Birthday party food: a giant Cuthbert the caterpillar cake, Waspi women, Louise Perry's podcast
Recipe of the week:
A human centipede style caterpillar cake for my daughter’s 30th birthday. As I mentioned last week, I live in Saint Cuthberts road so I’m calling it Cuthbert not Colin, even though I’m sure the original Marks and Spencer cake tastes better than the Aldi one (subject of a hilarious court case plus do follow Aldi on Twitter/X because their soc med team are masters of snark).
Waxing my floor Scandi-style
During lockdown I decided to resand my living room floor, making it pale rather than dark. Never ever do sanding yourself. Seriously, pay someone. It’s a nightmare. I got the worst of both worlds, I hired a bloke to do it, who did all the middles, the easy bit, then claimed to suffer from migraines and went off sick.
So I had to do the rest - the edges, the corners, under the radiators. Literal weeks on my hands and knees, scraping because no sanding machine could fit in. My best friend was a scraper, a Bahco 650 (Swedish company) which is so brilliant for scraping any wood.
I wanted that white wood Scandinavian floor vibe. There are two schools of thought for stripped floors: waxing/oiling or varnishing. (A third is painting, which also works well and is a lot easier, you don’t even have to sand it). In Scandinavia they wax rather than varnish. It smells nice and doesn’t turn the floor orange and shiny like varnish (even matt varnish) does.
The process is:
Sand roughly
Sand with fine sandpaper
Sweep/vacuum thoroughly (by the way I killed a Henry vacuum cleaner this way), then wash the floor with diluted white vinegar.
Bleach the floor until you’ve achieved the desired pale effect. There are options on what to use: you can buy a two-process wood bleach (by Fiddes or Rustin’s) which costs a lot, or even neat household bleach. I used both. I also used Woca Softwood Lye, which prevents yellowing. You probably need to do this at least three times. You need overnight drying times with each coat.
In between each bleaching/treatment, lightly hand sand the floor with the finest grit and wash the floor with diluted white vinegar.
Fill any holes with white wood filler.
Then cover it with this white wax/oil, using a buffer. You can use Osmo white wax or Woca Master Oil White or Fiddes Hard Wax Oil in White. As I said, I spent weeks on my hands and knees. You can rent a polishing machine but I did it by hand.
To clean it use Woca white floor soap which oils the floor, making it more resistant to traffic.
You can also buy an all in one kit from Woca.
I did my living room floor with the wax and my kitchen and hallway with the varnish. The living room floor lasted better. The varnish always darkens the floor, and changes the colour.
Three years later I need to do it again because there are worn sections where there is heavy traffic, so near the fireplace and in front of the sofa.. You are supposed to rewax every six months. But unless you can afford to employ someone to do that or have some kind of handyman husband, this isn’t going to happen realistically. You can regularly use a floor soap though, which helps.
I meant to write all this up in 2020. But I’m doing it now. This isn’t sponsored and I didn’t get any of the products for free.
Magnolia flowers:
Went to Kenwood for a long walk and saw the magnolia trees. There is a huge one right in front of the house standing in a puddle of browning pink petals. Go up close and sniff the unopened buds on the tree - magnolias smell like ginger. You can pickle them.
Kenwood have ruthlessly cut back their magnificent rhododendrons, maybe to clear the way for the view from the big house to the dairy. A bit of a pity.
My favourite podcast:
Louise Perry Mother, Maiden, Matriarch. Her interview subjects are fascinating. She is quite measured and calm sounding, almost ‘slow’. She’s bloody clever, a young woman who has engaged with the sexual politics of 21st century feminism which isn’t liberal feminism but radical. Today’s feminism includes motherhood (but shouldn’t exclude women who don’t have children). Second wave feminists tried to be like men, farming out child care to poorer women.
As a formerly left-leaning woman, Louise Perry admitted in a recent podcast that she’d vote Reform in the next election because she lives, like me, in a safe Labour seat.
As I have nobody to vote for in the next election I’ve been thinking of voting for Reform or the Social Democratic Party. There is no chance of them getting in, but I’ll be damned if I vote any of the main parties who have sold women out.
#WASPI women
But I will say that she doesn’t talk much about the matriarch part of the equation. So I guess I shouldn’t have been so surprised that in her tweets, Louise Perry does not support WASPI (Women Against State Pension Injustice) women. As a very end stage WASPI woman, I’ve felt crushed by the dialogue on Twitter/X, the complete lack of sympathy for older women. Misogyny is always ok when directed at women past their last fuckable day it seems.
The ‘ok boomer’ narrative is tiresome. Blaming the older generation for absolutely everything. It was always hard to find affordable housing. Always. In London anyway.
The salaries that young people get are shockingly high. But what’s even more shocking is that they can’t afford to buy a flat with these high salaries. But it’s not older people’s fault - we are as much victims as every other generation.
I’ve never voted Tory in my life.
I knew my pension would come later, but in my day having a private pension didn’t seem essential. As a freelancer I never earned enough to set aside money for that anyway. Women have lower pensions than men, because they take time out, decades sometimes, for raising children. As an unmarried woman, one is even more likely to be in poverty.
In theory you think, yes men and women should be equal, but men of my generation had better careers, more promotion, higher salaries and more chances to get ahead. Perhaps the case studies that have been put forward by the campaign for WASPI women haven’t been good choices: generally middle-class women that wanted to retire even earlier than 60.
The reality of having to try to find work amid declining energy, ageism and health problems in your 60s affects both men and women however. That together with the pandemic and the terrible state of the NHS makes me fear for everyone who is expected to work until their 70s.