Not in a jam

I have made jam.

This is always a good feeling. It is ace to see the empty shelves filling up again.

It is blackberry and apple jam. Mark picked the blackberries during his lunch hour at work, and next door brought the apples from their trees in Yorkshire.

So far I have made seven pounds of jam. I have boiled some of the rest of the fruit to make into jelly, and fruit pate, and still there is some left. Some of the jelly will be the lovely ruby-coloured stuff for spreading on toast, and the rest will be boiled harder and made into the centres of chocolate sweets for Christmas.

If there is any left then some will be puréed and strained for the freezer, and the rest can be put into gin and left to soak for a year, after which the fruit will go into the mince pie mixture, and the gin will be drunk.

It all takes ages but it is worth it.

Mark came home laughing about it, because an aspirationally middle-class friend, who had better remain nameless, had expressed disdain, and said that blackberries were peasant food. I do not know if this true or not, because I do not think that poor people eat blackberries these days, unless they buy them in a plastic tray from Sainsbury’s. Certainly nobody ever seems to bother to pick them. There was a time when competition for the first blackberries was fierce, and you had to keep an eye on the hedges and get there early, but that does not seem to happen any more, and lots of them just rot on the bush.

I like blackberries. They make the nicest fruit mousse and ice cream. Blackberry and apple ice cream is a joy which is entirely worth the endless messing about.

I might just be a natural peasant. I am disappointed about this, after all of my applications to join the middle classes, but perhaps it is true. Certainly if the price of middle-classness were to be never to eat blackberries again I would have to think jolly hard about it.

Mark did not go to work today because it is weekend. He has been trying to fix his trailer so that we can help Lucy move house this week.

He has been building some new steel sides for it, and it needs a new floor. He telephoned the builders’ merchant for some board, but this turned out to be so expensive that he decided he would not buy any after all, and is making the floor out of an assortment smaller bits of board that are already cluttering up the yard. This is also why it is having steel sides, because he had got some big bits of steel lying about getting under everybody’s feet, and did not have enough board.

We have got just about the tiniest back yard in Windermere. I am constantly surprised by the amount of junk he manages to cram into it. I have had to throw one summer dress away because of too many tears to be decently mended any more. We are probably starting to need a tidy up.

He doesn’t read these pages. I will have to mention it, subtly, so that he thinks it is his own idea.

I am very pleased to be able to tell you that Oliver called this evening.

We have not heard from him for ages. This is always a good sign, because the last thing you want when you are a boarding school parent is the excruciating anxiety of wistful telephone calls from a long and lonely distance. This call was not of that sort. In fact it was a sort of duty call, made because he had discovered my last half dozen e-mails and resolved that some sort of filial response was necessary.

He sounded probably as happy as I have ever heard him. School is good, music lessons are good, theatre projects are good. He is eating well, and his appreciation of the magnificence of the school catering arrangements has been thoroughly enhanced by his own kitchen experiences during the holidays. He has a bedroom to himself and he is keeping it beautifully tidy and organised, unlike our back yard at home. They are going to have a dance and social evening tonight. Life, he said, cheerfully, is going very well indeed.

I can hardly tell you how very pleased I was. I have been worrying about Lucy this week, who is still suffering with the ghastly bat flu, and whose throat is so sore that she can no longer speak, never mind shout Stop This Is The Police. It was nice to hear that one of us is completely recovered and bouncing with robust good health.

He will be socially dancing even as I write.

I am feeling very pleased.

No picture. My phone isn’t working properly.