Well-oiled

Once again, I am loafing about on the taxi rank in the sunshine.

There has never been a more guilt-free way of idling.

I am sitting beside the lake. The water is sparkling in the afternoon sunshine, and a couple of swans are gliding idly along its surface, just a few yards away from me. There is a gentle breeze and I have got a flask of hot, very spicy tea, and have just eaten a wedge of creamy peppermint-and-pistachio nut chocolate.

All the while I can rest easily in the certain knowledge that I am doing my very best to support my family and to earn a decent living.

How awful to have been one of those people who listened at school.

The whole day has not been this tranquil and contented. I am sorry to say that it began on a very miserable note indeed, with a terrible disaster.

I was making Mark’s sandwiches when the jar of mayonnaise slipped out of my hand and broke.

It was half-full.

This would have been upsetting at the best of times, because mayonnaise is tiresome to clear up, and worse, I only had two mayonnaise jars. They were exactly the right size, and I used them alternately, making a fresh batch of mayonnaise when the old one was almost gone.

No longer. The jar is broken.

Worse still, however, we are in the middle of a global sunflower-oil crisis, with none on the shelves anywhere in Windermere at all. I have been to the cash and carry, and to all of the shops, and even to Asda in Kendal, but there is none.

Obviously I had not run out. I had still got some left, but I have been husbanding it with very great care.

I think I have explained before that no other oil is exactly the right consistency for mayonnaise, or even for soap, and hence I turned to the mighty Internet in my hour of need to see if anybody was selling sunflower oil.

To my amazement, several people were. It was hideously overpriced, it has gone up in price from four quid to twenty, but it was still there.

Then I read the small print.

It appears that our beloved leaders have not been idle in their determination to defeat this crisis. They have taken decisive and immediate action.

What they have done is made it legal to call Rapeseed oil Sunflower oil.

I jest not.

It is now legal to sell a bottle of oily yellow stuff with a label with a picture of a merry sunflower and curly writing which says Sunflower Oil in big letters, as long as it says rapeseed oil instead on the list of ingredients on the back.

Manufacturers have been busy – and yet again I jest not – crossing out Sunflower Oil as the lone ingredient of sunflower oil, and writing Rapeseed Oil instead.

Most of them still seem to be charging twenty quid for it anyway.

I am so very impressed with Boris. No wonder he managed to keep his various wives in the dark about his affairs, what an ingenious rascal he is.

In the end I managed to find a health store which promised that their sunflower oil had got sunflower oil in it. I bought six litres, although it is so expensive it might as well be printer ink, which is the most costly liquid on the planet at the moment. I even wrote to them and checked, and somebody called Dominic wrote back with an assurance of their incorruptible virtue, for which I was very grateful.

I do not understand the shortage in any case, because there has not been a sunflower harvest since the war started, presumably last year’s sunflowers have long been squished to pulp and their useful contents extracted. Mark says that as well as being good for mayonnaise it is also very useful for running cars, and can be added to diesel with almost no noticeable effects, and that probably all of last year’s crop was bought up by the large business interests who saw the war coming.

It would appear that the world’s sunflower oil is being used to power tanks and trucks carrying rocket launchers.

I think it would be better in mayonnaise.