I am sitting on the taxi rank and feeling weary already.
This is not a good sign. It is only Monday and there is a very lot of week still to go.
I am tired because we had not expected that Mark would need to go off rural broadbanding today, and hence we did not get enough sleep over the weekend.
When the alarm went off this morning it felt like the most shocking offence against all of life’s tranquil joys, and we staggered around very sleepily indeed for the first hour of the day.
Once Mark had gone and the coffee had worked properly things began to improve a bit. Oliver came with me to take the dogs out, and then I made pies.
That is a very short sentence for something that has taken up almost the whole of the day. I did lots of other things as well, but they were all at the same time as progressive stages of pie-making.
Of course pie-making, and indeed all sorts of other baking, is going to be come considerably easier now that Boris has given the Queen the pounds, shillings and ounces back for her birthday present. I have never quite worked out how to cook in grams, and a very great deal of my recipe-translation is spent with my tongue sticking out and occasionally a calculator.
Not that it is going to matter very much. I do not have any scales that work in metric, and have never really understood what it means. I know, for instance, that Oliver probably weighed something around seven and a half pounds when he was born, because Mark weighed him with his tyre-weighing mechanism, but if anybody had told me in kilos I would not know if this meant that he was the size of a small piglet, or potentially malnourished.
It surprised me to realise that it is actually not in the least important anyway. I don’t believe we have ever really known what any of us weigh, nor wished to know, not in either language. It is as pointless a piece of information as the number of steps one has walked in a day.
I took Oliver to the gym. He is going to go on his bike for the rest of the week, but wasn’t exactly sure where it was, and so I escorted him for his first visit. He looked considerably rosier and more cheerful when he came out, so much so that I contemplated, vaguely, whether I ought to consider a trip myself. I only contemplated this, of course, and did not make anything that could be considered an actual plan.
Instead I carried on baking. I made three pies, with tomato and mustard flavoured pastry, and egg and cheese and ham filling. I cooked one, which turned out gratifyingly well, and shoved the others in the freezer.
We had it for our taxi picnic this evening, along with brioche, which was my other project for the day, spread with last year’s blackberry jam. It is very nice to have reached the time of the year where I need not be careful about using the jam any more. The black currants are beginning to get fat, and it will not be very long now.
Probably it is a good thing that we do not know how much we weigh. There is a lot of lard in pies, and in any case, it is the sort of information that could only be depressing, like listening when the Government tell you what they are planning to do next.
I had got lots of pastry left, which is also in the freezer, so we will be having pies again very soon. I have been purchasing pies at the butcher’s but they are expensive, and also a bit dull. I bought a Scotch pie for Mark’s lunch the other week, which the butcher warned me was spicy, but which turned out to be so bland that even Oliver would eat it.
I like the butcher, who makes very splendid sausages, but I do feel as though only a very slovenly idle sort of housewife would purchase somebody else’s pies, and so today I have restored my self-esteem.
We are a house with pies.
