It is ace to feel the season starting to change.
September is coming to an end. The first of the leaves are starting to become yellow and crinkle at the edges: and like Jon Snow, we have turned our thoughts to the inexorable approach of the winter.
We had a long sleep last night, due to the idle evening, and made an early start on the day again. This was a splendid feeling this morning, when we were bright and enthusiastic for the new day: but morning was absolutely ages ago, and I am starting to yawn a bit, nightclub chucking out time seems to be a very long time off.
Since we had got such a blissfully long day to get on with things Mark went over to the farm to finish glueing wheels on to the trailer.
I have got such a lovely clean house that no scrubbing was required, and I could spend the day contentedly in the kitchen, listening to the radio and cooking things.
Regular readers might remember that I have got a bucket next to the fire, filled with dried fruit soaking in cognac. It has been there since last January and it is now magnificent.
I made some cakes which looked deceptively like cupcakes but contained cognac-sodden fruit. I am not sure if they are all right to eat in the taxi, but I have been eating them anyway,
I cut up a couple of large bars of chocolate and made chocolate and nut biscuits.
I cooked thirty sausages for hungry weekend emergencies.
By the time Mark reappeared with the trailer laden full of wood it was lunch time, and he happened to be having a hungry emergency so it was a good job about the sausages.
It is lovely to feel the wood stores filling up. He went over to the poor neglected allotment to collect his wheelbarrow, and whilst he was there he picked me a bag full of raspberries.
These were a magnificent thing to have, because the next job was making fruit jelly.
Mark trundled the logs up the garden to stack them, and I chopped up the huge apples that next door’s mum had kindly given to us from her tree. Then I picked the grapes from the grapevine in the garden, and I chucked everything in a large pan with the raspberries to bubble itself to fruity pulp.
Nothing feels like autumn as much as the sharp smell of simmering fruit, and I breathed it in and felt profoundly happy. The washing was drying in the late-summer sunshine in the garden. In my kitchen I had fruit turning to pulp on the stove, and wood stacked by the fire, and the smell of fresh baking mingling with everything, and thought that I liked my life very much.
I left the fruit pulp to cool on the stove to be strained through muslin tomorrow: and we went out.
We went to try a sunbed.
We have not had very much sunshine at all this year, and I think I have definitely got rickets by now. We read something on the marvellous internet which explained that you can get Vitamin D from sunbeds, which we thought might be more affordable than a holiday in North Africa, so we went to try it.
It wasn’t a bed at all, but a peculiar noisy capsule affair. The idea is that you take all of your clothes off and stand in it with stickers over your eyes looking ridiculous. I don’t know if you are supposed to open your eyes under the stickers but I did, and everything was oddly blue, and fortunately there wasn’t a mirror.
At £2 for three minutes we thought it was a bargain, and examined ourselves with interest when we went for our swim afterwards, for any sign of suntan or skin cancer. Neither of these seemed to be in evidence, so we are going to go back for another three minutes in a week or two. We thought perhaps we were energised and less rickety, but that might have been a symptom of a placebo effect. If I was energised it has certainly worn off now.
Just another few hours to go.
