I have had an uneventfully domestic sort of a day.
Last night we spent the evening watching a film together on the wonderful new television.
It was The Lord of the Rings, which the children do not know very well, and although it is a splendidly exciting film, of course it is not nearly as wonderful as the book.
The children are veterans of up-to-the-minute modern entertainment, and were cynical about blonde ladies in nightdresses hanging about in enchanted forests to warn unwary travellers of their peril. They pointed out that Gandalf was absolutely right to be deceived by Saruman, because he was disguised in a long white nightdress as well, which quite reasonably made everybody think he was a goodie.
When it had finished we experimented with making the television work properly, although I suspect we are still no closer to understanding its various magical properties. Things appear on the screen, and we all think that they look useful and exciting, and then they just vanish, leaving us all saying: Which button did you just press? and frantically pressing lots of mystical buttons in the hope of making things come back.
We have invited Alexa to come and join Google, so that he will not be lonely, and they are settling down to domestic tranquillity in the television together. Even though now they are both listening to everything we say the whole time, they still don’t do anything very useful, and bizarrely, even though they both live there, neither of them seem to know how to make the television work properly either, and in the end we stopped yelling at them and went to bed.
When we went out for our walk this morning I noticed that Roger Poopy had become very interested in the compost heap.
He could hardly bear to go past it on the way to the back gate, but jumped up at it with excited enthusiasm. Of course he is a dog, with the super-power of scent-detection, and he knew perfectly well that The Rat had moved in. He even sniffed around the flower pots, where it scuttled after it had dived at me, because even though it was yesterday, he still knew it had been there.
I emptied the compost bucket on to the heap several times during the course of today, gingerly, lifting the frozen bit of old carpet off the top with a stick, but no rats rushed forth, and so I am hoping that if Roger Poopy makes his presence felt, The Rat might well decide to go and live somewhere else.
It might have moved into the compost heap anyway because Roger Poopy has not been home all the time lately. He has not seen very much of Pepper whilst everybody has been so busy over the last month or so, making mince pies and chocolates and dashing off to the post office. There is no more Christmas to rush about for, and we are all obliged to stay at home now, by Government decree, but Roger does not listen to the radio or read the newspapers, so he has defied Boris. When we come back from our morning walk every day, he has been sloping off to loaf about in front of the Peppers’ fire every morning with Pepper, who is his very best friend in the whole of the world, where they can indulge in a blissful social lack of distance that would horrify a Government scientist.
His father, who is too old and creaky to be interested either in rats or in Roger Poopy, is indecently delighted by this turn up for the books. He has stretched himself out luxuriously to occupy the whole of the cushion in front of our fire. He has had no competition for the children’s leftovers, and nobody has been trying to oust him from the warm spot in front of the fridge.
I was so busy today that frankly, one less furry nuisance to be tripped over was an absolute pleasure.
I have finished making the jam, and the chutney, and established my domestic virtue by making an apple pie for dinner.
In the end it all seemed to have turned out all right. I chucked half a dozen onions out of the garden into the chutney, and a leftover chilli and a couple of too-soft plums. I am glad it is done, it will compensate for the lack of tomatoes on Mark’s sandwiches now that the conservatory is not producing anything other than the occasional lemon.
There is still half a bucket full of apples left, which I might try and turn into jelly for sweets in the next few days, although I suspect that from a point of view of economy, I have not saved myself more than about a tenner. I am afraid that this is not a very high return for a morning’s labour.
It is still better than paying for somebody else’s chutney, which does not taste right.
In any case it does not matter.
I am making the most of my unemployment.
