On a jelly roll

Poor Number Two Daughter was not very well this morning.

She had spent the evening at a post-rugby farewell party with the other ladies from the rugby team, and this morning she was not at her best.

She discovered during the course of the day that some of the other ladies had got hold of her phone whilst she was drunk, and used it to take entertaining photographs. These seemed to make her groan and giggle all at once.

She retreated back to bed with some coffee and drugs.

Lucy was not afflicted with a headache, but nevertheless also felt that the best course of action for her day involved pyjamas and coffee in her bedroom.

I have been discussing Christmas arrangements with Lucy since she came home from school, because now that the children are older I thought we might make some revisions to the normal course of Christmas Day. This inevitably begins with the opening of Christmas stockings which are not stockings at all, but pillowcases, and I had wondered if we might dispense with this part of the ritual.

Lucy flatly refused to concede to this, explaining firmly that despite being sixteen she definitely still believes in Father Christmas and hopes I am not going to say anything dreadful which might shatter the magic of Christmas morning for her.

Hints about the cost of piles of trivia with which to fill Christmas stockings were met with the smiling reassurance that since Father Christmas did it it would all happen magically, just as usual, and Christmas would be lovely.

Just as usual, I had better start worrying about it all now.

Mark and the dogs buzzed off to the farm, which meant that I had a very tranquil space in which to get on with my day’s activities.

In the spirit of worrying about Christmas, my project for the day was to do something about the apple jelly which has been intended for the manufacture of Christmas sweets, but actually has been haunting the fridge for days.

You might remember that I have got it wrong twice now. The second attempt was sitting very solidly in a large earthenware dish in the fridge, and refusing to budge. I had  boiled and strained some more apples and grapes to make juice and the chosen method of resolving the problem was to add the solid jelly to the new juice and to boil it all together again.

The jelly was not much like jelly but more like cement, and took a great deal of prising out of the tray. Over the last few days it had set into an unpleasant slab of brown confectionery which contained all the worst features of both jelly and toffee.

By the time I had finished scraping it out I was very sticky indeed, having managed to get jelly everywhere, right up to my elbows and all over my apron. There was so much that I had to divide it all in half and cook it in two batches

I had saved the apple residue which I boiled into jam. This bubbled and hissed and spat a great deal and burned my knuckles with blobs of flying hot apple when I tried to stir it, so I didn’t bother much and stuck the lid on it until I thought it wasn’t probably cooked. I wished I hadn’t done this when it came to the washing up.

In the end I didn’t get to the second batch of jelly, because of having a huge mess of sticky apple all over everything which had got to be cleared up before work: but I am pleased to tell you that the first has finally turned out absolutely perfectly and can now be cut into bits and saved in the freezer to be made into sweets in a couple of weeks.

I wonder if I could put them in the children’s stockings.

I took the picture at work this evening. It rained not long afterwards.