It has been a nice day.
Lucy’s hair has grown very long now, so at Number Two Daughter’s recently-in-the-middle-east suggestion, this morning we spent some time rubbing coconut oil into it to make it shiny again. Her hair looked lovely and felt very silky when she washed it all off later, which pleased her very much.
Mark and Oliver were not particularly interested in hair conditioning, and took the dogs and the guns and went off to the farm.
When Lucy retreated back to her prep with her hair wrapped up in a towel I left her to it and went shopping.
We have eaten such a lot that we had run out of things already even though it is only a few days since the last time I spent lots of money.
When I got back of course I had got to put everything away, which meant the usual fuss of standing on chairs to reach the top shelves and redoing the three-dimensional jigsaw in the freezer.
The freezer is very full, mostly because of buying all the different bread that everybody wants to eat. This takes up an awful lot of space.
Mark makes toast with a bread with cheese and seeds in it, and Oliver likes brioche. When Lucy has bread she has plain sliced bread and makes sandwiches. Number Two Daughter has olive ciabattas, and I like hot cross buns.
I am too idle to go out and buy bread every day like a real housewife, so I just buy a huge stack of it all at once in Asda and then jam it into every available corner in the freezer.
This means that sometimes it comes out having frozen into unlikely shapes but since it still works that is all right. In any case it is important to have plenty in stock, because it is depressing to get up in the morning and discover that your own particular bit of the bread basket is empty and you have got to have coffee and headache tablets for breakfast again.
Whilst Mark was out I made some sausages. I didn’t really make them, actually, but merely cooked them. Now that we don’t have pigs any more I don’t make my own sausages, which is one less job to feel guilty about, it is lovely living in a street: and in any case the ones from Asda are perfectly nice.
When I have got a lot of people at home I cook twenty or thirty sausages at a time in the oven, and leave them on a plate in the fridge to make up for some of my other catering shortcomings. Mark makes suggestive jokes when I am cooking sausages as long as no children are listening, because of rude ideas about sausages and oil.
He thinks this is very funny. I have explained that sausage-related humour is strictly for ten year olds, but he always laughs anyway. Fortunately today he was not in and so I could make satisfyingly innocent sausages, unsullied by having not been the butt of vulgar humour.
It was a lovely day, so the washing dried outside. This was not helped by all of the clothes pegs being wet. This was because I had to wash them all in bleach yesterday when Mark spotted one of the dogs doing a wee in the peg bag which I had left on the lawn, sometimes being a pet owner is not the relaxing experience that it is supposed to be.
After the sausages and the washing I made some creamy pear and parsnip soup. Mark had this at Christmas and liked it, so one night when he took the hotel chef home in his taxi he persuaded him to part with the recipe, and I thought I would have a go.
I didn’t exactly stick to the recipe, because I had got some spring onions that needed using up, so I chucked them in as well, and thought that he probably wouldn’t notice, which he didn’t, so that was all right.
In the end Mark and Oliver came home with a huge stack of logs for the fire. Lucy went out to work, and Number Two Daughter came home from work, and I made our picnic with parsnip soup. Mark and I had a sociable coffee and five minutes contented but unrhythmic dancing together in the kitchen, and then it was time to go and sit on the taxi rank.
There are so many things that I want to get round to doing every day, and somehow there just isn’t the time. I haven’t planted the little seeds, and I haven’t done the ironing or put the sacks of farm muck on the garden, and I haven’t made the skirt that I want to make for going to Gordonstoun next week.
Life is very full somehow.
I will have to try again tomorrow.
