One of the benefits of the sunshine and the longer daylight hours is that it is light enough in the evenings for me to take my mending pile to work with me and get on with sewing in the taxi.
I can hardly describe my rapture at this development.
We are hoping for some warm weather on our holidays, as previously explained, and so I have optimistically looked out Mark’s shorts.
They are not exactly fit for a smart hotel. Actually they would be pushing sartorial standards even on the taxi rank. In the end I picked the best three pairs, chosen because they only had either paint or oil or a hole in them. Anything with all three was rejected. I took those three down to the taxi rank and darned the holes. We will just have to pretend that we haven’t noticed the paint and oil.
Holiday preparations are going nowhere in any great rush, actually. I have spent today cooking, because we had eaten everything, and although the fridge was full of handy things like carrots and onions and bacon and cream, this is all the sort of stuff that requires serious processing before it can be contentedly eaten out of a flask with a spoon on the taxi rank.
I made mayonnaise, and cooked another thirty sausages, and made two sorts of shortbread, and chocolate biscuits, and coffee-chocolate sweets, and then I made a curry and a huge pan of mince and vegetables, cooked in tomatoes and cream.
We will be able to eat for absolutely ages.
After that I was absolutely frazzled. Mark had offered to help at one point, but after a few minutes of him being helpful I thought that probably the most useful thing he could do would be to buzz off to the farm, and take the dogs with him, which he did, to everybody’s relief.
He took my car and did some more work on it for its MOT, which it has got to have before we go, and modified our new in-car kitchen a bit more.
This is going to be splendid, and will help when funds get too tight for dining out, probably on around Day Two. We may finish up being the only people having a picnic in the Disneyland Hotel car park every night. We have done this before, it is the sort of activity which would be deeply embarrassing if you were the sort of family that was easily embarrassed. Fortunately we are immune to this sort of sensitivity, as the children would probably testify.
I have filled a large tub with shortbread to take with us. I am perplexed about what I might feed to the children, who probably won’t eat shortbread, I might ring school and see if they can suggest anything that Oliver does eat. I know about fish fingers and waffles, but Mark has neglected to include a fridge in the in-car kitchen, and I am reluctant to leave fish fingers in the back of the car for a week, especially in shorts weather.
I could keep them frozen by packing them in sawdust, I have done this before and it does work magnificently. However if there is anything more embarrassing than cooking dinner on a camping stove outside a smart hotel, it is doing it whilst covered in sawdust and wearing oil-stained darned shorts, so I think probably I will disregard that possible solution.
I am going to start packing tomorrow.
I am jolly excited.
Hava a photo of sunset over Windermere.
