Little Dryad Dressing

I made a fantastic green dressing at the weekend, and since it was the first thing I have made in weeks that was delicious I wanted to write and tell you right away: a kind of Green Goddess, a green demi-goddess I suppose. A little green dryad; a dreamy little green dryad.

The naming of things is important to me. I wanted to call The Secret Detectives “The Book of Naming Things”, but it had zero commercial potential for the under-twelve set. All I care about is looking at things and naming them, which is a Hera Lindsay Bird paraphrase that seemed to me to sum up the difficulties of being my main character (also me). I have been trying to get into exercise over the last year, which has actually been great and interesting for a number of reasons, and one thing I have figured out that I will only really give it my all if the exercise in question has a charming name: a curtsey lunge, for instance, is totally doable, with even the heaviest weights my trainer1 can throw at me, but a burpee (yuk) is foul until I mentally re-dubbed it FDF (frog-dolphin-frog). I love ring rows mainly because I thought for ages that I was being asked to use the ring rose: two beautiful words. I identify very strongly with the older guy from Love On The Spectrum who loves to play with words. I love nice words, which is probably why I circle around Green Goddess Dressing despite not knowing very much about it. A beautiful name!

And so let’s call this Little Dryad Dressing: like green goddess, but maybe not so Junoesque.

On Sunday we limewashed the hall gold in big fat swoops, my mum lying on the floor with a tiny brush to get the frog-taped skirting edges, me clasping Rich around the legs as he made a series of wild, brush-handed lunges for the third-storey cornicing.

It is unbelievably tiring to limewash three storeys of hall, even or especially when the hall is very narrow, and especially when I was having a minor meltdown over the colour every 2-4 minutes. The thing about limewash is that it says on the tub of limewash not to panic after the first coat. Let me tell you: I was panicking after the first coat. I was panicking before we even had a first coat. The colour was “Chickpea” and online it looked a very pale and soothing hummus colour. The sample swatch was a little darker. The first coat went on pure brown. The chickpeas had been roasted and toasted to within an inch of their lives: a muddy, unclear– yet fully transparent– wash of filthy liquid. Do not panic after the first coat! I panicked after the first coat. I kept saying “I hate it, I hate it,” which was not good for morale at all.