Prawn free

It is over.

I have handed in my assignments this very morning, with a massive sigh of relief so huge it practically dried the washing.  I am now as free as a bird, unless the bird happens to be a chicken, in which case it is confined to its barn and not allowed to meet with any chickens from outside its own bubble, and only then in groups of six if they stand a metre apart.

I am freer than a chicken.

No thanks to Matt Hancock, whose activities are still fascinating me whenever I open my online newspaper.

Anyway, Matt Hancock and Defra notwithstanding, I am free. My assignments are over and I can do absolutely anything I like until the next one.

What I liked to do today was a very lot of dusting.

Obviously it wasn’t what I liked to do really. What I would really have liked to do would have been to get off an aeroplane in somewhere sunny, preferably Florida, book into a five star hotel and then loaf about by the swimming pool, but I thought probably I ought to concentrate on dusting, at least for the moment, because I have been lax in that department whilst I have been preoccupied by nuns, and little grey drifts seemed to have floated into every corner of every shelf.

I dusted and swept and hoovered. I watered the conservatory and changed the sheets on our bed. Well, I didn’t change them because we only have one set. We did have a spare-but-worn-out set last week, but I have cut the sheet up and turned it into dishcloths. Then middle bits have worn so thin they can only be single-use disposable dog-sick cloths, but the rest of it was all right and it is very splendid to have such a wide choice of dishcloths again, we had been getting a bit short after Rosie was unwell a couple of months ago.

I washed the lovely new sheets and pegged them in the yard and then replaced them on the bed when they were more or less dry, at least in the bits we will be lying on. The elastic corners of fitted sheets never seem to dry properly, but they are over the edge and so don’t matter.

I had to leave them outside in the yard whilst I replenished our supply of sesame seed prawn toast. This is an important part of winter taxi picnics and frankly its manufacture is a huge faff. I absolutely loathe the smell of fried food, it hangs round in the house for absolutely ages. We have got one of those cooker hood things, which is supposed to slurp up all the fat-laden air and disperse it somewhere over the top of the conservatory, but frankly it is rubbish and when I am frying prawn toast I have both the front door and back door open, and switch on the air purifying machine to help the ailing cooker hood, and everything still smells as if I was living on one of the less privileged council estates in the nineteen seventies. I close all the doors upstairs so that no smells can invade the bedrooms, but they do sometimes, a bit.

The result of this is that prawn toast is gloriously, terribly bad for you. It is a sort of exotic version of fried eggs with a side order of fried fish and fried bread, and it is very nice indeed. Also it makes for a magnificent dinner in a cold taxi at night after a busy day. I like processed foods very much, and somehow I don’t need to feel at all unhealthy about it if I have done all of the processing myself. I am quite sure that monosodium glutamate and vegetable oil are not nearly as bad for you if you have dolloped them in yourself. Anyway Mark grew the onions at the farm so probably that makes it home-cooked and nourishing really.

I fried fourteen slices and put them in the freezer, ready to go in the oven before we trek off  to work all week.

I am at work now and actually it is likely that the prawn toast will last a lot longer than a week because after tonight I have got no intention of coming back again tomorrow. I have been here four two hours and so far I am in profit by  about four quid.

This is good because it means I can shirk tomorrow with a completely clear conscience.

I wonder if there are any flights to Florida.