This is going to be a short entry due to a tiresomely drug-resistant headache which is making my eyes hurt to look at the screen.
I have had the headache for most of the day and am beginning to feel very sorry for myself. It has also had the effect of making me clumsy and inefficient. I don’t quite know how I managed such staggering stupidity, but somehow I managed to knock the breadmaker plug out of the wall halfway through its cycle. I didn’t notice for ages, by which time the seed loaf had flattened itself into a seed biscuit, better luck tomorrow.
Apart from the not so successful bread I have spent quite a bit of today drying apples. I cut the cores out, imperilling my fingers grievously in the process, and then sliced them thinly, the apples, not my fingers, mostly, and put them on trays in the oven.
I am getting bored with apples now, nobody likes them much anyway. I have made apple sweets and apple jam and apple crumble and stewed apple, and these are going to be apple tea. I was very tempted just to put the last ones on the compost heap, but I didn’t, because I am a Virtuous Housewife with a price above rubies, and also the chap next door who kindly gave them to us might have noticed when he walked past and felt unappreciated and disgruntled.
The nicest thing about today has been the arrival of a pile of newly-arrived library books. I have recently discovered that the library has an online ordering service, where you can sit at home in front of your computer, daydream about all the lovely things you think you might like to read, tell the library website, and a week or two later they turn up at the library next door to your house, ready for you to collect. I am overwhelmed with the wonderfulness of this, what a marvellous world we live in.
Hence I have got a stack of the most marvellous reading matter. I have got some biographies of rascally wealthy people written by a financial journalist called Tom Bower, some books about belief in peculiar things by a very clever chap called Will Storr, and some books about economics, written by an ace writer called John Lanchester.
I am so very happy about these that I can’t quite find the words to tell you, like having a house laden with treasure. I started on the first one when I came to work tonight, slowly, so as to enjoy it the better. The world is a good place to be tonight.
It is a good thing that I have got exciting books, because the taxi rank has become a very quiet place, apart from having lots of taxis sitting on it. The season has ended and nobody is coming for a holiday in the Lake District because they have got to save up for Christmas. This is a nuisance, because I have also got to save up for Christmas. Obviously I should have done it in the summer when there were lots of people here, but you won’t be surprised to hear that I didn’t.
It is very pleasant to be able to sit and write things and read books without being interrupted every few minutes, though. If it wasn’t for the money I would do this all of the time and not bother about customers at all.
The time has come to desist, the bright screen is making my eyes go squinty. I am going to read a book quietly and maybe have another couple of customers before it is time to go home.
Tomorrow it might be better.
