Ho hum, the taxi rank again.
I have belted around the house in such a desperate frenzy all day that to come out to work and collapse with a cup of tea was a wonderful relief.
Mark went out to work this morning, but things in the rural broadband world were not exactly buzzing, and so he came home at dinner time. This was a nuisance, because of the cash, but rather splendid because it meant that he could get on with the camper van.
He did not start off with the camper van. He started off by cleaning the taxis.
I was very pleased indeed about this.
My taxi was not exactly dirty, but it was lived-in, and Mark’s was nothing short of an embarrassment, and took him ages. Fortunately he has not been taking anybody anywhere in it, except the dogs, up to the farm.
It was not difficult to work out that he had been doing that.
This act of kindness meant that I could get on with my own acts of kindness, largely cooking things for him to take to work to eat, and I took advantage of his unexpected presence by getting him to accompany me to the cash and carry.
The cash and carry is one of the happy things about living in Windermere. There are so many Michelin starred restaurants and so many expensive hotels that it is actually worth having a shop which sells the ingredients for haute cuisine in bulk. I know I have talked about it before, but really it is a jolly good thing. If ever you need to purchase enormous quantities of after dinner mints or five hundred individual sachets of coffee, Windermere cash and carry is the spot.
Today I needed flour, which was why I needed Mark.
I could have managed by myself, but obviously this is one of the reasons that women get married, and I needed three sacks of flour, not to mention yeast.
I tried not to look at anything else whilst I was there, but obviously I couldn’t help it, and we came out with a tray of stuffed peppers in oil as well. These are ideal picnic fodder, and there were enough to last us for half of the summer.
Mark carried the flour upstairs to be stored under the desk in the office, which is just about the only place left in the house. I stuffed some big jars with the peppers and chucked them in the fridge. The oil will be very handy as well when the peppers have been eaten, for making mayonnaise.
Talking of cooking, something nice happened yesterday.
The actual Peppers, not the stuffed kind, came round to help finish the last of the biscuits. This did not matter, because I had got to make some more anyway.
They have taken my biscuit recipe, which is on these pages at the bottom of the recipe page as More Biscuits, and use often it to make biscuits for the guests who come and stay in their guest house.
One guest was a cordon bleu chef, and she liked them so much that she rang up afterwards for the recipe. She said that they were the nicest shortbread biscuits that she had ever had.
I was very pleased about that, because it is my own recipe. It started off with a recipe in an old cookbook which was for the standard four ounces of sugar and eight of butter, until one day I had run out of sugar and used icing sugar instead. After that I improvised with the rest of the ingredients until we have the biscuit recipe of today, which even the children will eat, as long as I put chocolate on theirs, so it must be all right.
Anyway I was most flattered, that is like somebody telling you that your cooking is good. Better still, it was not even my cooking but the Peppers’, so I didn’t need to bother with any weighing or sieving or tiresome washing up afterwards.
I felt like a real grown-up housewife, imagine somebody else liking my ideas.
I thought about it whilst I was making biscuits of my own this morning. It made my try so hard that I remembered them even when they were in the oven and I was doing something else. They were not burned at all, not even the smallest bit at the edges.
What a good housewife I must be.
Have a picture of the conservatory.
