I am now spying on the neighbours. I have been spying on the neighbours since Sunday and it is all my blogging friend learningwoman’s fault. A few days ago she wrote a blog entry about making elderflower cordial with her children and how much fun it was. Ever the magpie and being willing to steal most people’s ideas and pass them off as my own, I decided that this sounded like a brilliant idea and that I would give it a go. I would get to have another pass at my Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall fantasy (see blog about disastrous gro-bag attempts for previous tragic details), and the children would love it because it’s sticky and involves vast quantities of liquids to slosh about.
I tried to blot out the visions of the children being hermetically welded to the kitchen tiles and every doorknob in the house becoming part of a sensory experiment in the realm of the tactile. I tried to blot out the further visions of them getting sugared up on fourteen pints of elderflower cordial and being pursued by a flight of hornets, because I don’t like it, and if we’re successful they’re going to have to drink it all. I also tried to block out the random thought that maybe Oscar would turn out to be allergic to elderflowers and that the only way I would know this was when he had quaffed a couple of pints and blown up like a balloon, whereupon my only hope would be to deflate him with an epi pen that I don’t have. It was all going well.
Now, thanks to learningwoman’s prior research I knew that I would have to go to the chemist to get some citric acid, and that this is quite challenging, due to it being a key ingredient for home made terrorist activities and elderflower cordial makers. It is usually quite hard for pharmacists to tell the difference between cordial makers and terrorists, due to the fact that the terrorists are hardly likely to crumble and blurt out; ‘The destruction of civilisation in the West. Down with the infidels!’ when faced with the question; ‘What do you want it for?’ when asked by an idiot with glasses and a white lab coat. They’ve probably also realised that it is also an ingredient in the cordial making process and will have spent weeks at home sweating away at the Cordial Maker’s handbook and method acting their way into the mind set of a person who thinks that making orange barley water in giant plastic tubs is the best fun a man can have before the pubs open.
Even if they did say ‘down with the infidels!’ given the recent poor quality of pharmacists of my acquaintance (the woman in Boots who asked me if I’d tried ringing myself to find the mobile phone I’d lost), she’d probably think she’d misheard him and he’d said something like: ‘I want to make some Zinfandel’ and hand it over. The problem is it depends whether you get a stupid, trusting pharmacist or a stupid, suspicious pharmacist, and you never know which way it’s going to play out until you’ve donned your citric acid buying disguise kit and schlepped off to the chemist.
I was going to do it on Saturday, but we got side tracked by fitting four hundred cubic metres of garden furniture into a VW Touran, which took the best part of a day. Then I was going to do it when I went out with Saj on Monday, but due to my crippled hand, my lost mobile phone and a small boy trying to eat a powder compact it kind of slipped my mind. So, the first obstacle is that I still don’t have any citric acid, and don’t know how likely I am to be able to get it without Jedi mind tricks and the help of that Derren Nesbitt. Plus I haven’t decided on my disguise yet. I’ve ransacked the kid’s dressing up box, but not being a fan of pink ruffles, the only thing I like is a Robin from Batman and Robin costume, and we’ve lost the mask, so I’m not playing.
I have decided that this part of the exercise is very much in the lap of the gods and that I will get around to this bit after I have tracked down some elderflowers. My thoughts on the subject being, why arouse suspicion and possibly end up being thrown in a holding cell for forty days trying to buy citric acid if I haven’t got any elderflowers to make the cordial with in the first place? Cunning eh? Sometimes I astound myself with my mental prowess.
Now, learningwoman’s elderflowers came from the park, and an obliging neighbour. I had a good squint round our park on Sunday. The problem with our park is that it is one of those neat and tidy parks. I think that Glenfield parish council obviously have a lot of funding for gardeners, and so every thirty seconds they’re sending them round to the park to mow and prune and weed. The grass is balding, the bushes are shorn and there’s not a leaf of ground cover left that hasn’t been pruned to within an inch of its sorry life. I thought I identified some elderflower bushes behind the cricket pavilion, but they are more like stumps than flourishing horns of plenty, so no joy there.
Then, on Sunday afternoon I noticed that the next door neighbour has a large elderflower bush which is growing over her fence. This is the neighbour who isn’t surly and anti giving us our post. This is the neighbour who is renting the bungalow on the other side of us and who doesn’t garden. The garden is a wilderness, hence the fact that the ‘weeds’ are flourishing and the elderflower are flowering. I got very excited. It is laden with sprigs of flower bearing stuff. I have been staring at it ever since and mulling over whether I just hurtle over the fence while she’s out at work and harvest illegally, or whether to wait and ask her if she’d mind me taking the elderflower. I know she won’t mind, because judging from the state of the garden she wouldn’t know an elderflower if it walked up and bit her on the bum. It’s just a question of whether I, the most anti-social woman in the world, can be arsed to strike up a conversation with her and behave in a pleasant enough manner to get her to give me what I want. I worry that if I do that she might come round at three in the morning demanding bacon sandwiches and cups of sugar as recompense. I worry that she might come round every day and rub her finger along my mantelpiece and stick her fingers to the door knobs with elderflower cordial residue. I worry.
This morning while Oscar was engaging me in a pirate sword fight on the deck, I was idly looking over the fence in between blows, thinking about when it’s going to flower and whether I could nip across and get some now. Then I looked again. It has tiny green berries all over it. I think it has already flowered. I am too late. My plan to become Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall has been foiled again. Curses…
