It has snowed!
It was clear and bright when we woke up this morning, encouraging Mark to make allotment noises. I may not have shared the sentiment with quite as much enthusiasm, and hastily explained that of course I would love to help but unfortunately I had got an awful lot of very urgent jobs that I needed to get done before we went to work.
We had a contemplative walk around the Library Gardens. We have been undertaking one of our occasional reviews of our diet. This is not related to quantity of food or to issues of portliness, but to making sure that our largely picnic based eating habits are functioning well.
Living on packed dinners in the taxis is not at all as simple as cooking something like chicken or pork chops with potatoes and carrots every night. I think that there is probably rather less washing up, but we have got to try and make sure that we have got things in our diet that are good for us.
Once we are out at work apart from popping back to see the dogs and visit the bathroom we quite often stay there for ten or twelve hours at a time. Also I do not at all want to start cooking and washing up when we finish at four o’clock in the morning, that is the time for a glass of wine with our feet on the table: so picnics are the thing.
Some taxi drivers seem to eat a lot of pies and crisps, but I know from well-rounded experience that if I were to do that my trousers would be very uncomfortable in no time. Also we find that we get into the habit of making one sort of thing every day and then eating it until we get completely sick of it. We have reached this stage with tomato-stuffed olives and ciabattas at the moment.
In the end I embarked on a cooking project for the day. I sliced our remaining ciabattas and jammed them in a baking tray and added finely chopped bacon and onions fried in butter, and fresh herbs and eggs beaten with cream, grated cheese over the top and stuffed it in the oven. When it was cooked I sliced it into easily managed bits and packed it into boxes to take with us.
After that I chopped up the strawberries and raspberries left over from Thursday night’s extravagances and mixed them with whipped cream and honey yoghurt and crushed meringues, which is as near to Eton as we are ever likely to get, and squished it into tubs.
I filled a couple of bags with an assortment of nuts and some old olive tubs with sliced melon, and felt very pleased with the day’s achievements.
In the meantime, I am embarrassed to tell you, Mark went off to do some hard labour by himself on the allotment.
He took the wheelbarrow with him, and after he had gone it started to snow, just a bit at first, and then heavily, thickly falling flakes until the garden was white and silent.
It snowed a lot.
In the end Mark came home, wearing a pink bobble hat that somebody had left in his taxi, and looking rosy and cheerful because of having moved lots of stones off the allotment and into a pile somewhere else.
I fed him a trial sample of the egg and bacon bake, which he liked, and which made me feel a bit less guilty, and we took the dogs for an excited walk in the snow.
It is very splendid snow. It is creaky underfoot and Windermere looks like a sort of urban Narnia, white and mysterious and muffled. The dogs had an ace time, charging about and snuffling and sneezing and barking at a snowman that some children and their father were busy building.
In the end we took our picnic and went to work, which is where we are now. It is still snowing, which is making life very exciting, because it is sticking and the roads are becoming thrillingly slippery.
Mark enjoys this sort of weather, because he is very good at sliding about in cars. I think it is beautiful, and it makes me feel happy inside, but don’t really like driving in it very much because secretly I am a bit rubbish at managing a skidding car.
I don’t need to get very worried about this because I know that Mark will come and rescue me if I get stuck, so it is all right, and doesn’t spoil the happiness of finally having snow. Also we are managing to earn some money because quite a few of the taxi drivers have decided that it is too snowy to work and have stayed at home.
We have got an ace picnic and nice warm taxis and everything is fine. Apart from some slippery moments so far the night is just splendid.
I love the snow.
