You can find Thistles and Kiwis on Facebook, and also on Instagram @thistlesandkiwis. If you want to get in touch, email me on thistlesandkiwis@gmail.com or lofgren@thistlesandkiwis.com

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Published by Thistles and Kiwis

Loves summer, sunshine and cats. Beginner gardener, likes eating, cooking and reading about food

16 Comments

  1. Please feature your dollhouse when you can! My grandfather made one for my mother out of an old packing case. She passed it on to various nieces then had it railed from the Karoo for me to use … as did my nieces, my daughter and eldest granddaughters in their turn … and now it has moved to the Western Cape for my youngest granddaughter to use. It is a hundred years old and still going strong!

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  4. I am very taken by your Feature Photo – there is something very enticing about how you’ve composed the lentils in & out of the bowl. I can’t stop looking at it and imagining the possibilities of how they got there (wanting to put them all back in the bowl), the many colours (a strange urge to sort), and thinking of what you were going to cook with them (tada! I see at the end).

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  6. We are trying to get organised to leave as little as possible in the way of memorabilia to the people who will have to clear our house when we peg out. They will already have too much of their own.

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