More bulk cooking today.
Number Two Daughter stayed at home and helped, which was brilliant and meant that we got loads done. We split everything in half, half for eating now and half for taking on holiday.
We made meatballs, and cherry shortbread, and stuffed potatoes, and spiced chicken, and almond biscuits and some tubs of rice and creamy curry, made with yoghurt and fresh bay leaves and bananas and coconut. It took us all day, interrupted only by the arrival of Number One Daughter and Ritalin Boy, calling in to say goodbye as they set off on their journey back down the country to Surrey.
I won’t see them again until Christmas, and Number Two Daughter probably won’t see them for a couple of years, but we are all perfectly used to coming and going from one another’s lives, and so nobody felt sad, because we know we are all having a good time on our different adventures.
We were obliged to make admiring noises about Ritalin Boy’s enormous poo, because he had done it in the loo. If he does a poo on the carpet or in his underwear we are not supposed to admire it or agree that it is splendidly large, but adopt an expression of pained disappointment as it gets cleaned up, and make encouraging noises to express our confident belief that next time will be different. I find it difficult to be positive about anything at all to do with poo, except the sort which has come out of a horse and been put in sacks by Mark to be spread on the garden like a rich blanket in the springtime. Ritalin Boy’s poo just does not inspire similar satisfaction.
Number One Daughter ate some of the fruit that I have been soaking in brandy for the Christmas cake and some potatoes that we hadn’t got round to stuffing, and we had to shout at her to make her stop.
Ritalin Boy ate some cake, and hid one of the potatoes as a special arrangement so that we would think about him later, and then they were gone. Number Two Daughter and I tidied up the mess and threw away the things they had forgotten to take with them, and got on with the cooking, and then Number Two Daughter went out and I finished off on my own.
Most of the finishing off was just the last of the washing up. We had been boiling lots of huge kettles of water on the stove all day, because the weather has been so lovely that the fire is still out and so it is a jolly good thing that we still have a gas cooker.
The house was quiet without children in it, and I washed the last things up and took my half of the dogs to have a last amble around the Library Gardens, and we stood underneath the glorious burnt sugar tree for ages, breathing in its ripe-strawberry scent, or at any rate I did, the dog was more interested in what I think must have been a lady dog’s wee underneath a laburnum bush, and he seemed to be finding it every bit as satisfactory, each to his own.
After that I went to work.
I absolutely love midweek for work, mostly because I don’t do very much. I don’t start until five on Tuesdays now that it isn’t summer any more, and we go home at half past midnight, and in the middle of that already ridiculously short day we go and spend an hour having a swim.
Mark turned up just before the swim, he is still busy fixing the poor camper van. Considering that we were about Lucy’s age when its shiny new wheels first set out on the road it is not really surprising that it is in need of attention.
He is knocking rotted bits off it and fixing it with new bits of timber that we found in the skip at the builder’s yard across the road from our house. He has ordered some new bits for the fridge and the gas fire which need servicing, and he found a water heater in a caravan that somebody was scrapping, and he is going to replace ours before we go on holiday.
He is going to have to hurry up because he has got one week and two days to go.
It does seem to be in rather a lot of bits. I hope he gets it done in time.
