Last night proved to be rather better than the night before.
We took almost double the previous night’s takings, which we thought was a splendid result.
Of course it wasn’t enough to go to Asda, and when we had our morning coffee this morning we recollected that the twentieth of the month loomed large, and with it the bills that you always forget about, the gas, water and electric.
Obviously we had forgotten about them, and some calculation informed us that not only were we not likely to be going to Asda, but that we needed about another hundred pounds on top of what we already had in order for the electricity not to be cut off. Obviously they won’t cut it off, you can mess them about for ages in a true financial emergency, but it is not nice to get the sort of letters that have politely sinister warnings encoded in their courteous reminding language, so we had probably better try and pay it.
Hence we are on the taxi rank, having had our depressingly unslimming swim, and already now we are £3.60 closer to the target.
Despite this I have had rather a splendid day.
I have continued the culinary creativity brought about by not having any money. I had the happy recollection this morning that I had bought a quantity of sausage meat before Christmas with the intention of making it into celebratory sausage rolls. Of course we had so many other ace things to eat that I didn’t bother in the end, and stuffed the sausage meat in the freezer and forgot.
Not only did I have sausage meat, but I also had a large Kilner jar of goose fat.
I made meltingly smooth wholemeal goose fat pastry loaded with garlic and mustard and parsley. Then I mixed the sausagemeat with dried tomatoes and half of a finely-chopped pepper and chucked in an egg and some brown sugar and salt.
The resulting sausage rolls were ace.
After that I made black treacle flapjacks with crystallised ginger.
Then I hung up the washing and tore off my apron and went dashing upstairs to write my book.
I spent several hours in happy contemplation of surgery without anaesthetic.
When Mark came home he pretended that a hazelnut was a bullet and I tried digging it out from a pretend injury with a knife. It wasn’t nearly as easy as I had thought it might be and I am jolly glad that we have invented anaesthesia and also that I am never likely to get shot anyway.
After that he listened patiently whilst I talked boringly about how my book was going to end. I am nowhere near the end yet, but obviously it would be a good idea to have given it some consideration.
It was entirely obvious to me that given the characters and plot of my book so far that a trip to Scotland would have to happen in order for everything to reach a tidy conclusion.
I thought woefully about this, because I don’t go to Scotland much. This is because I was defrauded by a Scot once, which regular readers may remember, it was the time of the fraudulent fudge recipe online which wasted so much sugar and condensed milk.
All the same I thought sadly how lovely it would be to have the camper van back on the road so that we could go to Scotland and I could look hard at places and imagine my characters milling about having adventures there.
Mark was sorry, because the camper van is on stands in the shed, having its new axle put on to it, and not likely to be ready for weeks and weeks.
You will like this, and I promise it is absolutely true.
At that very moment the telephone rang, and it was my friend Elspeth. She told me that she had booked a surprise holiday in Scotland for us all one night next week, as a nice thing present because we haven’t got any money.
Mark laughed a lot, and then we lit a candle to the kindly Gods.
Here is something else which is Amazing But True.
Mark’s eczema patch is lots and lots better.
Remember the bird-poo ointment?
It works.
