Garlic bread and beef burger for our picnic this evening.
This is an improvement on yesterday’s evening meal of prawn toast and hot dog sausages, served with a side order of a blackcurrant jam sandwich and an apple. Fortunately we have still got loads of apples because I have not yet stuffed them all into jars with cheap brandy. The ones remaining, in a bucket in the conservatory, are providing useful nutrients in a diet which has become otherwise free of most health-giving nutrients, which are sadly limited in hot dog sausages and garlic bread, certainly these things are rarely recommended on the Lifestyle pages of the august Daily Telegraph. Fortunately, we still have home-grown carrots, potatoes and peas, so all is not yet lost, we have a little time before malnourishment sets in.
Still, the fridge and freezer are emptying nicely. I have washed all of their newly-vacated shelves, and they have the curiously uninviting cool of the sort of fridge you see in a showroom, impersonal and a little unfriendly, although why a fridge should appear more welcoming in its usual smeary crumb-spattered state I am not sure. Still it is a sparkling clean slate, and any day now we will be embarking on Project Winter Fridge Refill. I have been occupying quiet moments making endless optimistic lists of the things needed to restore it to its former bountiful glory, although we may need to win the lottery before that splendid day arrives.
We are throwing ourselves into winter preparations with a sort of anxious enthusiasm now. Mark has been covering the loft roof with the insulated boards today, and I have been doing everything else, being laundry and hoovering, and preparation of Picnic Surprise dinners.
We got up this morning and realised that it was too cold to drink our coffee in the conservatory, for the first time this winter. We have been leaving the door open between the conservatory and the house so that the cats can poo at a comfortable distance, and this morning when we came downstairs there was a chilly draught.
Hence, with some reluctance, today we have given in and turned on the heating. Obviously we have not been without heating so far, as you know had the fire lit for a few weeks, and the stacking and hauling of firewood has once again become a regular part of our daily adventure.
Despite this, it has not been heating the house. Well, it has been heating the house, but only as a bonus side-effect. What it has actually been doing is heating the water. This has meant that we have had the briefly seasonal delight of astonishingly hot water, before any of it gets diverted off to heat the floor in the conservatory. I like this very much, it gives my parsimonious soul enormous pleasure to think that our nightly showers are costing absolutely nothing at all, but alas, those days are now done, and unless we crank the fire up and work a bit harder at our firewood processing activities, the price we will have to pay for a warm floor is tepid water in the taps.
In fact we have got lots of firewood, but of course it does not saw itself up, and this week Mark has been obliged to replace his chainsaw, his own having a burned-out motor. We have purchased one from a complete rural halfwit on eBay, and my parents have kindly offered to go and collect it from him this week.
I am very glad that they are going to do the collection, not least because I would find it hard to resist the temptation to poke him in the eye. I have been listening to an Audible book full of helpful wisdom about how one achieves better results when one does not display anger and frustration, but I think this chap ought to be an exception, because he has been just about as uncooperative as it is possible for an eBay seller to be, and I am looking forward to the moment when the sale is done and I can leave the words-of-one-syllable review that he deserves.
All the same, it will be a great relief to have a chainsaw again.
Winter is coming.
