Sushi and jam sandwiches for dinner tonight.
The freezer and fridge are beginning to look quite remarkably bare.
There is a pork pie for Mark’s dinner tomorrow. I do not eat pork pies because of the utter revolting awfulness of finding jelly in them. As a child, brought up by post-wartime parents, being repelled by perfectly good enough food was not on the list of available options, and I gagged and struggled with many pork pies at weekend lunchtimes, fighting down nausea as the disgusting slimy jelly had to be swallowed, because in those days, of course, it was what all children were Supposed To Do.
Being grown-up has all sorts of disadvantages, like council tax and arthritis, but at least I can rejoice in the happy knowledge that I never have to eat pork-pie jelly ever again.
I like hot pork pies, incidentally, the sort where all the jelly has disappeared, but I was a child back in the Dark Ages and microwaves had not been invented either.
Fortunately we are fifty years on now, half a century further on again from wartime parsimony, and nobody thinks these days that anybody ought to eat things that they don’t like. Indeed, we have all worked out that being compelled to finish everything on your plate in olden-days fashion, will probably just make you fat. This wisdom came too late for Mark, who now has to fight the urge to eat things just because they are there, and will probably have no problem at all polishing off the sushi even though it appears to have been in the freezer since last December. I have already eaten most of mine, it tasted all right but you will know if there is no diary entry tomorrow that it probably wasn’t.
I have occupied much of the day with posting things. I am not sure how such a small task has occupied quite so much time, but it has. It was the day for all of Mark’s old clothes, auctioned on eBay, to be posted to the winning bidders, and I am pleased to be able to say that when the cash finally rolls in, which tends to take several weeks when you are on eBay, it will be very useful indeed. We have not been so successful that I would contemplate selling on eBay as a viable hobby, indeed it seems to be a very lot of awful faffing about for not very much reward, but still there has been enough result that I am content.
Certainly I have made more than nothing, which would have been the end result if I had taken everything to the charity shop across the road.
I have also posted the first of the Advent Calendars. It was the one bound for foreign parts, and will begin to get me off the hook with the lady in the Post Office, although I might 98yup[[p[p
Small cat related pause there. Let me explain.
I had returned home, the taxi rank being a fine and private place where none, I think, do there embrace, except for the occasional intoxicated Geordies on their way back to Aphrodite’s Lodge.
I brought the remains of the sushi with me and settled down at my desk to finish writing to you and painting pictures for the lady in the post office. I had just got as far as Might, although I can’t now remember what I was going to say next, when a cat walked right across my keyboard, discovered the sushi, glanced across at me to see what I would do, and gave it a push with its paw.
The sushi landed, upside down, in my desk drawer, covering everything, pens, tins of paperclips, tubs of drawing pins, elastic bands, spare glasses, with rice, soy sauce, and cold fish.
Clearing up took ages. I am going to wrap the cats up and post them to the far ends of the country.
If anybody gets a calendar with a surprise cat in it you can keep it.
