It has been another very cold day. The garden has stayed white even in the daylight.
We are keeping the fire going all the time now, and the house is joyously warm. Mark brings logs in in the mornings before he goes to the farm, and stacks them by the stove for me. It is wonderful to have the fire lit. I can put bread over it to rise and get the washing dried, and everywhere feels safe and calm.
My life has been further improved by the arrival today of a second-hand sheepskin body warmer that I bought for a tenner on eBay some time ago and had almost forgotten about. I was very pleased when it turned up this morning. Admittedly it smells a bit peculiar, but it weighs hardly anything at all to wear, and is beautifully warm and not encumbered by irritating sleeves.
Certainly I am not going to waste any more sympathy on sheep on chilly days. I recall thinking in my youth that soft sheepskin rugs were the height of luxurious decadence, and now here I am wearing one. I am in my taxi and I am not cold even though there is a smooth layer of ice all over the world outside. This is blissful, and I am sitting here feeling very pleased indeed with the world.
It has been another day of trying trying to catch up on myself with house things. It is the weekend now, and I have made several days worth of assorted ready-meals and put them in the freezer in order to feel like a real housewife even when we are doing fifteen hour taxi shifts. The idea is that I will smugly produce them from the freezer to fill our flasks like a head waiter with his most expensive wines when he senses the potential for a serious tip.
I made wholemeal bread rolls and chicken and banana curry and a pan of minced beef and tomatoes. This was more interesting than it sounds because of the half bottle of leftover red wine, the cream, onions, garlic and assortment of vegetables that I added.
Also I made holes in the middle of it and broke some eggs into it, they cook slowly in the centre of it all and then get chopped up and blended in at the end. This is a refinement I like and learned from my Turkish recipe book, it is very different to just mixing a raw egg in. If you are copying the recipe, add a couple of spoons of brown sugar with the wine, and cumin and paprika. You might also fry some bacon and sliced potato and chuck that in as well. It is not helpful for losing weight but it is very welcome in a taxi when it is minus four outside.
After that I wondered about Christmas card manufacture, and dug the tin of creative arty materials out from underneath the desk to see what I had got left over from last year. In consequence of this I was completely covered in glitter for the rest of the day, despite not having actually made any Christmas cards. Mark came home and after a moment or two asked if I had had Tinker Bell round for coffee. It is dark in here apart from the light from the computer screen, but every now and again I keep catching a tiny glint from a bit that still hasn’t washed off.
Mark has got the engine in to the camper van. That is, he has got it in in a sort of ‘hanging on a crane in roughly the right place’ sort of way. It was a major event to get it that far, because first of all he had to move the old engine, which was still lying on the floor exactly where it fell off the crane a couple of months ago, and then he had to manoeuvre the new one across the workshop and into the right place.
It has got to have some bits taken off it before it goes any further, or apparently it won’t fit in the gap. I don’t know which bits, but I am sure there must be some bits in engines that you can get rid of without affecting its performance much, like the appendix or the tonsils in people. These will have to be quite big bits, because the engine is quite a lot too big.
Mark is very clever. He will sort it out in no time.
