Well, I have managed to achieve some cooking.
I am not sure how successful it has been. It is ages and ages since I baked anything, and things did not work nearly as well as they work when you are doing them all of the time. I had expected to slide comfortably back into Master Baker sort of achievements, but failed miserably, and the Tear and Share bread, made with the few stewed apples that were not burned, turned out too sticky, and the pastry for the cheese and onion pies was too short.
By short I mean in a bakery sense of being a bit crumbly, not in the mathematical sense of not being big enough, obviously, although actually a couple of the lids managed that as well, and had to be eked out with the offcuts from the other bits. This made the pies look a bit lumpy but probably they will taste all right and so I do not really care.
I do not know if the pies will be too crumbly to eat because I have not eaten any of them yet. I have covered them with a tea towel and left them for Mark’s return.
Mark is coming back tonight.
He called me at around five to let me know that their boat had arrived, because this trip involves sailing to the oil rig, not the usual helicopter trip, and that he would be getting home somewhere between ten and midnight.
Since this is more than enough time for me to go out to work and earn a living I have got no excuse to shirk, and will stay on the taxi rank until he calls to tell me he has arrived.
Apart from the baking I have occupied some substantial part of the day in planning our French trip.
Since we are going to look at houses we will be doing some travelling about, and some journey times have had to be calculated, along with some scowling and some tongue-sticking-out.
I have been making appointments to view places, which has involved some complicated juggling of French estate agents. One doesn’t work on Thursdays, one doesn’t work at weekend, one is on holiday, one or two never bothered to reply in the first place, and one told me, rather snootily, that she was not going to show us the house that we liked because some French people also wanted to look at it, and so obviously they would get first refusal.
I was torn between irritation and admiration at this statement. Despite having wanted to look at the house, which was a rather nice yellow-painted spot with its own lake, I thought it was a very fine sentiment, and wished, wholeheartedly, that we lived in a country that espoused similar principles.
It occurred to me that in fact there is no country in the world, including, and perhaps especially, my own, that would give me a priority option on a purchase because I happened to be English.
Indeed, in this country we seem to have become so courteous to foreigners that we are cheerfully prepared to step back and say No You Go First. I do not mind this, exactly, but it does seem to put us at a disadvantage when our neighbours are doing exactly the opposite.
I thought resignedly that if England was still allowed to be as proudly nationalistic as the French, probably we would not be planning to leave.
Anyway, I accepted the more important claims of the French people fairly humbly, well, with reasonably good grace anyway, certainly by my standards.
Mark laughed when I told him about it and said that the house was on the wrong side of a hill anyway and would not get the sun until lunchtime, so the French people were welcome to it. I was pleased about this, nothing has been lost by our misfortunate birth in the Wrong Country.
There are plenty of other houses.
