I have no words to tell you how fed up of grapes I have become.
I have not even begun to be near the end yet.
I have boiled and pulped and squished until my hands have been dripping and sticky with the juice. I have pushed grapes through a sieve and squeezed them through muslin. I have sugared and stirred and weighed until grape juice lay in puddles on the working surfaces, and stalks and pips and leaves and the occasional frightened spider were strewn all over the kitchen.
I am in my taxi now, but my hands still smell grapey, and somehow even my computer feels tacky.
I have gone off grapes.
This lot, for some reason, have got pips in them. I can’t describe what an utter nuisance this is. They are not supposed to have, and previous batches have been pip-free: but not these. Every single wretched grape has got a pip in it.
I have had to remove them all. Thousands of them.
The pips are drying in the garden whilst I look up how to make grape seed oil, which is supposed to be good for you. I am secretly hoping that the crows will eat them.
I can confess here to secretly hoping that the crows will eat the rest of the grapes as well. Grape processing is not exciting.
I think that so far I have done about fifteen pounds of them. That is not very many, but it feels like it.
I have got so fed up with it that I was looking forward to doing the ironing, this morning. It seemed like a happy release.
Whilst I have been occupied with the grapes, Mark has been out in the garden building things. He said that it was better than doing the grapes, but tonight his back hurts and his legs hurt and he is very tired, so perhaps the grapes have their advantages.
He put down some footings for his shed wall. This means that he dug a trench and filled it with concrete. After a short while the dogs walked in it, which made him swear.
The dogs were scared of the concrete from then on, fortunately, because they do not like Mark to get cross. I hope they still remember to be scared when we start laying floors, because it turned out not to be easy to squish dog paw prints out of concrete.
He has built the beginnings of his shed walls. I said that I wanted a round corner, and he has very cleverly built one, which you can just about see on the picture. We went to the builders’ merchant in Bowness for some more blocks. I went as well, because carrying bricks was a much nicer thing to do than messing about with grapes, even taking into account the trapped fingers.
I enlivened the grape-processing by occasionally writing things on Facebook and being astonished and entertained by how peculiar a place the world has become.
I expect that this was how my computer became sticky.
By the time I had to start getting ready for work the first jars of jam were finished, and everything set up for boiling the next jam tomorrow. I have not made jelly because I did not want to waste the grape pulp, and it just seemed like too much trouble to do two sorts of jam, one with pulp and one clear, without.
I might do a batch with chilli and onions, though, and make chutney.
You can even pickle grapes.
You have got to take the seeds out first.
Maybe I won’t bother.
