I do not know how on earth the present incumbent of Ten Downing Street thinks that his current proposal for the entire nation’s dietary well-being is going to work.
My understanding of his latest brainwave is that we are all going to be encouraged to live on fresh fruit, lightly cooked vegetables, and steamed salmon.
I have spent all day preparing healthy food with fresh home-produced ingredients and I can jolly well tell you that I hardly had time to get out to work. We will all have to go back and live in nineteen fifty.
Actually it was not all that healthy, because some of it was sausage and egg sandwiches for Oliver’s dinner, and some of it was black currant jam.
We grew the black currants in the garden, though. It was my first batch of jam this year, and it is just as well because we were down to the very last jar.
They were not as sweet as they should be either. This is because we have picked them a few days earlier than we should, because they are being massively raided by a very determined thrush, who moved into the bay tree whilst we were in Blackpool, and who has been squatting there ever since, living on the black currants and pooing on the washing.
I am not enough of an animal lover to feel sympathetic.The thrush can jolly well eat the snails. There are enough of them.
The black currant jam is always my favourite. I make raspberry and apple and blackberry jam as the year grinds into autumn, and the odd batch of mixed-fruit jam. I usually make this last when the children have been home for a while, and I have got lots of fruit left, purchased to rid them of scurvy, but inevitably left rotting in the fruit bowls in their bedrooms.
Out of all those jams the black currant is the nicest. Some years I make black currant jelly, which is nicer still. There is no finer ornament for a sideboard than a row of sunlit jars filled with rich, glowing jelly.
This year I could not be bothered with the muslin and the straining and so just mashed it all up and boiled it. I was disappointed with myself about this, because jelly is an above rubies thing to do, but sometimes life just gets in the way.
I am sure it will be just fine anyway.
This took a lot of clearing up. Our dishwasher is not working. I told Mark that this did not matter in a hurry, because I do not use it very much, but have discovered over the last few days that actually this was a complete lie, and I use it all of the time.
I do not exactly use it all the time. Mostly when I am baking I wash up myself as I go. You will remember that this process is enlivened by having to boil the kettles on the stove to provide the hot water. However, when the clock begins to move inexorably towards the time when I am late for work, I start to panic and use the hot water to make myself a flask of tea instead, and hurl the last dishes and pans into the dishwasher. Once there they will be magically cleansed overnight and usually put away by Mark in the morning whilst he is waiting for the kettle to boil for coffee.
That joyful option is no longer available and I am beginning to think that we need a new dishwasher. It is wearisome to think that there is no choice other than to stand drearily at the sink, scrubbing sausage fat and blobs of jam off things, until every last thing is clean. I might not have used the dishwasher on the whole, but it was encouraging to know that the choice was always there.
It was a bit rubbish anyway. It left everything feeling a bit gritty. I do not like this, although of course it might be a consequence of cheap dishwasher tablets.
Nevertheless the time has come for another.
I should have looked on the mighty Internet for a dishwasher today, but of course I have not had the time. I had to stop doing things for half an hour this afternoon to talk to the accountant on the telephone, and wondered if perhaps I could do it at the same time, by way of filling the unforgiving minute, but of course I couldn’t. I had to concentrate on the things the accountant was saying, and even listening hard and doing my best to make sensible remarks I still did not understand.
He was talking about pension contributions and National Insurance, so I just said Goodness, politely, and that seemed to do the trick. At least, he sighed and said that he would send me an email.
I will read it slowly and probably eventually I will work out what he was going on about.
I went off to work then.
Have a picture of Roger Poopy. He put the necklace on himself.
