I am hastily dropping you a few quick lines on my way to bed.
I am sitting in front of my computer in my dressing gown, wracking my brains for the best bits of the day with which to cheer your cornflakes, or greek yoghurt and goji berries if you are a new age Labour voter.
I did not have any of those things for my breakfast. In fact I had half a bag of chocolate buttons in the car on the way to the supermarket with Mark. This was an entirely acceptable breakfast although I think it would not have been so pleasant coupled with Greek yoghurt. In fact actually the only thing that is pleasant with Greek yoghurt is a large spoonful of sugar, or alternatively garlic, lemon and mint, poured on the top of a slow-cooked leg of lamb, which I don’t think is a common breakfast dish, certainly not in Windermere.
We have been shopping, as you have probably guessed.
We went to – sharp intake of breath – Aldi.
This is our second visit and I am still having trouble reconciling myself to the habit. It seemed to be full of fat people wearing two-berth tents to protect them from the rain, and anxious looking elderly ladies , frowning worriedly and marking things off on their lists. The only person I saw who might have been even remotely middle class was a blonde lady in her thirties who was busy loading her trolley with the extremely cheap champagne. I might have bought some, but I am suspicious of any product which calls itself champagne but costs less than Prosecco. Knowing the French as I do, they are unlikely to sell it to the Brits at a bargain price unless something very nasty has gone wrong with it. Not that I would notice any more. There was a time when I could have identified not only the difference between champagne and Prosecco, but between different makes of champagne.
Those days are very, very far away.
Anyway, once I had managed to get over the colossal embarrassment of walking in through the door, and the emotional difficulty of re-inventing myself as a person who shops at Aldi, it was not all that bad.
That isn’t true, actually it was truly, unspeakably horrible, but it is remarkably cheap, and, more to the point, the only point that actually interests me, the stuff we bought last time was actually really nice. They sell things like Cheshire cheese that Asda disdains to stock, and Mark likes their sausages.
We had to go to Asda afterwards, which frankly was almost as bad, I wish I could win the lottery and know I could shop in the ethical middle-class haven of Booths for the rest of my life, but no luck so far, and so Asda it was.
We finished off with a reassuringly middle-class visit to the lovely coffee shop in the town centre. There are no cars allowed in Kendal Town Centre, it is buses and taxis only. Everybody else has to drive into the horrid car park with spaces so narrow that you have to exit from your car via the window, for so great a sum of money you might justifiably imagine you had actually purchased the space in perpetuity after an hour or two.
By a stroke of great good fortune we have got a taxi, and so had the immense pleasure of barrelling through the pedestrianised area and Mark waited outside the shop for me. This was a huge bonus as it was raining unpleasantly hard, and I did not need to duck and dash across the shiny pavements back to the car park where I would have to feed my shopping in through the still-open car window.
There are not many employment perks to being a taxi driver, but I am very pleased to say that this is one.
We unpacked with relief at home, and then instead of going to work we have been using up some of our huge store of apples by chopping them up and packing them into jars with brown sugar, nutmegs and cinnamon. We packed them as tightly as we could and then filled the jars with rum.
We have got a bottle of whisky for the same purpose for tomorrow. We have been enjoying the blackberry gin so much that we have almost finished the first bottle already. This is a great sorrow, and so some apple whisky, especially if we can work out the way that they smoke it in bars, will be a jolly good encore.
We have seen the smoker things but are far too parsimonious to buy one. We are going to have a go at making one of our own one of these days.
It can’t be that hard, surely.
