Yoghurt

I have been drinking, and difficulties with lucidity might result.

It is lovely to be drinking. I have almost finished the second glass of wine, and I think I had better not have another, because the world has become contentedly peaceful, and fuzzy around the edges. It is good to quit whilst you are still ahead.

We have not been to work tonight, and better still, Mark is not rurally broadbanding tomorrow. This means that we do not have to leap out of bed in the middle of the night in order to fuel him up with coffee and sausage sandwiches ready for a day climbing up aerial towers and crawling underneath floors.

We can stay in bed and sleep.

I am looking forward to this. It is not easy to co-ordinate a life where you are working both night shifts and day shifts, and inevitably you finish up desperate to sleep at all the wrong moments, like somebody with narcolepsy or drug addiction. It is embarrassing when people ring the doorbell at three in the afternoon and find you still in your dressing gown, even if they are only  Liberal Democrats or Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Tonight we do not have either sort of shift to worry about, and I am feeling very pleased with the world.

My task of the day has been to make yoghurt.

It has not been my only task of the day, obviously. Making yoghurt is interesting and involves some precision stirring, but does not really take much longer than about fifteen minutes. I have done lots of other things as well, so you do not need to imagine that I spent the rest of the day drinking wine with my feet on the table.

I have not made yoghurt for years. I used to make it all the time when Numbers One and Two Daughters were small, much to their disgust. They objected strongly to being the only children in their class obliged to eat horrible home made bread and home made yoghurts, when everybody else had proper yoghurt and lovely sliced bread.

I felt guiltily inadequate about this until another mother rang me up and complained that her child came home every day wanting her lunch to be made with proper home made bread and yoghurt like her friends had, not the horrible shop stuff.

I used to do this partly because of being broke, but also because of being something of a hippie in those years. I thought that plastics were the stuff of wickedness and that shop food was laced with poisonous chemicals designed to make the nation’s children become obedient unthinking drones. I stopped thinking these things in the end when I discovered that they were nonsense, but in the meantime I had learned how to make good bread and yoghurt.

Today I tried yoghurt again after what must be a twenty five year gap.

I read about it first on the mighty Internet, but decided that their recipes were wrong, and tried to remember my own. It is amazing how these things get stored in the cobwebby recesses of the mind, and once I got started and the milk was simmering, it just came back to me as if there had been no gap at all.

Obviously there has been a huge gap, in fact gulf or chasm would be better words. I have now got central heating and a decent electric mixer, arthritis, and glasses. What you gain on the swings, etc.

Anyway, in the end it worked very nicely.

It is sitting above the fire now. I am going to leave it there until I go to bed, and then put it in the fridge. The thing with yoghurt is that the longer you leave it to warm, the thicker it gets, but also it becomes sharper to taste. I like my yoghurt thick but not at all sharp, and so the point of putting it in the fridge is an important moment.

Mark likes yoghurt. I shall mix it with honey and bake a lemon cake to go with it.

The picture is the microwave cupboard in the new kitchen, which turned out to be too small for the microwave and had to be adjusted. Obviously it is going to have a strip covering the adjustment, and we we are going to turn the top bit it into a shelf for washing up liquid, because it is next to the sink.  This will make it look a bit as though it is meant to be like that, but in the meantime it is the most magnificent bodge, and I thought you would like to see it.