I can’t believe how quickly the day off was over.
We had hardly got out of bed before it started to go dark, and then of course today was a Normal Day, insofar as such a thing exists any more. That is to say that Oliver went off upstairs to school and Mark went off to install rural broadband into the houses of people who have not got any.
That must be a bit difficult at the moment. I think that I would quite like to stop using some of our broadband installations, like the daily newspaper and social media, but Oliver could not go to school without it. Of course we use it to watch films on the television as well, now that we have got lots of empty-of-taxis evenings to fill.
I used to like Facebook, but I have very definitely gone off it now. It seems to be very full of advertising and people saying peculiar things. There was a thing on it this morning, inviting Anybody With A Cervix, explaining helpfully that they could be of any gender that they liked, to come for a smear test.
It took me a while before I worked out what it was going on about, and I do not mind confessing that I thought it an uncomfortably weird way of expressing what used to be a perfectly normal idea, and further more, entirely unnecessary. I do not think that any reasonable person might be offended by a polite invitation to come and have a free check to see if they had a life threatening disease, even if it did use archaic words like ‘women’.
I understand that this thought makes me somebody who is not likely to be invited to make speeches at Oxford university, but I suppose I can live with that.
It did not matter anyway, because the invitation was not issued by our own GP, who writes old-fashioned letters with stamps when he has got something to say, and so I ignored it.
I was not actually looking at Facebook at the time, because I am trying not to do this quite so much, because it is both upsetting and full of the most ghastly drivel. In fact I had rushed upstairs to read a message which had appeared on my phone, and which I could not decipher because the print was too small for my elderly squinting to make out.
I usually look at the internet whilst I have my morning cup of tea and toast after I have emptied the dogs, but I have become disenchanted with it, and so I have started taking a book into an armchair instead. This is a far, far more pleasant activity, except for the buttery smears on the pages.
Despite my resolve to avoid it where possible, sometimes I need to look at the mighty internet for things. At those times I have to concentrate hard in order not to be distracted into reading enticing news items.
I had to look this morning to find out whether you could make crisps in an air fryer.
It turned out that you could.
The air fryer has arrived, and I have started to use it. This has been partially successful, in that some things have been brilliant and other things have been rubbish.
The crisps were a combination of both.
I peeled bits off a potato with a potato peeler, soaked the starch out of them and then dumped them in about a teaspoonful of oil mixed with salt and smoked paprika and dried garlic before shoving them into the air fryer for ten minutes.
I do not think I stirred them early enough, because when I looked at them, some of them were a bit burned and some were still slightly raw. They all tasted surprisingly pleasing, to my satisfaction, although I do not think I am like to be setting myself up in competition with Doritos just yet, and Oliver ate most of them anyway.
I am going to try again tomorrow, because we use a lot of crisps. They are very good as an emergency addition to lunch boxes or to dip into cream cheese when we are drinking wine with the Peppers.
I was astonished by how far a single potato did not stretch. One large potato turned into the tiniest handful of crisps, not even enough to fill a side plate. There are, it turns out, a lot of potatoes in a packet of crisps. I would not have expected that.
I shall let you know how the next lot turns out. The fatless chips, incidentally, have been splendid, once I got the heat to the right setting, and yesterday I made chicken nuggets in breadcrumbs, because we had some left over slices of bread. They were jolly good as well.
I have not become any thinner yet, however. I suspect this part of air fryer ownership might be a myth.
Have a picture of the author and the author’s son.
