Fruitful

I am writing to you before I go out to work in order to earn myself a peaceful evening on the taxi rank.

Obviously I do not mean an evening without customers. We have spent so much cash over the last few days – mostly on replacement bits for the aspirational taxi – that we could really do with an evening packed with lucrative action, although I am not exactly holding my breath.

If this turns out to be the case then I will be very glad that I have already written to you and do not have to keep breaking off after a few scribbled lines in order to convey some extremely fat person with a bad leg around their corner to their hotel.

Obviously I do not actually scribble, this is the modern era. I have a state-of-the-art keypad, kindly designed by the thoughtful Mr. Jobs to function perfectly whilst also looking ravishingly beautiful.

It has been something of a day for apples, quite apart from the Steve Jobs sort.

Mark disappeared off to the scrapyard, for some more taxi-repairing bits, and I set to one of my most tedious autumn chores, being the storage of the summer harvest.

It is rather less tedious than it used to be. First we have got cash these days and so hardly need to bother harvesting very much at all, but it would be sacrilegious to let it all go to waste, and so a few days ago we went off to the field where we filled a bag with the damsons.

I have spent the afternoon removing the stones and putting them either in brandy or on trays into the new drying out machine. I know you are supposed to put damsons in gin, but we only had nice expensive gin, whereas I had purchased four bottles of Asda’s Ghastly Cheap Brandy, the sort that comes in plastic bottles, but which makes an exceedingly good base for mince pie mix and for soaking plums.

I have already got loads of plums soaking in brandy. They have been there for several weeks. The plums, and the damsons, can stay there for a few months, and eventually be strained out and the fruit added to the mince pie mixture.

We will drink the brandy, probably mixed into Prosecco as a Christmas cocktail. This is truly, exceptionally nice, especially with sugar syrup and cinnamon.

It is not too late to make your own, although I should warn you in advance that taking stones out of damsons is really dull.

I made it a bit easier for myself by microwaving them for a few moments first. This turns them into a squishy mess, but it is a very lot easier to scrape the stones out.

It was not fun. By the time I had finished my fingers were stained brown and as wrinkled as if I had spent the day loafing about in an exceedingly unpleasant hot bath.

After the damsons there were apples.

These were some windfalls left by our next door neighbour, and hence barely worth salvage really, because of the bruising and the worms, but the bad ones make excellent compost so it didn’t matter, and I peeled and sliced the good ones and stuck them on a tray in the drying machine.

I even put the peel in there to dry. Apparently you can dry it and then grind it to a powder which can then be used as a sweetener for porridge. I did not think I liked the idea of that very much, but if it turns out to be true and it can be made into powder, then it might be a very pleasing addition to the mince pie pastry, I will let you know how it turns out.

After all of this industry Mark turned up again. He has gone off to a friend’s field with the dogs, where he is engaged in shovelling up some sacks of horse poo for the garden. I am about to muck everything hard and bed it all down in a deep mulch for the winter, which might fend off the worst of the frosts.

They will not be long now. The autumn is upon us, and the winter chills will not be very far away.

Perhaps this would be a good moment to start turning your thoughts to your own damsons.

It is coming ready or not.