We haven’t quite gone on holiday yet.
We have so much not gone on holiday that Mark is at work installing rural broadband, and I am on the taxi rank. Mark is going to come and join me here shortly, so in fact today we are back to doing lots of jobs.
We were busily creating some new drawers for the camper van kitchen this afternoon when the phone rang, and it turned out that the Marina village, just in Bowness, was having a wi-fi crisis of some sort. This needed Mark to go over and sort it out in a hurry.
We had to stop making drawers then. I wasn’t really making drawers anyway, I had just been called out into the garden to hold one of them whilst Mark put the screws in.
They are going to be splendid. I am going to have a real kitchen, with everything tidily stacked in beautiful wooden drawers. It is one of the loveliest things about being over fifty, that things like kitchen drawers can cause such a happy tingle of excitement. There are many more opportunities for good times than there were in my youth, when thrilling things always seemed to involve an awful lot of explaining and clearing up afterwards.
I did not do carpentry.
I talked to my parents last night, who observed that I would be less completely bankrupt if I did not go out and eat dinners in restaurants quite so frequently, but stayed at home and drank wine from Asda instead.
This was irrefutable. It seemed like sensible, if boring, advice, so I considered it over the course of the evening.
I like eating out very much, although I am not sure why, because when I put my mind to it I am a reasonably good cook, and I don’t especially mind washing up, mostly because we have got a dishwasher.
I thought about it hard and wondered exactly what it was that I liked so very much. If I can cook good food and drink good wine and get Mark to wash up, then technically there is no good reason why I should prefer to eat in the Grand Hotel rather than the camper van.
I like the ambience and the quiet sophistication of nice hotels, but then I like the riot in big groups in the Turkish buffet restaurant as well. And I know that I like the camper van, it is one of my favourite places in the world.
I came to the reluctant conclusion that perhaps I ought to adopt this policy, at least on a trial basis, for the duration of the present holiday, and see how we got on with it.
I explained to Mark this morning that I needed to think about cooking.
I thought that I would cook lamb. If we go out for dinner, quite often one of us or maybe both of us chooses lamb, and so it is special and interesting enough to compensate for the absence of chap with the white cloth over his arm who calls me Madam.
After my run up the fell, Mark came with me to the butcher’s, and we bought a chunk of lamb.
This was so expensive that I almost choked on my virtuous intentions. I don’t know how civilised restaurants manage to make any profit at all if they have got to buy ingredients like that. It cost our entire two-pound-coin collection, saved for nice times and usually blown on red wine and eating out.
I thought that I would cook it today, because a joint of lamb needs really slow cooking, and I do not want to be in the camper van in a heatwave with the oven on all day. We can slice it and warm it up later. I am quite sure that hotels do things like that, and if you are rude to the waiter they spit on it as well. I know this because I work in a tourist area. It is worth being really polite to waiters.
I cut some mint out of the garden, which is the most lovely summer thing to do. The leaves are soft, and gorgeously scented, and made me feel wonderfully contented. I chopped it up with a whole bulb of garlic, and some parsley from the pot that is on the wall out of the way of dog leaks. Then I stabbed the joint all over, stuffed the whole mixture into its injuries, rubbed it with butter and slid it into the oven, where it stayed, simmering slowly, for the next five hours.
Once that was done I mixed a dressing of yoghurt and lemon juice and mayonnaise, and added more garlic and parsley and mint, and put it in the fridge.
I boiled some Jersey Royal potatoes whilst I was in the mood, and put them in tubs with olives, and little chunks of interesting cheeses for picnics tonight. I had had enough of cooking by then, and there was a serious mess to clear up, so I stopped.
The meat smelled achingly good all day, and when it came out of the oven it had practically fallen off the bone.
I poured the juices into a mug to add to rice later.
We have got the bottle of taxi driver red wine, and we can cook a brilliant dinner. In fact, there is probably enough to cook two dinners.
We are going to see my parents tomorrow. How impressed they will be with my economical parsimony.
The picture is the view from the top of my run this morning. There was a real fell-runner up there. He thought I was one too, so I pretended that I was.
I suppose he knew really and was just being kind, but it was nice for a few minutes to talk about knee impacts and hamstrings as if I knew what I was talking about.
