I thought I would bake today, but it has been a bit uphill.
If I were a Public Hygiene official I would not let me bake. No matter how hard I turn my head away and try and cough towards the other side of the room, and wash my hands again, and again, and again, I can’t help but feel horribly certain that every breath expels a rich cloud of hideous alien bacteria. It is settling relentlessly on the top of everything I do, like snowflakes over of a set of dropped car keys.
I did not have a bag to put over my head, but I needed one.
Fortunately, the recipients of the baking are only Mark and Oliver, who have already been exposed to so much toxic micro-life that they don’t really count. In any case, Oliver probably has plenty of micro-life of his own, breeding undisturbed in the spilled apple juice on his desk, and crawling over the controls for his Playstation, stalking over his desk on their rippling alien legs, hunting ruthlessly for an undefended host to invade, and overwhelm, and bring to ruin.
Probably, though, this would not be a good time for anyone else to pop round for afternoon tea and fairy cake.
I have washed my hands so often that they are beginning to feel a bit peeled.
I only made buns and swirly bread, but it was quite enough, and I had to sit down several times whilst I was doing that.
Mark and Oliver liked the buns. You do not need to be tasteful and restrained when making buns, so I decorated them with a large splodge of lemon butter cream, roughly the colour of a high-vis jacket, and stuck mini eggs and marshmallows all over that. I had intended originally just to do the butter cream and the eggs, in imitation of a bird’s nest, albeit a high-vis one, but after some discussion with Oliver, decided that you can never have too much of squishy sugary things, and added the marshmallows as well. They did not look much like nests at all then, but Oliver said that they tasted brilliant, and so I counted them a success.
Mark was working in the garden. He was looking forward to today, because the builder’s merchant in the village was supposed to be bringing us a whole pallet full of building blocks, and they were going to be an important part of an exciting new conservatory before dark.
Alas, in the end the blocks never made it. The builder’s merchant has got an agency driver on the wagon, and when there was a terrible accident on the road out of Ambleside, he didn’t know any of the secret drovers’ roads over the fells, and just sat in the resulting traffic jam for the rest of the day, collecting his agency pay check and eating his sandwiches.
The road was closed for almost all of the rest of the day. We heard the fire engines going down, and worried, sadly, about poor injured people in their cars. I was imagining the most hideous multiple-pile-up carnage because it was taking them so long to reopen the road, but Mark, who can be quite cynical at times, reminded me that Windermere Fire Brigade are paid by the hour. Indeed, in the end it turned out that there had only been two cars, and nobody had been killed, so that was all right, but we will have to wait until tomorrow for the blocks.
He rendered the garden wall and built some of the inner wall instead, the picture shows the bit by the back door. The wall has got to go around the corner in order that we can still open the back door, and so the actual conservatory bit will start where the bend is, and there will be a bit of extra new wall in between. This will also mean that we don’t have to try and poke the pipework through a window. This sounds very complicated and puzzling, but it is all going on perfectly well in Mark’s head, and so I don’t feel in the least worried about it. I am quite certain that it will all come out splendidly in the end.
We didn’t go to work. The baking had left me feeling wobbly and weary. We cooked some pasta and ate it in front of a film that I had wanted to watch, about Steve Jobs, which was incomprehensible and dull. Nobody had to rescue anybody from anything, there were no sword fights, and I didn’t need to watch through my fingers one single time.
I am going to bed now.
