The wretched apple jelly turned out brick-hard.
Of course this is not an insurmountable problem, it needs more apple liquid in it and then it can be boiled and set all over again. I think I have put too much sugar in it, which is what happens when you can’t quite remember the instructions and are too idle to go and hunt for them.
As it happened next door had kindly left us another bag of apples, and there were still grapes on the vine, so I chopped apples and picked grapes and started all over again. There is now another muslin bag of pulped apple dripping over a pan waiting for me to scrape the first lot out and mix it all together.
I want to make apple sweets for Christmas with it and I suppose the good thing about all of this failure is that there is going to be absolutely loads of it now. I do want to get it right in the end, the thing is that if the jelly doesn’t set properly it is an extremely sticky and unrewarding job to attempt to cover runny jelly in chocolate, it is messy even when everything has gone according to plan.
Mark is not very interested in apple boiling, and laughed at my efforts. He and the dogs very kindly came with me to Booths to help with the shopping, because he could see that I was working myself up into a tizz, and then they wisely buzzed off out of the way to the farm, leaving me to unpack things and flap about tidying up the mess they had left.
This was no small task. Roger Poopy has taken to hiding things. This morning I retrieved his horrible dribble-soaked tennis ball from my nice Chanel scented swimming bag and some breadcrusts and a grape from Number Two Daughter’s shoes. He likes putting edible things in her shoes, usually he leaves them there for a while and then retrieves them later, maybe they enhance the flavour or something.
I cleared up and tidied up and then went on a trip to the ironmonger to buy another bucket, you can never have too many buckets. This was because I want to have a go at recycling rubbish paper into paper that I can write things on, proper things like poetry, not just shopping lists and reminders to pay the council tax. I can’t write poetry. The last sentence was for purposes of illustration only.
This way I can make a really productive use of all of the waste paper that comes in the post from the people like Inland Revenue, rather than just lighting the stove with it.
I have started off this afternoon. I tore the letters into bits and chucked them into the new bucket which is now under my desk, which felt pleasingly creative. I have got to add boiling water to the bucket when it is full and then sieve it out. I can’t remember what you do after that, and I have lost the instructions, but it can’t be that difficult, maybe it will be obvious when I get to that bit.
I don’t know what we are going to use to light the fire.
After the housework was all done I turned my attention back to Number Two Daughter’s curtains, and spent a contented hour or so pinning and hemming. I have bought some new pins, which is an absolute pleasure, it is very satisfying indeed to pick up a pin which is sharp and not at all bent. I threw all the bent ones away when I stuck the new ones in the pincushion, with a happy little sense of having made my life a bit better, even in the tiniest of ways. I felt this when I bought the new clothes pegs, it is lovely to notice the small joys I have found now that I have become old.
At the end of the day we went for a swim and on to work. We were hoping to earn some cash because we have spent it all again, but it is a bit quiet, the winter months are upon us.
Apart from not having any cash it is pleasant not to be interrupted.
I have got a jolly good book.
