I am sitting on the taxi rank eating birthday cake.
This is lovely. It is especially lovely because I did not need to make it myself, because the Peppers made it for me as a surprise. It is lemon drizzle cake. It is light and sticky, and it is very, very nice indeed.
We have cut some of it up and saved it for tomorrow. We are going to have a picnic tomorrow.
This is going to be a proper picnic, not the taxi sort. Oliver’s old prep school is having a cricket match, and we are going to go and cheer, and have a picnic.
I am not sure if a cricket match and a picnic is going to be a good idea. Today the weather is superlatively horrible. It is grey, and hot, and very damp, with occasional thunderous bursts of rain.
This would not matter quite as much had it not been for the massive pile of washing described in yesterday’s diary entry. You might recall that we came home with a bag of the dirty clothes that we had been wearing for the last few days, including sandy beach towels, and Oliver’s clothes for what looked to be the last six months.
Of course there is a perfectly functional laundry service at school, but if you put anything into it during the last week of term you might never see it again, and of course there are sheets and dressing gowns and towels and sports kit, all of which has to be brought home and made clean and beautifully pressed again.
We had to hunt through it this afternoon to find some sports kit which might be worn for cricket. Gordonstoun is not especially interested in cricket, and so Oliver no longer has a full set of cricket whites, but he unearthed his PE kit, which he assured me was clean, although it very obviously wasn’t.
It will have to do, because there is no time left for any more laundry. We are at work now, and even if we were not, we would not be able to get it dry anywhere. We have already done three loads of washing, which won’t dry at all in the miserably grey gloom of the garden, and it is all dangling, limp and uninspiring, from every windowsill, bannister, drying rack and radiator.
Mark helped with both the cooking and the laundry today because I had started to get into a flap about it.
We cooked a chicken and some sausages. These are supposed to be for the picnic, but really they are for everybody to eat next week at the moments when I have not been organised enough to make any dinner for anyone. Mark gave the remains of the shop cheesecake to the dogs, because we thought it was rubbish and when we read the list of ingredients it turned out to be made with things that we did not understand, like skimmed extracts of pretend milk substitute, and other such junk.
Obviously the dogs have got no scruples about ingredient-comprehension, and disagreed with us about it being rubbish. They wolfed the lot down. Roger Poopy’s father could not manage his all at once, and had to stand guard over it in his bowl, growling horribly at Roger Poopy whenever he thought he might just help to finish it off.
I made some cheesecake of our own after that, with some of last year’s damsons that I had puréed and then frozen and forgotten. We washed the plastic shop-cheesecake dishes out and used them to put it in, because they were the exciting sort with a bottom that you can push upwards, and because it will make the children think that we have bought them in a shop. They are always less suspicious of things that have been properly shop bought and not made by me.
Mark licked the bowl out and said that they were a million times nicer, and that the shop ones left your mouth feeling greasy, so we have put them away for the picnic tomorrow. We are going to be eating very well indeed, with birthday cake and cheesecake, and chocolate biscuits and chicken, cooked in Chinese sauce. I hope it does not rain. I am looking forward to it, probably the picnic more than the cricket.
Have a picture of the conservatory. We are going to need a machete to get in at the back door soon at this rate.
