Villains

Some villain has pinched our dustbin.

This is probably our own fault for leaving it out in the road the whole time instead of finding a corner of the garden for it. We have got dustbin issues at the moment, because the council have just changed all their dustbin wagon routes, and everybody is confused, not least the dustbin men.

Usually we don’t have much of a dustbin problem, as we don’t just have our own dustbin, but there is the dustbin of the house next door, which is a holiday house, so the people in it never know any better; and the house next door to that, which is empty, and hence its dustbin has become a sort of communal dustbin which everybody at our end of the street uses an emergency overspill for when their own dustbins fill up or they have any really smelly and unpleasant rubbish to get rid of. I accidentally set it on fire once, when I tipped ashes into it that were hotter than I had hoped they would be.

We don’t really recycle, as much as burn everything even faintly flammable, which is an obvious economy measure when you have got a wood fire. Also I have been saving carrier bags for a year now to put to use now the moment has come when I will have to pay five pence if I want one.

Mostly I don’t want one, when we lived in France the French supermarkets didn’t provide them, and we got used to not having them: but I like to have them because they are very useful for being rubbish bin liners and scoops for dog poo, although you have got to be careful about the holes, obviously.

The absence of a dustbin gave me a few moments anxiety when tidying the worst of the chocolate wrappers out of my car before work, in the end I collected them up and poked them discreetly into the bin belonging to the Co-op at the end of the alley. I will have to wait until I get back from work and then pop round and pinch somebody else’s, which is one of the advantages of  coming back from work in the middle of the night.

I am at work now, at the end of a busy day which involved making some new curtains for the camper van out of some left over bits from the living room curtains. I am pleased with these, they are thick and heavy and lined with a good thermal draught proofing fabric. Since it is October all this sort of thing is very helpful in a camper van.

I also re-boiled the fudge, but I have boiled it too much now and it is like toffee, which Mark said is all right, because he likes toffee as well. I don’t, much, and so when I have got over being cross with myself about the first lot being rubbish I will make some more.

It was not the fudge I usually make, which is creamy and nice, but a new recipe that I thought I would try for a change. This will teach me to take notice of housewives from MidLothian writing stuff on the Internet. I am afraid that it is what happens when you forget the basic principle of reading things online, which is that it is almost certainly made up. I have now become a victim in a fraudulent Internet fudge recipe sting, and I would like to warn everybody else. Treat such things with extreme caution.

I have also started packing things for our holiday, which I know is a bit premature since we don’t actually go for another week, but I have got gate fever, and am so excited now about actually going away that It is almost as good as being on holiday already. It is a lovely feeling to have food stored in the freezer all ready to take with us, and meringues and biscuits packed in tins. It would have been lovely to have fudge as well if I hadn’t made such a pig’s ear of it thanks to heartless online cyber-villains.

Not to worry. We will have toffee as well as fudge now.