I am feeling very contented with my world.
I have done lots of things that I have been trying to get round to for ages.
The most exciting thing was to try out the new breadmaker.
This took ages because I had to find a new place for it to live, which was no easy task in a kitchen which is already spatially challenged. There were one or two places I had thought I might put it, but when I came to actually lugging it across and trying it I couldn’t open the lid because of an excess of shelves too low down on the wall.
In the end I moved the spice rack to behind the mugs, which after some reflection I decided I preferred anyway, and put the breadmaker in the spice rack place. This seemed to work fine, and then I had to embark on the massive task of piecing it together and trying to understand the instructions. It didn’t make any sense for ages until eventually I discovered that there was a sort of lid within a lid, a sort of secret interior lid, which contained all the things that the instructions had been talking about and for which I had been searching in vain.
After that things went smoothly, and I followed the instructions extremely carefully to make a loaf of bread. I thought this would be a good idea, rather than just making it up as I went along, or even mostly following their recipe but improvising with some bits, like adding more nice things and not so many dull things. This is my usual approach to cooking, but I thought that unless I followed the instructions to the letter I would never know if I could trust the breadmaker makers or not.
I measured everything with great precision, rather than just chucking handfuls in. There turned out to be a little hole in the interior lid where you put the yeast, and another one where you can put nuts or raisins or seeds, and the breadmaker adds it all to the dough when it considers that the appropriate moment has arrived. I thought this was very clever, and admired it all very much.
It turned out that the bread would take five hours to be ready, so whilst it was churning away contentedly to itself I went upstairs and Did The Children’s Bedrooms.
I do not look forward to this job, but in the end it wasn’t at all bad. It was a sunny day, and I opened all of the windows wide to blow the stale air away, and washed and polished and wiped until everything gleamed again.
Of course there was Number Two Daughter’s room as well. This was not very messy because she had taken everything with her, but it was very like a room that had not been dusted or hoovered for a considerable length of time.
She is not one of Mother Nature’s little home-birds. I had to empty the hoover twice just doing her bedroom. The dust on the chest of drawers was a thick felt, with clear squares where she had taken things with her. I felt mildly surprised that she hadn’t suffocated in her sleep from excessive dust inhalation, but clearly she hadn’t, it is amazing what the human body can stand.
I changed all of the sheets and replaced the towels and felt my world become orderly and peaceful once more. It is lovely to be in possession of a house which is tidy wherever you look.
By then the bread was nearly ready, which illustrates just how much time it took to turn the top floors of the house back into somewhere civilised again. Mark came home just before it finished and we had a pot of tea and some buttery warm bread.
It was very good indeed. It was nicely soft and the crust was perfect. We had to be very self-controlled not just to eat it all there and then, but of course we didn’t. We took some with us to work to eat after our swim and saved the rest for breakfast.
I am very impressed with it indeed, what a miraculous invention. We will be having a newly gluten-full diet if the rest of it is as nice as the first.
I would have finished there, because it is the obvious place to stop, but I just thought I would add a last paragraph because of an entertaining incident that I wanted to share with you.
We are at work and it is deathly winter-quiet, we have been here for ages and are not making much money at all. The evening has been greatly enlivened by a woman sitting in the window seat of the restaurant across the road setting fire to her menu by resting it on the candle on the table. This caused a small but amusing kerfuffle amongst the waiters who flapped about trying to waft smoke away without opening the doors and letting the chill air in.
We sat on the taxi rank and laughed heartlessly.
I just thought you would like to know about it.
