After a late, although not terribly lucrative night last night, we were startled into wakefulness this morning by the arrival of Harry, who had come to volunteer his assistance with Oliver’s unceasing efforts to keep the world free of flesh-devouring zombies.
Since we were awake then there seemed little point in trying to carry on with being in bed, so we got up and went to collect the local kebab-delivery van, which had broken down on the bypass last night. We discovered this at about midnight last night, when Mark dropped some passengers off outside the kebab shop and the kebab man rushed out to tell him all about it, and so Mark promised that he would look at it today.
Mark says that it needs a new clutch, and we towed it back to the farm and he went to break the bad news to the kebab man, who wrung his hands and rolled his eyes and wants to think about what he should do: because of course like everybody he is not making any money at the moment.
I will be pleased if the kebab man wants his van mending, because our January crisis is in full swing as well, and so if we can get him to give us his takings as well as ours that will be a result.
Whilst Mark negotiated with the kebab man I came back home and got on with hanging washing up and tidying up at home. I made a stack of pancakes with eggs and cream and wholemeal flour, most of which Oliver and Harry ate straight away, and the rest of which Mark ate when he got home.
After that Mark went into the garden to stack logs brought from the farm, and I got out the soap-making pans and made some candles out of some candlewax left over from failed Christmas candles.
We had several candles at Christmas which were nice but burned out long before all the wax had melted, and which left tiresome dribbles of fruit-scented wax all over the table. In the spirit of not wasting useful candlewax I stood some wicks in jars saved for the purpose, the chocolate spread ones are good because some of them pretend to be drinking glasses when they are empty and although you can hardly offer cognac to guests in an old chocolate spread jar, you can light a candle in it. I melted the wax on the stove and added lots of scented oils,
Mark had to pour it into the jars, because I am clumsy at that sort of thing, and he laughed quite a lot because the candles that I have reused were orange and green and purple, and the resulting fruit-and-cypress-and-black-pepper candles are an unfortunate, but clearly amusing, poo colour.
I know that there is a whole mellow-mood-whale-songs-and-crystals culture which thinks that the colour of candles is important for helping a person to be in the right mood for what they are doing. If you are feeling loving you light a pink candle, and if you are feeling like grass and flowers then you light a green candle, and if you are feeling wholesome and pure you light a white candle, Wholesome and pure is always a good one because white candles are usually cheapest and they sell them in the ironmongers in the village, so I can manage that one without having to be organised and remembering about mood candles when I am in Asda. However I was stumped when it came to an appropriate use for a brown candle.
Mark suggested that it could be mud, in a sort of wintry precursor to grass and flowers, which actually is not inappropriate for the issues current in Windermere, although hardly descriptive of the sort of mood that we would like to invoke in a magical spirit of domestic tranquillity.
Be that as it may we are going to light one this evening and watch a DVD, which I am looking forward to very much. We are going to eat the end of the ham-and-egg pie, and drink a glass of wine and watch something uplifting whilst burning a mud-invoking candle.
See you tomorrow.
