I have finally finished the last crime writing assignment, who would have thought that it would be so difficult to write a whole story in three hundred words.
Anyway, it is done and handed in, and I might just shove it in one of the writing competitions as well, because I might win a hundred quid, which would come in very handy indeed.
I have not spent much of today writing things, because now that Mark is back at work I have got an awful lot of cleaning up to be done.
I have cleaned out the fridge, which was so disgusting you could have been forgiven for believing that our house was rented. I was cross with myself about this, because I like our fridge, even though it does not work brilliantly well. It is gold with a green handle, and it is still one of my very favourite things about the kitchen.
It is a much nicer favourite thing now, because when you open the door it looks just like an advertisement for a fridge. This was because when I had finished I did not want just to shove a leftover bit of beef, some elderly lard and some spongy carrots back inside. These things seemed like a waste of a gleaming shelf.
Instead, after we had been on our walk, I gave the dead beef to the dogs, put the lard in the freezer for the next time I make a pie, and went to Booths for some ethical gleaming things.
Booths is really good for making your fridge look perfect, because they sell vegetables in brown paper bags and yoghurts that have got middle-class loopy writing on them. Everything comes in environmentally satisfying colours. Even the chocolate is wrapped in a drab shade of green-and-cream coloured paper.
I bought all sorts of beautiful happy things, like cheese wrapped in waxed paper and some hot cross buns. I felt guilty about these because they were £1.40 and I am perfectly capable of making them for myself at half of the price, but I was ravenous by then, having walked all over the fell, hung the washing out and cleaned the fridge without breakfast. We all know that you should never go shopping when you are hungry, and I had a very narrow budgetary escape from a bar of Montezuma’s Peanut Surprise Chocolate. I thought that this looked splendid, wrapped in shades of ochre and sage, but it was £2.60 for a titchy bar, so I thought I really should make my own. I will do this one day next week, perhaps.
Instead I rushed home and fed myself on hot cross buns with far more butter than was good for me, and then felt so guilty that I used up almost all of the swirly-writing yoghurt with the pictures of flowers on the front in making some bannock.
I like bannock, which is after all a northern ethnic dish. Also it is good for Mark’s lunch boxes and looks nicely middle class next to the paper bag of potatoes in the bottom of the fridge.
You could tell the potatoes were really middle class because not only was there a picture of a smiling farmer hung above them, but they came with dirt on them. This makes me cross when it is dirt that Mark has brought from the field at the farm, but it is satisfyingly virtuous when you have just paid three quid a kilo for it.
At least it was only in a paper bag and not all over the carpet, which is one of my difficulties with the farm dirt.
This does not sound like very many things to have occupied a whole day, but really they did. Obviously there was a great deal of sweeping and washing up and emptying compost bins and all of that sort of thing, but I had barely sat down in front of the computer to finish my story and write to you when Mark telephoned to say that he was coming home, and I had to squeak and flap downstairs to put dinner in the oven.
We hare going to have newly-scrubbed potatoes and some fish.
I think I can hear the car.
I hope he looks in the fridge.
