who only by moving can balance

On the left: a modern Bart jar labelled cardamom, tall and cylindrical with the stacked black lids. It's empty, labelled 22g and Best Before End Oct 2017 on its square stickers, not that you can see that in the photo. On the right, shorter and generally rounder, with a much simpler green lid, is a jar of Bart cardamom dating from, probably, the mid-nineties. The label is round and scalloped and definitely, at this point, looking charmingly dated. It's mostly full; dspite being an awful lot smaller it contains 30g of spice. It's got a reduced sticker on it.

On the reduced sticker, in probably-my-grandmother's-hand, also not pictured, is written AROMATIC // TRY WITH CURRY RICE OR FRUIT PIES. The price has been changed from "159" to "106".

When we were clearing out the mouldering ancestral pile, a lot of the food had to be binned. The untouched unopened spice jars, bought at cut price, were fine, though. In addition to this one, I've got another jar or two of cardamom in the pantry.

My cousins, various, have decided that Kardemummebullar are The Best Thing Ever, which means I'm making quite a lot of them, which means that I am in fact getting through cardamom quite rapidly. It's still good; it's still aromatic; I'm using it. I've a pan of milk with twenty pods in on the stove, and tomorrow I'll grind the seeds from another fifty in the ancestral spice mill.

On this day in 2010 we held Mama's funeral. Tomorrow I've two godcousins and another of her grandchildren coming over. I'll feed them and we'll probably end up singing at least a bit and Adam might well paint their nails. (The first time I ever had my nails painted, it was Mama who did it, in the big armchair we've now got rid of in the attic sitting room, with newspaper on the floor and a gale outside.)

For now I'll put the bread and then myself to bed.

• "I accidentally made cheese"
  
• "yes obviously I want to grind all these poppy seeds"
  
• "... shit sorry I put a load of laundry on"

(more poppy seed grinding then BED)

As none of you have any particular reason to remember, my grandmother was an Austrian.

My mother was asking me today about Progress On The PhD, and followed up by asking what the next chapter was going to be on, then -- not expecting to recognise the volcano name.

"Popocatepetl--" I said...

"-- is der Berg in Mexiko, yes yes, oui oui, si si, so so!" she replied.

Turns out there's a 1951 German music hall song about it that she was taught as a nursery rhyme... and it's on YouTube.

There are some terms I don't have good English for, either because I don't know the word or I don't think the English is as good as the German so I don't bother remembering it. Here are some of the things I am most likely to say:

Basta, fertig. Enough, finished, sufficient, done.

Biomull. Green waste/compost/recycling. Usually used when I am helping with cooking and therefore asking what to do with vegetable odds and ends.

Egal. Yes, French via German; lit "equal"; used as the shortest way available to me of communicating "I have no preference between the options you have offered me".

Falsch! Lit wrong/incorrect; muttered at myself when I've made a mistake.

Erstens braucht es immer länger zweitens als man denkt. First: it will always take twice as long as you think. Only with a nicer play on the numbers.

Spatzen. Lit sparrows; more helpfully, this appears to be a local dialect term that probably wasn't only used by my grandmother in the 50s, which seems as of late to be called "delayed onset muscle soreness" in some varieties of English.

Ein/der Teufel sitzt darauf. There's a devil sitting on it, or the Devil is sitting on it: of something that is lost or mislaid, causing strife and frustration and anxiety.

Unterlag. Lit "underlay"; specifically, the thing you put hot pans etc on top of to protect the table/worksurface.

Was man nicht in Kopf hat, muß man in den Füßen haben. Lit "what one does not have in one's head, one must have in one's feet"; more helpfully to Anglophones, expanded as "if you don't remember to bring it with you, you have to go back and fetch it", usually muttered to myself in exasperation as I disappear into another room to fetch something I failed to bring with last time I was there. When directed at other people it is done with affection and sympathy. (I have the regional variant that uses "feet"; other variants use "legs".)

Ich bin ganz satt, ich mag' kein Blatt me-e-e-ehr. I'm stuffed - I couldn't eat another leaf. (It's funny because you say the last word like a goat bleating.)

Immer aufhören wenn's am Besten schmeckt. Always stop eating when it tastes the best.

Wer nicht kommt zur rechten Zeit musst essen wass da Übrig bleibt. If you don't arrive on time for dinner, you get to eat the leftovers.

(There are others, of course, but these are the most common.)

They say, I think, that moments
can hang preserved in drops of amber
suffused with bone-deep memories
of setting autumn suns.
In Mass I see the elderly &
think of my Grossmutti, who
placed sacrificial flowers on
the altar, very nearly til she died
& in so doing offered up
her blood, her knees, her strength;
I think of Papa, who still heaves
his way through grassy lanes
to kneel, to genuflect, to offer peace.
And in Mass I hear the children
as they whisper to their parents
having not yet realised just how well
the church carries their voice
(nor yet been taught: above all else is silence);
in them, and in the fretful babies
this strange unwieldy future
reflects me backwards to myself.
That imperfection is inevitable
is without doubt its greatest grace:
the same is true of love.
Take heart. Take strength. Take space.

A little while ago I put a cake in the oven. The tin is from my grandma; the Kenwood mixer I used from Papa; and the recipe was e-mailed me by my mother: she transcribed from Grossmutti's copy of the recipe in Cornwall, which she in her turn transcribed from Grausi's recipe in Feldkirchen, probably sometime in the forties.

Happy birthday, me. :-)

I think, at the moment, that I don't: but I hope that this will change as of the first week of January.

But: standing on the concourse at Paddington, hunting the departure boards for trains in the direction of Oxford - this is something I seem to be spending a lot of my time doing at the moment - my heart always-and-without-fail aches when I see the trains that are headed for Penzance. It's a struggle not to abandon my plans; even when I'm safely on board the train I first thought of, I'm yearning to be heading south instead of north, because the line from Paddington to Penzance, with the white horses and the mud flats and the deer park and the red arches and the first precious glimpses of the sea and the castles and cathedrals - and the piece of line that gets washed out every time there's a storm - and the ghosts of origami and colouring books and poetry and conversations with strangers about music--

-- oh, that journey is home. Though these days I take the bus from Redruth, because I'd rather Papa didn't drive; though Mama doesn't any longer emerge from the kitchen to distribute hugs at the front door; though the garden's grown wild and tangled; though the wind through the windows and the mould and the damp are worse than ever -- oh, to see the sun set over Mullion Island, from the ancient armchairs by the shelf a foot deep in old newspapers; oh, to see the rabbits flash across the garden; to smell the gorse and the heather and the salt; to be rocked to sleep by the waves, and to observe the rituals of determining whether the chopper's practising or actually on a mission, to spend three solid days each spring deadheading the hydrangeas and still not be done; the single camellia standing defiant and proud in November; the lichen encroaching on the table on the patio; the cellar and the garage and the strawberry patch that hasn't grown strawberries in years -- oh, I couldn't ever live there, not half a mile down a grass lane with the closest hospital routinely ranked as one of the worst in the country, not when I can't drive, not when I'm this ill, not when the patio is slate that's treacherous in the wet (and it is always wet), but there is the art gallery run by Agnes and the post office that was my mother's school and the faces in the wall, and I've never lived there for more than a week or two at a time, but I have stood in that garden and gazed at stars and birds and a total eclipse; I've cried; I've been christened; I've organised a funeral; it is home.

It is full of the Telegraph and the Times and Radio 4, and a man who loves me fiercely because we carefully don't talk about how I'm not Catholic, how I'm queer, how I'm trans, instead dancing the same old steps, over and over, of how to work a breadmaker and surely I'd relax my rules enough to try just a morsel of the goose, and would I like a snifter of brandy on my way to bed, and still he pulls himself up onto his feet and makes us cocoa and toast for supper, and presses hot water bottles upon us, and - I've so much guilt and shame and so much love tied up in that journey, in that house, that I don't know even where to start.

(My Grossmutti's collection of camellias is stunning: this is because she had grune Dauben, she'd take clandestine cuttings of anything she liked the look of in any formal garden she ever visited, and they always took. The redcurrants are netted in, still, though the brambles and the nettles creep ever on. This, this is why whenever I move the first thing I do is take an inventory of where the rosemary grows, where the thyme grows, because I am not used to cities and I am not used to gardens, and for all I adore Cambridge, for all I am learning to love London, there should be sea-spray in my hair, and my heart belongs to a rockery on a Cornish cliffside, planted to bring a little piece of the Alps to the southern coast of an island a very long way from home.)