After Mark went out to work I went for a stroll around the Rec with the dogs.
I had not intended to go up the fell. I have done lots of running this week, at least by my standards. These are roughly on a par with the weekly running expectation of an elderly sea lion, probably with crutches, but nevertheless it has left my muscles whingeing with an assortment of complaints.
To add to this, it was raining, the sort of endless dreary rain that leaves your trousers uncomfortably sodden in patches, but not wet enough all over to make it worth changing out of them afterwards.
We did not stay for very long at the Rec, which was full of children doing some sort of noisy orienteering adventure, supervised by dripping teachers in anoraks stationed at every exit, presumably to prevent unauthorised sloping off. I did things like that in my youth, and wondered if any of them had been creative enough to slide down the bank and over the stream to the estate at the back, but I didn’t see any excited stray children on my way home, so I don’t suppose they did.
Instead of hanging about at the Rec, we splashed back home and made a start on the day’s tasks.
I had decided to cook chicken and sausages to sustain Mark over the weekend. As I hacked raw meat into bits all over the work surface I thought happily of my vegan friends, who are coming on a much-looked-forward-to visit soon, and reflected on what a good thing it was that they weren’t arriving until Friday.
That thought took a while to penetrate, but after a few minutes it did.
They had been to Scotland and were stopping in for a cup of tea on their long road back to Brighton.
I sent them a text. The reply confirmed an arrival time of around one-ish, and wondered if they should bring some lunch.
Not at all, I breezed. Leave it with me.
There are no words to describe the panicking and useless flapping about that followed.
I could not think of anything to do with the chicken and sausages, so in the end I just shoved it all in the oven anyway. Then I frantically disinfected the work surface free from any traces of dead animal dismemberment and rushed off to Sainsbury’s.
I lasted about five minutes, squinting helplessly, before I had to rush back home for my glasses, because all lists of ingredients are written in really small writing.
Readers, it is amazing how many products in a supermarket are made from dead things. Practically everything except the soap powder, in fact. You don’t notice this in the usual way of things because of not wearing your reading glasses to go shopping.
In the end I bought some potatoes, because I knew what was in them without worrying about a miniscule list of ingredients, and some vegetarian sausages, which said: ‘Suitable For Vegans’ in really big writing across the front. Note to all manufacturers of foodstuffs, if your target market is middle aged housewives, consider a large font for your packaging.
We already had salad and olives, and I had made some hummus a couple of days ago.
The thing about being a vegan is that you can’t even put butter on your potatoes.
I flapped about desperately, trying to think of ways of making vegetables look interesting.
I have never been any good at this, as Oliver will confirm.
In the end, and anybody else who has vegan friends might be interested in this, because it worked well, I had an inspiration. I mixed some olive oil with tomato purée and mustard. I chucked in a bit of brown sugar, some garlic and a chopped spring onion, and when the potatoes had cooked I drained them and mixed the lot in over the heat for a few minutes.
This was so nice you hardly minded that there was nothing interesting in it at all.
Of course it was so brilliant to see them that we talked for the whole hour and I forgot to notice what anything tasted like anyway. They were too polite to say if anything was rubbish so that was all right.
We even went and had a wander around the field at the farm, because our friends do musical things and thought that it would be a nice place to have a little festival.
I thought so as well.
Mark thought so as well when I told him about it later, except that if anybody had a festival it would have to be on a Saturday night when we are at work, so probably we wouldn’t be able to go anyway.
We liked the idea all the same, imagine summer evenings with people playing guitars and wandering about the field being meditative and hugging each other.
It would not be at all like the sort of festival that Lucy has been at all summer, where people tripped over tent pegs and took drugs.
I think it would be lovely.
Have a picture of the autumn. It is the burnt sugar tree in the Library Gardens.
