I am very pleased to announce that I have completed both the ironing and the hoovering.
What a thrilling day I have had.
Of course I have not just done ironing and hoovering. In between I have had a colossal argument with our mobile phone provider, the substance of which is too dull to be included here, and that one is a very low bar, I can tell you. I have emptied the dogs and done the laundry and I have spent a very great deal of money on an online purchase of something called a Dehydrator.
I have been considering one of these for some time, ever since Mrs. Jeremy Clarkson used one for drying mushrooms during Mark’s shore leave, not the most recent one but the one before, when we managed to squeeze in some loafing about in front of the wide screen, oh the persuasive power of television. I had not realised that such a thing existed, the dehydrator not the television, obviously, and I was fascinated.
For those of you who are no more au fait with the zeitgeist than I was, a Dehydrator is the modern electrical version of the contraption that used to be built with a sheet of glass and some hot stones. It is for drying out fruit and vegetables.
This is an incomparably useful sort of thing to have, I can assure you. Anybody who has ever been reduced to helpless swearing whilst trying to cook meringues in a gas oven will be able to confirm this. It can be used not only for meringues, but also for preserving fruit, turning it from grapes to currants, from plums to prunes, from bananas to nasty white chewy things.
Given that we are now fast approaching the Fruiting time of year, I think this would be a very good thing to have.
We have got some damson trees on our field but I have not bothered looking at them. This is because nobody in our house is likely to eat damsons. However, that ceases to be true when they have been dried out and dumped in brandy for a few months. Under those circumstances there will be a very lot of volunteers.
I have been trying to interest Mark in the purchase of a dehydrator for some weeks now. You will not be surprised to hear that he was not remotely interested, until eventually I said that he never listens to anything I say because he is just cruel and indifferent and perhaps I should just put it on his credit card.
After that he found one on eBay that very same night.
I was pleased about this because it was considerably more upmarket and expensive than anything I had been considering, and so this morning I purchased it hastily, in case he discovered that there were lots of cheaper options available, and started to think about the day when the credit card bill would appear.
I am looking forward to its arrival. With any luck it will be just in time for the blackberries.
In other news, there has been the ironing. And the hoovering. I cleaned Oliver’s bedroom because he is not in it at the moment, which was just about the most exciting thing that happened all day, so there is no other news at all really. I enlivened it all for myself by drenching my pillow with lavender oil as a surprise for bedtime, and setting off the diffusing thing that makes everywhere smell better. Housework is not quite so drearily tedious if there is an actual result at the end of it, sometimes if you are sufficiently bored even a pleasing smell counts as an adventure.
It means that the housework is done and tomorrow I will have the day almost to myself, apart from the routine chores, an appointment at the dentist and the necessity to visit Booths for some fridge-replenishment.
I can hardly wait.
