I’m Thinking This in Bed

I’m writing this from my bed. It’s 04:22 and I’ve made a choice I am now living with.

Two duvets cohabiting inside the same cover, which turns out to weigh roughly the same as sleeping under a pair of sumo wrestlers who have fully committed to staying put.

There is also a heated under-blanket involved, because apparently I believed warmth could not go too far. This felt sensible at 9pm. By eleven it had become a situation.

I am still toasting in a way that briefly raises the question of piles, which I will not be googling, under any circumstances.

I’m wearing vintage thermals that might be Damart¹, a light blue the colour of very cold lips, designed for women who expect to be chilly and plan accordingly. The elastic is doing its best. The seams have their own opinions.

My mum loved Damart. She used to flick through the inserts tucked into the Weekend Guardian or The Times, pausing over heated footrests and massage pads with narrowed, suspicious eyes, as if they were promising more than warmth. I think she believed the massage pads were secretly something else. Not for her.

Thermals, though, were safe. Entirely decent. Moral.

She’d knit me scratchy vests and socks. Trust me, I was the only girl at convent school wearing homemade cable-knit socks with a matching 3ply vest under my uniform.

“Character building,” she’d say.

Anyway.

Back to now. Back to the things currently orbiting my attention, whether or not they’re sensible or finished.

I’ve been thinking a lot about metre-long candles.

Actual ones. Ridiculously long. They exist at a scale that makes every normal candle look embarrassed. At no point did anyone say, “that’s enough candle.”

size really does matter

I’m winter sowing seeds. Lupins first.

They’re in ziplock bags with drainage holes snipped into the bottom, filled with compost, sealed shut, and lined up outside like a perimenopausal woman named Lisa watched a worrying amount of YouTube and now believes she’s running a small but serious horticultural operation.

I’ve also been thinking about my brother’s ashes.

He lives in a glass cabinet in the drawing room with Sammy the taxidermy kittiwake. He once mentioned being scattered across the sea. I’ve kept him here, which feels sensible given he was a bank robber.

Then there’s Rosie in northern Sweden, renovating a cabin in the snow like time has been cancelled.

Timber everywhere. Silence doing much of the talking. She’ll pause mid-task, stare at a wall, make a cup of tea, and somehow this counts as progress.

I watch those videos the way other people mainline crime shows — for the relief of watching someone move slowly on purpose.

wild & cosy at Rosie’s place

And Rewilding Jude. Scotland. A man learning how to do things he was never taught, in real time, on the internet, with tools he’s still getting acquainted with. He holds them a bit wrong. He swears, nearly. He keeps going. Watching him figure it out feels like sitting near a fire built by someone who had to work out how fire works first. He’s un-slick. And adorable.

I’ve fallen into pallet cabin porn.

There are surprise benefits. Men alone in forests, sleeves pushed up, shorts in weather that doesn’t agree.

Pallets slapped down, lifted again, lined up, corrected. Drills whining. Wood giving way. No talking. Just making something stand upright.

There’s one called Erik. He has a chopper. He brings it out like a promise. Trees come down clean. Logs split. Time disappears.

I watch him frame walls the way other people watch hands on a wheel — calm and slightly indecent. And somewhere between the second coffee and the fifth replay, it becomes obvious I’m not just watching. I’m studying². Because I’m building one. Here. On my land. A pallet cabin.

This counts as research.

Which brings me to the yurt.

Photo by Marc Pell on Unsplash

Should I buy one?

This feels like a reasonable question when you already have a Flow Hive stored under your daughter’s vintage black iron bed, waiting for its moment. The yurt would arrive in several large, circular packages and then live somewhere inconvenient for a year while I adjusted to the idea of owning it.

The bees already live in the loft. The question is whether they’ll relocate.

It’s 04:47 now.

The house is asleep. The under-blanket is still over-committed.

This is what things look like from here.

1. Turns out they’re vintage North Cape base layers. Inherited from someone wonderfully ancient, from a time when climbing and hiking were central to my life.

2. Need more? Try Bogdan in the Forest, Jacob, and the joy of Lesnoy.