I am pleased to announce that today I have oiled all of my curtain rails with a little olive oil, and all of our curtains run easily and freely again.
I have not told you about this small irritation on these pages, some things really are too trivial for your rapt attention, but nevertheless it has been mildly tiresome for ages. I can assure you that the result is nothing short of miraculous, so much so that even Mark noticed. What have you done to these? he said, in a suitable tone of admiration when he pulled the curtains.
Not only that, but I have tied back the monster geranium in the conservatory again. It has become so huge that it was stopping us from getting in and out of the back door, and is possibly the biggest geranium I have ever encountered. It is around three metres tall, although because the ceiling is in the way it might be better described as being two metres tall and one metre long, and occupies almost all of the back wall of the conservatory. It is massive and bushy and its stalk should now really be referred to as its trunk.
Today I got fed up with fighting my way through it every time I want to go in and out of the kitchen, and harnessed it ruthlessly back up to the arches in a savage sort of horticultural bondage. I can feel its grumbling resentment every time I pass underneath it now, one day I imagine it will just quietly reach down and strangle me.
It has been a day of vegetation. Mark has been up at the farm where he has been preparing Oliver’s car for its MOT tomorrow. It will fail this because of something – I forget what – that he has not had time to finish, but he is going to take it anyway and get a fail sheet so that he knows exactly what needs doing and can make it pass easily when we get back from Scotland.
I have insured it today. We are now a multi-vehicle family.
Anyway, the vegetation. Whilst he was there he also harvested some vegetables out of his garden. He brought home potatoes and carrots and peas and beet and parsnips. As it happened our neighbour had kindly left a box of bananas on the doorstep, and so I thought I would make a vegetable curry.
This is the sort without meat, in case you haven’t tried it, and its main appeal is that it is really quite astonishingly cheap, especially when you have grown all of the vegetables with your own fair hands. I haven’t grown them, it was Mark, so it was economy by proxy.
I went to Booths, where they have a little stall which always smells thrillingly of foreign holidays, and purchased some Indian spices.
I have got lots of Indian spices of my own but I thought that since it was a special home-grown occasion I might try something which had been properly organised by a proper Indian instead of my usual haphazard dollops of the spices from the Curry shelf on the spice rack.
I don’t think the chap was a proper Indian in the end, he was pinkish with a gingery beard and a lumberjack shirt, although the sign said he was called Raj. Perhaps he was brown on the inside, there aren’t many actual Indians in Windermere so I suppose it was the best they could manage. Anyway, the spices looked splendidly exotic so I followed the instructions for the first couple of lines but they were in ridiculously squinty-small writing and very quickly I stopped bothering about them, so I did not have much confidence in the outcome.
To my astonishment the resulting curry is splendid, although I am having some qualms of anxiety that it might give Mark wind. Vegetables can have alarming consequences sometimes, and we are going to eat it in the camper van, so it might be one of those experiences that you do not repeat very often.
He thought he would go out to work for the last couple of hours, largely, I think, because he wanted to watch the sort of film on Netflix which has car chases, and eat his dinner without any animals watching him hopefully. The cat is lying next to my keyboard as I write, and for some inexplicable reason seems to want me to hold her paw. Every time I let go of it she pats my hand softly and pulls it back to her with a gentle hook of her claw. I do not know how Lucy ever gets anything done, it should be the sort of thing that is an acceptable addition to a CV. What do you do in your spare time? I stroke cats. This seems to me to be the only possible answer for anybody who is a cat owner.
They were on our bed mewing at eight o’clock this morning. They had got plenty of food and everything a cat might reasonably need. They just wanted to be with us. Once we were awake they curled up on the pillows next to us, purring and patting our noses encouragingly until we got up.
I am going to go. Mark has just called and told me that we are now ten pounds better off than we were and he has finished his dinner, so he is coming home.
Scotland tomorrow.
Have a picture of the cat. It has worn itself out.
