Proportion

I am not going to write much.

This is because I have become so cross and anxious that having another thing to do is just making me feel worse.

It is a double time day and we were stupidly late for work. I mean really late. It is the middle of the evening and we have only just got here.

It is busy.

It has been a difficult day.

We were in such a rush that we did not even sit in bed for coffee this morning. We always do that, it is one of the important quiet moments of the day.

Today there was not time. We jumped out of bed as soon as we could muster the energy, and shoved the sheets in the washing machine. Then we gulped down some coffee and rushed off to empty the dogs.

I can’t remember if I told you that I had been making sweet and sour pork. Earlier on this week I made a complicated marinade mixture of onions and cornflour and some excitingly foreign spices, and layered it carefully with the pork.

This was to take away with us and to eat in the camper van.

Today I got it all out to turn it into dinner.

I was halfway through the messy bit of rolling it in cornflour when the doorbell rang, and it was our friends from Lancaster.

We do not see them very often, and I enjoy their company enormously. It is very pleasant indeed to be with people who are sharp and clever and entertaining.

I stopped rolling the pork in cornflour and we sat down to drink tea instead.

This made for a very happy afternoon followed by a very rubbish late afternoon, because when they had gone I realised that there were still a thousand undone tasks and no time left.

Oliver said that he did not, in any case, like the idea of sweet and sour pork, and would prefer a curry. Then he and Mark went off to load the school luggage into the camper.

I was utterly crushed.

It was time for work, and not only had I completely failed to get everything ready for our journey north, I hadn’t even made anybody any dinner for tonight.

I started cooking the pork, but after a moment or two it became plain that it was just going to take ages. There were vegetables still to be chopped, the rest of the sauce to be mixed, rice to be cooked and fried, and the whole exercise had suddenly become pointless because Oliver did not wish to eat it in any case.

It could not be frozen. The pork had been frozen once already.

I put the whole lot in the bin.

Then I got some curry out of the freezer, and hated everybody.

We were late for work by then, terrible on a Double Time Day.

We had run out of biscuits as well, so I hurled butter and vanilla into the mixer and started sieving icing sugar and rice flour.

I will draw a veil over the next couple of hours.

We were very, very late for work and we still have not packed. We can’t even hang around in the morning, because we have got to set off in time for Oliver’s dentist appointment on the way. I am going to have to put another load of washing in and pack our clothes when I get home, after the pubs have all closed.

I am desperate to go home and try and set my little world into some kind of order, but I can’t because of double time.

I am trying to find my sense of proportion but it seems to be irrevocably lost.

I hope it turns up quickly.