I have got sore fingers again.
Today’s sore fingers are not because of chilli but because I have been making soap.
As you might know, the soap making process is quite corrosive and if you don’t keep your fingers out of the way they get burned.
I didn’t keep my fingers out of the way.
I am making soap because we called in at Penhaligon’s in York the other day only to find that they did not have any of the soap I liked.
They have stopped making Bluebell soap, they didn’t have any Lily of the Valley, nor Malabar, nor Blenheim Bouquet. In fact all they had was Quercus, and the girl said that it is the only one left on the order form and she thinks that they might have stopped making all of the others as well.
They have stopped making the lovely English Fern candles that I liked so much. The candles now all smell of different sorts of tea.
I think tea is for drinking. Flowers are for smelling.
I was not pleased.
Things were quite difficult enough when they stopped making the Bluebell soap and I had got to get used to the other sorts.
I do not like Quercus soap. It is flavoured with lemon which takes us back to the observation about tea.
In fact I didn’t like any of it. They had emptied the shop out so that instead of its usual warm pleasing clutter of wooden tubs and elegant bottles and gold-painted jars and paper-wrapped soaps and creamy candles, they have become minimalist.
Shelves of glass and steel squatted coldly in the middle of the shop, sporting single bottles, illuminated by sophistication-enhancing spotlights.
I don’t know if Prince Philip, who gave them their Royal Warrant, likes this sort of thing, but I don’t. I hope he jolly well says something about it before the rot goes any further.
There isn’t even another shop to go to. They have closed the Penhaligon’s corner of Harvey Nichols in Manchester, and I most certainly don’t wish to order Mark’s shaving cream and my perfume online. Some things should be purchased from a shop and wrapped in tissue paper by a polite young man with a complimentary handkerchief popped in the scented bag.
I am not at all pleased.
Hence we did not buy any of the atmospherically lit inappropriately flavoured soap, and so today I made some of my own.
Regular readers will be aware that I also have a preference for Chanel soap, which is and always will be my forever favourite, however at twenty five pounds a bar I am hardly likely to purchase it for Oliver to leave stuck in the hairy bit of the plughole at the bottom of his shower. Also however much I like to smell like Marilyn Monroe, I rather think that Mark may be less enthusiastic.
I am beginning to get better at soap manufacture. It is not as easy as you think. You have got to get the heating point just right and then do everything really quickly whilst it plops and bubbles and splashes your fingers with boiling caustic soda.
It is such a tiresome thing to get right that I can perfectly understand why soap makers charge fifteen pounds a bar for it. It has to be mixed and blended and the scent added at just the right moment, and mistakes inevitably finish up with eruptions of soap all over the cooker and hours of cleaning up.
Today’s soap manufacture did not go badly at all. It was the last job of the day. Before the soap I made a pan of pine-nut and ham and cheese pasta for us to have in picnics, and meatballs in tomato sauce for the children.
I could not be bothered to make tomato sauce and instead retrieved a large tub of tomato soup from the freezer. I made this for the lodger once, and she went off it after the first week of eating it for every meal, and put the remainder in the freezer for later.
The defrosting of this solved a small mystery that has been irritating me for some weeks.
As the soup slowly defrosted, plastic lids from all of my small storage pots slowly emerged from the large frozen lump and slithered down the sides.
The lodger may not have checked inside the tub before filling it with soup, so it is a good thing that nobody had done a wee in it or anything.
She may not be one of nature’s little housewives.
I am not sure that I am one of nature’s little housewives either.
