Sad

I am sad today, and so this post will not be very funny.

I am sad because an old friend has just died and also because I just dropped dinner all over the floor.

I was trying to take it out of the oven when it slipped.

It was a roasting tray full of roast beef.

Regular readers will almost certainly have forgotten that I bought some beef at half-price to have for Christmas dinner. Instead of staying at home cooking roast beef and sprouts, instead we went to the Indian restaurant and ate massive quantities of tandoori butter chicken, after which we got drunk instead of washing up.

I thought that this was a brilliant move, which is probably why we do it every year. Some other taxi drivers do it as well, which adds to the happiness of it.

However the upshot of it was that we still had the beef left. Even though I went to Asda last week, my family seems to be eating like a herd of walruses let loose in a fishmonger’s shop, and yesterday, when I didn’t have anything left to put on Mark’s sandwiches, I thought I would defrost it.

Please do not worry about Mark being hungry. When I say ‘nothing on his sandwiches’, I mean, nothing apart from the basics of home made mayonnaise and chutney, cheese and sausages. These form the groundwork for every sandwich and then I put something interesting in to go with it.

He is a working chap. He needs to keep his strength up.

I thought that I would cook the beef for dinner, and that there would be enough of it to do dinner tomorrow night as well, probably in some Chinese sauce, and also to add interest to Mark’s sandwiches for a few days.

It has been cooking slowly in the oven since three o’clock, until I tried to take it out to see how it was getting along, and the oven shelf fell out.

The mess was not lovely.

I wiped the worst of it up with the kitchen towel, which I badly wanted to throw away, but readers, thrift is our watchword in these difficult times, and so it is soaking in a bucket of washing-up-liquid and bleach. I will do something about it tomorrow, unless the Peppers win the lottery, in which case I will throw it away.

I mopped and wiped and sympathised with my burned feet. These had been clad in flip-flops, which are not described as protective footwear in their sales pitch for a good reason.

Again, please do not worry. Apart from a few splashes and a lot of horrible beef-smelling grease, they were all right.

I wonder why cooking beef smells so lovely when it is drifting aromatically up the stairs, and so utterly disgusting when it is smeared all over your toes.

There were no circumstances whatsoever under which I might have considered not eating the beef, so I chucked it back in the oven and turned the heat up, to make sure any horrible floor-related plagues were thoroughly killed off.

We can always put on gloves and a mask to eat it.

Fortunately I had just swept the floor.

I dropped the beef because I was having a day of uselessness, and it was in keeping with the rest of the theme.

I am very sad for my friend, who is gone.

We went on holiday to Prague together once, where we ate so much we practically needed extra seats on the flight back.

We wrote to one another every single day for a whole year.

We got drunk together on home-distilled dandelion and rhubarb schnapps and home-made apricot sherry, and thought we might die.

He sent me a huge bunch of congratulatory flowers when -ahem – I first stayed the night with Mark.

I had not seen him for ages, and had cursed the stupid government-imprisonment rules when I wanted to visit him after his partner died a couple of weeks ago.

I did not go, and now I never will.

Have a picture of him, with Number Two Daughter and Lucy.