catching up with the accounts

It was not supposed to rain this morning, according to the Met Office five day forecast, but it did.  I had just finished sorting out the cats' breakfast, and the chickens' sprinkle of porridge oats with Value sultanas, and their water, and their food, and my breakfast, and washed up the small accumulation of mugs and glasses by the kitchen sink, when the circular pattern of ripples on the pond told me that it has started to rain.

At least it gave me time to catch up with the beekeepers' accounts, though it I'd known it was going to rain for most of the morning I would have got dressed properly, instead of sitting at the kitchen table in my gardening thermals and a dirty t-shirt with large holes in the cuffs.  Still, at the end of it the accounts were complete right up to the end of March, though I was sorry when I realised I'd missed Pienaar's Politics on Radio 5 Live.  The Systems Administrator introduced me to this quite recently, and it delivers a better quality of debate than you generally get on the Today Programme nowadays.  John Pienaar does not interrupt his guests, and nobody talks over each other.  This might be due to his civilising influence, but I think it is also because if they try to, he switches their microphones off.  Evan Davis, take note.

I had rhubarb pudding again for breakfast, this time with a conventional sponge, because I couldn't find any lemons in the fridge to flavour the whisked egg white-batter version, though after the SA had gone shopping with a list that included unwaxed lemons I found two in the bottom of the salad drawer, so we are now rather long on lemons.  I don't know whether rhubarb counts as part of your five (or seven, or ten) a day, since you would have to be a real masochist to eat it without a generous helping of the devil-food sugar.  When first introduced to this country it was not regarded as a food stuff, but a medicinal purge.

We had the other half of last night's leek and mushroom tart for lunch, with salad made out of whatever was left over in the fridge, which turned out to be cucumber and tomatoes, because the SA had forgotten about the flan and so didn't buy any more salad.  I jazzed mine up with a few olives.  Then we shared what was left of the grapes, which probably didn't come to a portion each, whatever a portion is, but we topped them up with two small oranges.  Tonight the SA is roasting a joint of pork, with which we'll have sprouts, carrots, parsnips, roast onion and apple sauce from the largest Bramley I think I have ever seen.  I have no idea how many portions all this adds up to, but I should think it's enough.  Fruit and vegetables are rather like the rabbit in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  The monster is not behind the rabbit: it is the rabbit. So vegetables are not something you add to food: they are the food.  Or at least, largely the food, since I am looking forward to the pork, and the SA does mean crackling.

Tomorrow I am booked to go and see my next garden, over the Orwell bridge and up into Suffolk.  It is forecast to pour with rain all day, so I am hoping the Met Office has got that wrong as well.