I have given both of the dogs a haircut.
I was rushing, because Oliver had promised to take them out to the Library Gardens for half an hour’s brainless belting around after the ball, and he had got to do it and get out to work.
All the same, it was a thankless sort of job.
By that I mean that neither of the dogs thanked me at all. Indeed, Roger whimpered as if he were Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Past and the chap from the Inland Revenue had both popped round together. Rosie fought, silently and grimly, and both of them escaped at the first possible opportunity, leaping off the table and scattering piles of revolting, mud-encrusted fur in their wake.
Roger becomes so upset that he breaks wind all the way through, which adds to the cheery elbow-in-the-throat ambiance of the event.
It is late in the year to be making them bald, but if I do not do it now they will be unspeakably shaggy by Christmas. They will be fairly shaggy anyway, but they would have looked like Highland cattle.
They are done, and the mess has been cleared away and the table disinfected, and we are all thoroughly and completely shorn, even Oliver, who disappeared to the barber this morning.
Oliver has not had much of a haircut. It is short on the sides but still long and curly on the top. He has reached the age where he thinks I have got no taste in hairstyles and general appearances, although I should observe that it took him much longer to get there than it took his sisters. Anyway, he merely laughed when I expressed the opinion that he had not got his money’s worth, and said that it was a perfectly fine haircut, and I suppose it is.
It has been a busy sort of day. I decided that I do not want to eat shop bread any more. I used to use the bread maker all the time but became too idle a couple of years ago when Mark went offshore, and started purchasing bread rolls.
I have been reading alarming articles on the mighty Internet about the junk that gets shoved into supermarket bread, and also it is dull and fluffy and does not fill you up, and so decided, albeit reluctantly, that I would prefer to make my own.
I went to Windermere’s wonderful cash and carry shop this morning and purchased some wholemeal flour.
I made the mistake of making bread rolls instead of just a loaf, because I thought they would be nicer, but you have got to take the dough out and shape it into rolls and put it over the fire to rise. This would have been all right but the fire went out halfway through the rising so they stopped rising and sank again, and also I had a floury mess on the worktop.
All the same I have had one just now, and I can tell you that they are divine.
They are solid and reassuring and actually taste bready, made with groundnut oil instead of whatever horrible cheap grease supermarkets use, and when I had had one I didn’t want to eat anything else.
Actually that isn’t true. I would have liked to eat another one because they were so nice, but really I didn’t need to. I was replete.
I have still got five bread rolls left. They are a bit sunken but will improve the rest of my week very much indeed.
Whilst the bread was rising and falling I rushed upstairs and got on with the wedding invitations for Lucy and Jack’s nuptials in November, and I am very pleased to announce that I have finished them, apart from the ones I have forgotten, obviously.
It is going to be a very splendid party. I am actually looking forward to it, because for the first time in years and years, all four children will be with us together, all of us in the same place.
It is going to be wonderful.
