Domestic

It would appear that I am once again restored to robust good health, and I would just like to observe how very, very fortunate we are to live in an age of antibiotics and analgesics.

I recall reading Victorian melodramatic novels where all mysterious crying and wailing or other suspicious disturbance indicative of the presence of a mad wife in the attic or the ghost of a murdered child in the cellar, was explained away by the grim faced housekeeper, perfectly plausibly, as being one of the servants with the toothache.

We live in times of fairly robust medical science, and whatever the iniquities might or might not be of the big pharmaceutical companies, it is thanks to them that I did not finish up wailing like a helpless banshee or a Victorian servant. Today I am cheerful, pain-free and pleased with the world, and I am profoundly grateful to all those whose curiosity led them to discover these miracles, and also to those whose business acumen and quest after a fortune led them to make such miracles widely available to anybody who happens to have a bit of spare cash and the toothache.

In consequence of my newly-recovered good health, I have had a day of pleasing domesticity. It has managed to be quite productive because we finished work at midnight last night, and hence woke up early, by our not terribly early standards of early, and we have done lots of things, like shopping and tidying up, and it has been a busy day.

I have completed an enormous pile of ironing. It took me so long that I am now very reluctant to create any more and so I am wearing a crumpled old T-shirt and have left the lovely smart flat ones in the drawer. I think I will probably save them for Christmas and carry on with the creased ones in the meantime.

Whilst doing the ironing I felt that I excelled myself in the domestic achievement stakes by also manufacturing some apple jelly and then putting the boiled pulp into a bucket with the grapes out of the garden for alternative purposes. This is now fermenting in the airing cupboard.

The grapes were rubbish this year. Last year they were brilliant, and Harry’s dad made them into some wine, obviously we haven’t tried it yet but it is almost there and with any luck we will be able to drink it at Christmas. This year there were only a few, and mostly they were fairly small and unsuccessful, so today I chucked them into a bucket with the apple pulp and some sugar and yeast and left it to ferment.

This was Mark’s idea. Of course we have got no intention whatsoever of distilling the end product because you are not supposed to do that in this country. When we lived in France everybody did it, and we still have some very splendid alcohol as a result. Therefore, obviously we will have to throw it away when it has finished bubbling.

However I can tell you about times in the past when we have done home distilling, with a kettle and a long length of copper tube. Once we made some rhubarb and dandelion schnapps, it was ace, in a shuddery sort of way.

In France a man comes round with a distillery on the back of a tractor and parks in the village square, and everybody brings their fruit pulp to make into some astonishing liquid that you drink by dipping sugar lumps into it and then sucking them. I have seen our neighbours do this for breakfast. Mark once came home at nine o’ clock in the morning, almost incapable of standing, after having gone out an hour earlier to help Monsieur Bolle put a fence up.

Anyway, all that is by the by, but I can cheerfully announce here that anybody who pops round at Christmas will be able to see me wearing flat clothes, and also avail themselves of last year’s home made wine and this year’s home made apple jelly. Hurrah for being domestic.

Mark spent the day hauling logs, and came back just before we had to go to work to get under my feet and scrape out the jelly pan.

I think this is exactly what husbands are for.

Every domestic should have one.