Hello, just a few words because it is late and I have got a good book.
The book in question is by a writer called Matt Ridley who has long been one of my favourite authors, and it is about the origins of bat-flu. He thinks that probably it leaked out of a lab in Wuhan, as far as I can tell. I am only on Chapter Four.
I have every sympathy with Wuhan about this, we have had some difficulty in stopping our camper van from leaking and viruses are much trickier to manage than water tanks. I discovered from his book that it is a bit of an academic question whether or not a virus is a living thing, since it can’t replicate by itself but pokes its way into your own cells and takes them over, a bit like the evil spirit did in that film about the doll. I never watched the film about the doll, because of being far too easily prey to nightmares, but you get the idea, and am pleased by such a malevolent image of bat-flu.
Mark had to drain all of the water out of the camper van when we got home, because we had discovered a wet patch on the carpet which turned out not to be one of Rosie’s misfortunate accidents, but a malfunctioning seal. This is the water tank sort of seal, obviously, not the sort that we saw sunning itself on the beach at Findhorn the other day.
This is tiresome since we also have a leak in the roof, so water is both leaking in and leaking out, and I am in far too fragile a glass house to start slinging stones at Wuhan.
Mark said that he will fix it and that it is still structurally sound so we do not need to worry, but of course I am worried, how horrible if it crumbled into a lot of rotting blackened fragments and we did not have a camper van any more. It is raining very hard at the moment, and so things will not be getting any better but worse and worse even as I write, poor, poor camper van.
Mark has been hauling firewood and poking bits of the camper van all day. I have been cooking. I have made sesame prawn toast, enough to last for ages, and filled the freezer. Then I made biscuits and bread rolls and a pan of pear and parsnip soup. It did not just have pears and parsnips in it but all sorts of things left over from Christmas in the bottom of the fridge, so actually it is pear and parsnip and ginger and green beans and celery, along with a couple of onions from the strings in the little porch behind the front door. We have eaten all of the home-grown garlic now but the onions are still going strong, and providing an olfactory surprise for any visitors who turn up at the front door. Mostly visitors don’t turn up at the front door, not least because it is monsoon season and once again it has stuck shut due to the rains. If you happen to pop in come round the back. The postman knows to shove it hard if he has to hand me a parcel, but Amazon delivery drivers change every fortnight and have to leave things on the step. I have to make a point of checking there if I go to the post office.
The soup has turned out all right, if you decide to make it yourselves use milk not water and add cream and coriander, and also once you have liquidised it you have to shove it through a sieve because pears are horribly gritty otherwise. This makes it a nuisance but worth it. Plenty of ginger gives it a satisfactory bite, and we had plenty of ginger because I didn’t get round to making another batch of mince pies.
Hence tonight’s picnic has been a satisfactory affair of spicy pear soup with fresh bread rolls and salad with prawn toast. We have had plenty of time to eat it because nobody wants a taxi on a very wet Friday night in January.
I am hoping to be too busy to write tomorrow. Almost certainly I will be too idle.
I will see you on the other side…
