I am on the taxi rank for a cash-collecting interlude before we take Oliver back to school.
The holiday is over.
We will set off when I have finished work, whenever that might be. Hopefully it will be when I have earned hundreds of pounds and am feeling so fabulously wealthy that we could buy a takeaway on the way if we wanted to.
We are not going to buy a takeaway. I have cooked a chicken in a big dish with couscous and parsnips and sweet potatoes, all drenched in lemon juice and garlic and coriander. We will take it with us and eat a last dinner together before the prison doors clang shut behind Oliver.
We will not see him again for six whole weeks.
Next term will be even longer. There will not be a half term holiday, because of bat flu, so he will be away for nine long weeks, from the end of Christmas until the Easter holiday. This is a long time.
I think that school is worried that Scotland will suddenly decide to start objecting to people’s comings and goings. If everybody is in school this will not matter, but if they are scattered all over the globe it will be hard work persuading their beloved lady leader to allow them all to come back. I do not think she is renowned for her sympathy and helpful positivity towards expensive public schools.
I have had so much cooking and packing and worrying to do that I was jolly glad of the extra hour. The annual present of a longer-than-usual day is one of the happy things in life. How wonderful to do everything at a leisurely pace and still not be late for work.
I was late for work anyway, though, and finished up in a mad flappy rush, frantically trying to get everywhere tidied up and swept before I left.
The sun had been shining, and I had washed the sheets. They did not dry properly, but of course this did not matter because we will not be sleeping between them tonight. Tonight we will be away in the camper van, and the sheets can stay where they are.
They are not still outside, obviously, which is just as well, because now I am on the taxi rank it is raining. I brought them in and hung them over the banister. They will be dry by the time we come home on Tuesday.
I made mayonnaise, and some more fudge, because we have eaten all of the last lot already. This batch is apple and blackberry flavoured, because I added a couple of spoonfuls of last year’s jam by way of variety. I am very glad of the preserves, now that the winter is coming in. We have still got tomatoes, but fewer and fewer all of the time, and it is important to have good things for sandwiches.
I hope it does not freeze whilst we are away.
My job of the day was to move some of the remaining tomato plants. They have all became far too big for their beds, and today I needed to take some of them out and replant them in the ex-mushroom farm. You might recall that I filled this with compost the other day.
This was no small undertaking.
The tomato stalks must be easily ten or twelve feet high, and having clambered as high as the ceiling, have covered the whole span and are on their way down the opposite wall.
They were planted in a large drawer.
Today I needed to take them out of the drawer and somehow dump them in the tank.
I had to demolish the drawer, which made a terrible soily mess.
I wheeled the tank in front of it and slowly prised the tomatoes out. They have become so pot-bound that it all came out in one huge slab, and I felt terribly guilty.
They did not want to move.
They were twined around one another in a passionate sort of tomato orgy, making the roof space of the conservatory such a solid canopy of green that you could quite easily store things on top of it.
I tugged and pulled and eased them loose.
They did not come very loose, but in the end they finished up where I had wanted them, bringing their companions with them.
I filled the tank up with muck.
Mark had very kindly brought me not only some sacks of muck from the farm, but a bonus sack of guano that he had dug out of a pigeon-infested building where they are installing aerials.
I could never say he does not bring me presents.
Guano is brilliant stuff. It will set your compost going splendidly. It is like having an extra cylinder in your car engine.
It is practically made of nitrogen, and is so powerful that if you spread it on the surface of the soil, you should not let the stems of plants touch it.
Sweet corn loves it.
I mixed it in with the compost in the tank and sprinkled a little, carefully, as a top-dressing on the big bed.
After that I mulched everywhere with some lovely rotting hay layered with sheep poo.
I hope it works.
Clearing it up took ages, because I had managed to get poo of all sorts of descriptions all over the conservatory. Plants like poo, but dinner guests do not, and our dining table is right next to the flower bed.
When I had done I rushed about being late for work.
Have a picture of some better weather this morning.
