It has been busy sort of day.
Mark’s mother is coming to stay with us tomorrow. A relative, Mark’s father’s cousin, in fact, whom I knew although not especially well, died last week and so there will be a funeral in a couple of days, which we will all be attending.
Mark’s mother is coming up for the occasion, and will be staying with us.
Obviously this involves all sorts of faffing about which probably I would do anyway but which becomes considerably more focussed with the potential advent of guests. I am entirely certain that Mark’s mother would not even begin to notice if I had not swept the kitchen floor, but I will notice, and it is supposed to be swept every day anyway.
I thought about mopping it but didn’t.
We debated at some length about what we ought to offer in the way of dinners. Mark’s mother has various digestive uncertainties, none of which we could exactly remember although she has told us every time she has visited. We have become unadventurous in our own domestic eating habits, having a shared preference for pasta with cheese and pesto, partly because it only uses one pan and is ready all at the same moment. If we have several nights at home it is not at all improbable that we will eat pasta with cheese and pesto on every single one. If we feel like variety we might use the orange cheese instead. Indeed, we are not working tonight and so we will be having pasta with cheese and pesto this very night.
We thought that probably pasta would give her indigestion, and we were not exactly sure about cheese either.
In the end we decided upon a shepherd’s pie. I am perfectly well aware that to the purists this is a cottage pie if it is made with beef mince instead of lamb, but in fact in this instance it is made with bacon, so work that one out.
Actually it has not yet been made with bacon, but I have got the bacon out of the freezer. It will be made with bacon by the time I have done it.
I thought that I would get it done today, but somehow the day’s events overtook me.
When I took the dogs out this morning it snowed. This was not forecast, it was supposed to rain, but instead we had trillions of great, fat, wet snowflakes. These are still falling even now, and are not sticking to anything. I would have liked them to stick to things, because it is all right to be idle when the world is covered in snow, but it isn’t. Instead I got covered in snow, which stuck to me all right, and made me cold and dour all the way around the park. By the time I got home I was sodden and muddy, because Rosie found a ball and bounced about snorting excitedly, leaving enormous black paw prints all over my trousers in her attempts to persuade me to throw it. She knows that if she is enough of a nuisance I will throw it just to get rid of her.
She kept bringing it back, and indeed, the dogs are fighting over it under my desk even as I write.
By the time I had dried off somebody was banging on the door, and it turned out to be the chap from UPS bringing a box for me to send my iPad back to Apple. It is still under guarantee, which is why Mark is not taking it apart, and various bits of it have stopped working.
It took me nearly an hour to package the thing up and work out how to persuade UPS to come back for it, which they still might or might not, and I should warn you that I am going to be Disconnected on the taxi rank until it is fixed, so there might not be very many entries on these pages.
Once I had done that I began to feel despondent, because I had wanted to write some of my story and the day was slipping away fast, so I encouraged myself with the suggestion that I would just do the very worst bits, the things I was avoiding, and once they were over I would make a pot of tea and daydream at the computer.
Sometimes these things just work out splendidly. Before I knew it I had done all sorts of irritating chores. I had swept and tidied and peeled all of the vegetables and everything was neat and orderly, and I could dash upstairs to write about the cat who had walked out on the witch, which is today’s project.
I am going to go and see how he is getting on.
