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We took some much-needed time off at the end of last week and went to York to meet up with dear friends and an exceptionally lovely and smiley baby. The drive over was beautiful -- the leaves' colours were so rich and varied, and the cold sun shining on everything made the edges sharp and striking. Unfortunately the weather when we got there was striking in a different way -- cold and moodily grey, as you can see. But quite good for pictures and for the stark contrast with the amazing light and warmth inside the Minster. It was overwhelming in the best way -- walking around with the lovely, lovely K was a perfect pause of calm. We were laughing at how tiny and silly we are in comparison with this massive arching structure, and this was a real comfort. That must be how the poor Medieval people kept going in their lives of grinding work and poverty -- going to the Minster must have felt like a promise of hugeness and richness that, by putting a huge eternity around a person's own little moment, makes your own life oddly a bit more manageable, as a tiny speck in the midst of it all. Note also how York has button and wool shops, which can only be good. Working on keeping up the spirits now we're back -- so it's carving 'jack lanterns' tonight, as the American calls them.

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Here are more beautiful Portuguese tiles, photos taken at the palace in Sintra. It's a very lovely town in the mountains, where we had tea in the kind of shop I wish we had more of here; indeed, the kind of shop I would like to run. There would be the enormous pleasure of telling my current employer where to go, followed by the delights of setting up shop, choosing teas, deciding what to cook (I'd be pretty tough -- no real choice on the menu, I'm afraid -- you'd have to have what I deem good for you) and filling the place with music and various pleasing objects. And of course the hostess would be doglet, in an apron at the cash desk.

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FFS. Being cold from no hot water or heating; enormous IKEA deliveries on my doorstep that I haven't ordered; escaped doglets and thence tearing around, chasing a seemingly flying French bulldog through the streets in my pyjamas and slippers, eventually careering into the soggy meadow where my trousers got soaked, I slipped on the leaves and still she continued to evade me, dancing with delight and bobbing like Muhammed Ali because I couldn't grab her. Coco, you drive me insane!! All these things have happened in the last 24 hours. Days when things astound me by their total failure to go right, and when things that are peeving enough normally (teenage behaviour in grown women, for example, or breezy cover ups at work) start to burrow under your skin and make you question everything, including your own sanity. Lucky, then, that there are some things that are brightly coloured and nourishing. How lovely is the green of this juice? There's spinach in that. Figs in the shops – a last burst to remind you of summer warmth – is also not at all bad. It's autumn, so bad days and good.

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*Harness now mandatory.

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As some parts of life continue to be intractably difficult, it's soothing to focus on home and surroundings. In a disorientating week I've met with heartfelt sadness as dear friends have had frail and ailing parents, people have been sad and bereft and I've felt weepy with them. Also a week in which I heard about a craven leap to over-promotion in a colleague -- but at least this gave me the opportunity for much evil cackling in the pub with a lovely, sympathetic colleague (it's all bollocks really seems to be the conclusion). Also cuddled a beautiful, smiling bundle of baby curiosity. Exhausting, and ironic (in the Kierkegaard rather than Alanis Morrisette sense). Which makes me feel compelled to be a bit more appreciative of home life. Here are some recent additions -- managed to change the central light in the lounge from a bare lightbulb to this circles-and-lines arrangement; we were given a gorgeous, detailed and bright print of a bird by Fiona Watson as a beautiful wedding gift (on the wall at the end of this image of my beloved sideboard); I hung up a huge, wadded curtain at the kitchen entry to keep us warm (this side is the map of the world; the other side is a patchwork of leftover fabrics; I don't have any good pictures of it yet); and, although it's not new, the engraving by Alistair Gow that I bought at his graduation show at the Glasgow School of Art in 2010. I was very happy to see that he has some prints at the Glasgow Print Studio now.

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It's been a lovely, sunny few days and we've used it well with walks and long sessions playing outside with the doglet's two new rubber balls. Result -- an extremely sleepy pooch. Too exhausted to chat.

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I‘m lucky that one of my top people ever was/is related to me (surprise!). My mother’s father; or ‘Bampa’ as we called him. Staunchly Labour-supporting (from the South-Wales old guard), a Union champ, clipboard-wielder like no other. (After he died, my mum was delighted to find a little strip of paper amongst his things bearing the legend Cledwyn Jones: retired, but still active. And, oh yes, he was.) His vade mecum was The Vest Pocket Chairman, published by the Fabian Society (process and systems being the friend of the worker). I loved my granddad in the way that is delightfully possible if you’re lucky enough to have family close-by; they are so comforting and familiar. Bampa always had warm hands (excellent for a cold morsel like me) – and that was funny, because he also had a warm heart. He also always had a little packet of sweets on him (one of our many bondings was our jointly-held passion for black, hard-boiled, sort-of-licorice-type ones that repulsed everyone else. They made your tongue go blue-black, like the bible in Under Milk Wood). He was given a pot of Nivea every Christmas (for his alabaster skin, his adoring sisters would say).

Bampa’s own father was a choir-master, leading the singing at the factory and indeed Bampa had a beautiful singing voice, low and rich and bass – perhaps he didn’t reach quite the timbre of Paul Robeson, but he liked his style and shared his politics. Bampa certainly inherited some of that sense of leadership (or bossiness); he loved ‘an occasion’ and was the very best supporter ever of whatever amateurish displays we put on as kids. Yes, the Christmas Concert was a line up of cousins and tipsy aunts singing ‘Show Business’ or quietly steeling nerves in the wings (my parents’ hallway) for a piano recital (grade 2 piano exercises never sounded so good, or bad) – but Bampa brushed off the black tie and prepared to act as MC without missing a beat. (After he died, his sister told me that when the children in Church Village found a dead mouse, or frog, or even a pet, they’d bring it round to Cled and he would gather them together and lead a little funeral service. In Welsh. I wish I’d known this when he was alive.)

This year I’ve thought even more about Bampa than usual (which is always quite a lot, actually) because my luck has struck again. I got to marry a man who, in fact, holds a candle to him for general heroism. Also zealous for the Left, furious at injustice, alight with flames of passion (a resonant phrase of Bampa’s, spluttered regularly during the Thatcher years). A man whose every password is some version of ‘Fabian’ (hope that isn’t a security breach.) So it makes sense that this Summer my mum shipped up to us in Glasgow the Bardic chair that I inherited from Bampa, who’d inherited from his father, who’d won it in the Inter-Factories Eisteddford in 1944, so that this chair could take up residence in the hallway in the flat we now share together. To mark this, and to bind together these two lovely men, I made this cushion to go on the chair, tapestried with a design inspired by the cover of The Partisan Reader, a collection issued in 1944 that gathered essays from the previous ten years of the Left-wing intellectual journal, The Partisan Review (with which the doglet’s co-carer is especially familiar). I mapped the cover onto graph-paper to make a pattern and used a mid-century-type-yellow shade of woolen yarn, backing it with cream cotton. It took ages and ages and ages to do, and almost tried my patience to distraction. But I got there, remembering the tireless purposefulness of my grandfather and now my husband, and I’m very happy to see it there every time we walk by (even if that often involves stubbing your toe on the heavy wood). I think Bampa would be happy about its new home, and apparel. 

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Taking inspiration from the GBBO doing buns this week, I reprised the fruit/cinnamon ones from a few weeks' ago. If I'm honest, they need some refining -- the main problem being that I am over-filling them with fruit, so that it all falls out the bottom when they come out of the oven. I need either to mix the fruit actually into the dough (probably not ideal for soft fruits) or take a leaf out of Brendan's book (already identified as GBBO legend) and make a smoother, paste-like filling that just sticks the swirl together (see his poppy-seed bunskis), rather than overwhelming it with whole fruits. But the latter does look lovely in the baking tray, waiting to go in. And even if they do fall apart and look rubbish afterwards, they taste nice and feel like a treat.