When we emerged from the Sunday morning cocoon of our bed this morning we went to Booths for some shopping.
I got home from work last night with a box of cash and a lot of lists of things that I thought I would like to achieve before the visitors arrive at our house on Tuesday, which said things like: ‘take rusty old bike to farm’ and ‘remember Brazil nuts for pie’ and ‘clean bathroom again’.
Mark looked through them and said that we ought to do the shopping straight away before I spent all our money on something else, and also that we needed to do some things on them today because things like: ‘put a new window in the kitchen’ might take him some time and it might be a bit optimistic to think that we would get all of it done before Tuesday when our visitors come: because as well as the things on the lists we had got to go to work as well, so that is what we did.
Booths was nice, because it has got lots of interesting food that you very much like the idea of eating but never actually will really, but because we had got visitors coming we bought loads of it. We bought interesting crackers to have with cheese, with poppy seeds and tomatoes and olives and jalapeños, although neither of us really knew what jalapeños actually were, and bread to warm up and eat before we started on the starter, and things to put with smoked salmon mousse and some fruit.
We argued about buying interesting crisps made out of beetroot because I said that with bread and three courses and a cheeseboard and mints and coffee we would have enough, but Mark just wanted an excuse to buy crisps made out of beetroot, because he likes them. I said accidentally loudly that I didn’t at all like them because they turn your poo red, and a lady behind us laughed, which made me mortified in case she was thinking about my poo, and then I thought sadly that I will probably never manage the entree into sophisticated society until I can stop talking.
After that we went to work, but it was raining and some poor, agonised-looking people were running a marathon round the lake and all the traffic had stopped. We sat on the taxi rank for ages and ages drinking tea and not doing very much else, and after a while we calculated that we had earned about three pounds per hour each, and so gave up and went home.
Going home was brilliant, because it meant that we could get on with all the things we wanted to do without feeling guilty because we should have been at work, like being sent home from school early because the boiler has broken or something.
In fact it was a good job we did come home, because one of the tiresome cats had had an upset tummy. The litter tray is next to the back door and although most of its unhappy mishap had gone into the litter tray, the rest seemed to have been squirted uncontrollably all over the back door, where it was slowly dripping down towards the doormat in a dreadful stinky brown horror.
I found this when I arrived, and wished quite badly that I had not been the first one to give up on the taxi rank and slope off home and should have encouraged Mark to give in first, and knew it was entirely my own fault for being the weakest willed.
I sluiced it all off and scrubbed the litter tray and cleaned all the dreadful little cracks between window and rubber seal into which it had disgustingly seeped. I revenged myself by telling the cat that it had no friends and nobody loved it or even liked it at all, and then felt ridiculously guilty in case they understand English even though they can’t talk, but it was all right really, because it didn’t seem to care and was busy clawing a hole in the cushion on my rocking chair. Mark came back then, and made appropriate horrified and sympathetic noises, which helped, and then we got on with the things we really wanted to do.
In my case this was nice things like making ice cream and meringues and mayonnaise and biscuits, but Mark thought he would take the kitchen apart to make the trough underneath the window for my plants.
I worked on one side of the kitchen and he worked on the other, and by the time we had got to stop to go swimming I had put perfect fluffy ice cream full of little vanilla seeds into the freezer, and some new jars of mayonnaise in the fridge, and two trays of meringues into the oven. I worried about the meringues. You have got to make them when you make ice cream, because of using up the egg whites, but it is so easy for them to go terribly wrong and finish up in a horrible glutinous mess that sticks to your trays and fingers for ever: but of course I won’t know until morning if they have worked or been a disaster, because they dry out slowly overnight with the door open a bit and the heat on low.
By the time we stopped to go swimming Mark had made an enormous mess. I am beginning to feel the first stirrings of unease about him getting it properly tidy and beautiful before Tuesday.
Of course it will be fine.
