Friday 21st March – Beelzebub’s Credit Cards

I was all catered out today.  I have finally reached the end of my baking odyssey, despite the fact that at this stage my essay is no nearer being written.  I just can’t face making any more pies, pastries, cakes or other goodies.  I will now have to subsist on shop bought Easter goodies until the mood strikes me once more.  I’m sure I will be able to manage.  It’s hard, but we all have to make sacrifices for the greater good, and apart from anything else, I am sick of trying to clean flour from the grouting on the kitchen floor.  My back is not what it used to be.  It would be a shame if I became a hunchback for the sake of Madeira cake.

Last night our guests weren’t hungry when they arrived, which also did something to dampen my enthusiasm as I was faced this morning with three quarters of a rhubarb crumble and a French apple tart that didn’t look as nice as they did when they came steaming out of the oven yesterday evening.  We only had three quarters of the rhubarb crumble because I couldn’t resist and had some warm with double cream before bed, even though it gave me terrible indigestion it was a small price to pay.  It was very nice indeed.  I have a deep soft spot for rhubarb crumble, which saw me through some of my most troubling pregnancy related problems whilst I was gestating Tallulah.  Like mashed potato, it is a very needful and nesty type food, and just what you need when you’re about to spend Easter in an impending and unseasonal blizzard situation.

Jason had his last night on call last night, and as a special treat they called him just as he was getting into bed at midnight, whereupon he worked feverishly through the night into the wee small hours, finally getting to bed at half past four.  This meant that whatever Good Friday type plans we had adopted had to be abandoned due to the fact that he was fit for nothing except getting under a duvet and snoring his head off for most of the day.  Luckily my mother came to the rescue and invited us to her house, meaning the children were delighted because Granny spoils them rotten; Jason was delighted because he got the whole house to himself, and I was delighted because I didn’t have to spend the whole day creeping round on my eyebrows trying to find quiet things for the children to do while Jason attempted to sleep.

What I have found, from bitter experience, is that children are rather like drunks in this respect, the more they try to be quiet and well behaved the louder and more appalling they get until you are left with little choice but to lock them in the garden and refuse to acknowledge their existence.  Unfortunately the weather conditions were not sympathetic to this operation so Granny really did come to the rescue.  As a reward to her I took a large tureen of chicken stew, the apple tart, some ginger cake, some biscuits and the crumble.  Mum hates cooking with a passion, although she is very good most of the time and buckles under, slaving away at the coal face with gritted teeth, but she is always very grateful for donations.  I must remember to thank our guests for not being hungry because it actually gave me much kudos.  Dad ate most of the apple pie, which is brilliant because I don’t like them and neither do the kids, so I had resigned myself to the fact that the birds would be experiencing the delights of bespoke garden based patisseries, when he saved the day.

We had a bit of excitement when mum allowed the girls to get their sewing boxes out.  Mum is incredibly handy with a needle and when we were poor and I was a child (the two events coincided), she made lots of my clothes.  I mostly hated this, as I was a child of the consumer age and wanted Rah Rah skirts and sailor dresses and pants with nylon hedgehogs on them.  What I didn’t want was brown pinafore dresses whose buttons came undone every time you stood up and showed everyone your plain cotton pants.  Times were hard and things were rough.  Anyway, now she admits that she hated making clothes and would have been much happier doing tapestries and making quilts.  I would have been a lot happier too.  It doesn’t take much brain to know that someone who fiercely and aggressively makes you brown pinafore dresses isn’t a fan of haute couture and all it entails.  A lot of hate went into those clothes, and it showed.

Anyway, now she is teaching my children to sew, something she failed to do for me, despite numerous evenings crouched over a bit of binka (like open weave tapestry) and some heavy duty knitting needles.  We’ve never been great knitters in our family.  We always went at it with a kind of ferociousness that is very bad for the world of knitwear.  Apparently the more stressed you are, the more tight the stitches are, and the heavier the finished article.  I made a scarf that made chain mail look light and easy care.  My grandmother and aunt used to make similar articles, only bigger.  It was always a joke in our house that one of gran’s scarves would make an excellent nuclear fall out shelter as nothing would be able to penetrate the density of the weave.  I inherited that creative gene, and I have yet to see whether I have passed it on to my children, as we are still in the early stages of sewing.

Today that meant that Tallulah knocked Tilly’s elbow just as she was trying to thread her needle and it shot across the lounge floor disappearing from sight.  This happened just as I was trying to apply for a credit card online for mum.  This was fairly stressful all on its own, as my dad equates credit cards with getting naked, smearing yourself in goose fat and swearing allegiance to Beelzebub and all his minions.  He and mum were having a complicated argument whilst I was trying to extract financial information for the form when the balloon went up.  Mum can’t see and her arms are bad at the moment which means she is not good at any form of sweeping manoeuvre.  My dad is just rubbish in a crisis, and the kids were milling around squeaking.  The only good thing was that Oscar was in bed and not honing his needle finding and swallowing skills.

You can bet your life that if he had been up he would have found the bloody thing in a flash and that would have been it.  As it was, I had to finish filling out the form before my dad could disconnect the computer and throw it through the French windows in an agony of worry about impending financial ruin, and then spend half an hour on my hands and knees creeping around the lounge like a demented religious supplicant.  I did find it eventually which is good because by then mum and dad had moved on to arguing about the world of needles and needle related accidents.  It made a change from the whole credit cards are the work of the devil thing, but it wasn’t a whole lot better.

After that I insisted that the needlework be put away and we stay on safer things like Tallulah’s growing scrapbook fetish.  As she cut her hair off the last time she was left in charge of a pair of scissors at granny’s house this had to be under strict adult supervision, but was still a lot easier than hunting down needles, especially as the cat had just come in from the cold and also needed supervision.  She’s a monster for thread related torments, so I was delighted that we had moved on.  She got her comeuppance anyway, as she flirted too near to Oscar for her own good when he got up, and he was so excited he hit her on the head with a Horrid Henry book.  She has not yet worked out that he can now walk and his arms are longer than they once were.  She sulked off to reassess him and wash her rumpled fur.

By the time we had rearranged the lounge furniture and I had done some research on dental insurance (what an exciting life I lead), I was knackered and ready for a lie down.  When we got home I fell asleep on the sofa again and had to be escorted to bed protesting loudly that I hadn’t really fallen asleep, and that I had just been resting my eyes.  Ha!