The nightclub is open tonight, so we are working very late, especially because we have accidentally spent all of our money.
It is midnight, and so far I have made just less than a tenner. I wish I wasn’t so profligate.
I don’t mind in the least really, because I have had a very pleasant day, occupied in baking biscuits and bread, and I have been to the gym. I thrashed about on their torture machines until I felt a bit sick, and my arms and legs wobbled when I tried to stand up, after which I tottered across to the swimming pool.
I was not very impressed when I put my swimming costume on. I have been to the gym four times now, but I am still as rotund as I was on Boxing Day. I have made an awful lot of effort and got very tired, but I am as wobbly as an egg custard. Nobody writing a description of me would include the word ‘lean’ in it anywhere, unless they were describing me when I was drunk, and added the word ‘over’ next to it.
I had the usual routine of scalding showers and icy showers, which are supposed to improve my circulation but haven’t. Then I dragged my close-fitting trousers on and came out to work.
I was glad I had made biscuits. They are a small consolation in a depressing world. They are ginger biscuits with crystallised ginger and grated ginger and bitter chocolate, and they are jolly nice.
The baking is partly responsible for us having spent all of our money. There are two reasons that we are broke yet again. One is that we had forgotten to pay the last instalment on the council tax.
I had thought that we had finished scraping out the Ibbetson coffers for this particularly tiresome levy, until a grumpy letter arrived from the council this morning, demanding a hundred quid with menaces. Presumably they have overspent at Christmas like everybody else. Anyway, they are in need of cash, so I generously came to their rescue and forked out a hundred quid, even though I thought they should at least have asked nicely first. I hope they don’t spend it recklessly. If anybody is going to spend cash recklessly I would rather it was me.
The second reason for our cashless state is that like the council, I actually have done some reckless spending.
My food mixing machine has broken.
It has not entirely broken. It has a huge crack up the middle of it which has, in its turn, shaken the blending jug into bits.
It is noisy and juddery to make biscuits with a cracked mixer.
I have managed without the blending jug for a few weeks. I had got a hand blender which I have been using, but it was not very robust, and by the fourth batch of mayonnaise it burned itself out.
I have not been able to make mayonnaise for ages.
We have got a last jar of it in the fridge which we have been eking out cautiously, but Mark said that a food mixer was an important thing to have, and we ought to get a new one.
He is right about this. I use it almost every day.
We have been looking on eBay for ages, but everything has been just too expensive. I thought longingly that I would like a specially expensive sort called a Kenwood.
I have had one of these before, and they are splendid. I had one which made sausages out of four pigs and a sheep and half of a cow before it finally puttered out, I used it to make cakes and butter and pate and biscuits and all sorts of fine dining, it was ages before it puffed out a little coil of black smoke and surrendered.
It did not make all of the sausages at once, just so you know. They were the product of a couple of years of farming. I don’t make my own sausages now. This is because you can buy loads of them for a tenner in Asda, and also we do not keep pigs any more.
This evening Mark went on the mighty Internet and found a beautiful gleaming Kenwood mixer with a damaged box for seventy seven pounds. It is sold by Kenwood themselves, out of their garage for used fivers probably, and comes with a real warranty and everything.
It is brand new and perfect, and I am very excited about it.
It doesn’t matter about not having any money. A real Kenwood mixer is going to be wonderful.
Mark has been building things in the garden all day now that the snow has gone.
We might have a conservatory soon as well.
What a thrilling life.
