Hello...

2012 was the year of change and excitement for me. New house, new job, the Olympics and all sorts of other wonderful things. I knew it was going to be a momentous year so I kept a scrapbook of everything from letters to tickets and photographs (I say scrapbook, it's just in a folder, by no means pretty and arranged). So compared to that, 2013 has been a bit of an anti-climax and disappointingly calm so far. This blog will be my attempt to keep me on track in my goal for this to be the year I stop codging.

Codging - I don't know where the word came from (my mum is from the West Midlands and my dad from Cornwall so it's bound to have been one of their strange dialects) but I know I do it. You start with good intentions, whether it may be icing a cake or sewing something, and along the way you either get bored or it's more complicated than you thought. So you codge it with a "that'll do" or "I'll just do it like this" or rush to get it done. You realise that if you had taken some time it would be quite good instead of just average or even a mess. You codged it.

I can do a lot of basic things. It comes partly from being a Guide leader and partly from having a mum who can do amazing things like run up a pair of curtains, reupholster furniture and make clothes you could actually wear, in public. But I have no real skill in any of these things - I had no patience to learn when I was younger, or time to learn up until now (see the aforementioned crazy year). The one thing I love to do is cook, especially baking but definitely not cupcakes. It's all in the taste for me. I have no truck with dry little cakes with massive piles of sickly icing on top, and don't get me started on those red velvet things that are more colouring than cake. I'll happily spend hours learning how to make rough puff pastry or kneading bread, and I don't really care how it looks as long as it tastes good. This is somewhat at odds with my quest to lose weight, which is why other handy things are going to have to take over. Almost two stone so far and I'm not going back.

I've started a few blogs in the past. One for an outdoors challenge which I managed to keep going and one for my allotment which I sadly no longer have (I lived in a flat before my house but I have a garden of my own now and the allotment waiting lists are four years long where I live so it seemed fair to give it back). I can't promise to keep this one going forever more, or that anyone but me will read it, but we shall see.

So here goes with cooking, baking, gardening, sewing, knitting, music and anything else I can make.

And I shall codge no more!