Reassawance

Dear Mum,

I tried to take a picture of all my fingers by way of reassuring you that they are all still present and thoroughly attached to my hands.

Unfortunately your point about the usefulness of fingers was exactly proven because it turned out that I could not take a photograph of all of my fingers because one would have been needed to press the button. Hence you will have to take my word for it, and I have attached an encouraging picture of this afternoon’s rainbow over Bowness taxi rank instead.

There was not a pot of gold at the end of it, or if there was, somebody else got there first.

All the same, I would like to reassure you that like you, I consider the home-built circular-saw-balanced-on-a-dustbin to be an object of such lethal peril that I am not in the smallest part laissez faire about its use.

I promise that I will take great pains to ensure that whilst using it I do not inadvertently trip over a dog, or the power cable, and accidentally shear through my fingers as I stumble. I will clear away the bits of wood with nails sticking up so that I do not inadvertently stand on one and catch hold of the saw for balance. I am not likely to have my attention distracted and become careless, since the saw makes such a deafening racket I would be completely oblivious even to a nuclear bomb going off, and I absolutely guarantee that I will never, ever, do Mark’s thing of poking the wood towards it with his fingers because they work better than a stick.

I am fond of my fingers. They facilitate the easy composition of these very pages.

I hope that makes you feel better.

I have not been using the saw today in any case, because we have got plenty of wood at the moment.

I have been faffing about the kitchen. I made mayonnaise, which was difficult because we still do not have a complete floor.

I have just looked at that sentence and realised that it does not make much sense. The reason that the floor affects the mayonnaise is that Mark needs to finish putting it under the fridge.

The floor, not the mayonnaise, obviously.

Whilst he needs to keep moving the fridge about it is not possible to replace the piles and piles of clutter that normally live out of the way on the top of it. Think of cake stands and sacks of dog food and an enormous soup tureen. Things like that.

All of these things, along with lots of others, cannot yet be replaced and are sitting on the work surface, cluttering it up.

I have not put them on the floor because of the dogs. They live on the floor and I think the sack of dog food might turn out to be a temptation too far.

Whilst making mayonnaise amid the clutter I was inspired by the presence of an earthenware tajine. We bought this in Morocco nearly twenty years ago, and have never, ever used it, and hence it has migrated to the top of the fridge and stayed there. This is because Mark promised to make a little charcoal burner on which it might stand, and so far has not got around to it. I have mentioned this to him occasionally.

Since the tajine was on the work surface anyway I dusted it off and thought I might try it. I had this very morning grumpily wrapped a scarf around my face and visited Sainsbury’s, where I had purchased a chicken, because Mark has almost finished the sausages.

I mixed together some lime juice and paprika and garlic and chilli, then I peeled the skin back from the chicken and spread it underneath. Then I chopped up the surviving remains of exhausted vegetables in the bottom of the fridge and chucked the lot in the tajine with some rice.

I did not have a charcoal burner. This is Mark’s fault.

I put it in the stove, or the biomass boiler, for the environmentally aware.

This involved loads of faffing about cutting logs into little bits and trying to build a fire around the tajine.The stove doors would not shut properly and I was mildly concerned about the fire hazard, see how safety conscious I have become, Mum.

I didn’t do anything about the fire hazard apart from worry about it, and when I called back in from work later the fire had gone out anyway.

The tajine had gone black though, and was covered in flakes of ash. I did not look inside it in case it was depressing, and shoved it in the oven instead. 

Once I got back to work I spent so long chatting on the taxi rank that I did not start on these pages until it was really late, and hence I am now sitting here in the middle of the night finishing them off. I had already surprised myself by turning up in Bowness and wondering why there were so many people about.

Somebody else told me that it was Saturday.

Obviously I pretended that I knew that, because I did not want to look as though I don’t keep up with current events, but I was surprised. There doesn’t seem to be very much difference between days at the moment.

The tajine chicken turned out to be a mixed result. The bit at the bottom was cooked until it fell apart, and was smoked and spicy and golden and wonderful.

The bit at the top had gone a bit black and tasted of dusty earthenware dish. Mark says that this will probably improve as I use the tajine more often.

He has promised to make me a charcoal burner on which I can stand it.

I am not going to hold my breath.