the reluctant cook

When I got up at about half past seven there was fairly thick fog, so that I couldn't see the wind turbine at all.  You don't normally expect fog in August, and I saw later in the news that Manchester airport had to divert incoming flights, because they had turned off their guidance system for routine maintenance, not anticipating needing it at this time of the year.  The fog gradually cleared through the morning, but while the rest of the UK basked in sunshine we sat under a grey pall of low cloud in muggy air until lunchtime.

I am working my way up the top half of the sloping bed in the back garden, pulling out the weeds and adding a layer of mushroom compost from the garden centre in Elmstead Market.  Their fill-your-own bags is not an all-you-can-eat, or rather lift, buffet, unlike the mushroom farm.  Instead they give you a 30 litre pot with the bottom cut out, which you are supposed to wedge inside your bag and fill, then shake the contents out into the bag and voila, you have 30 litres of compost, give or take.  Nobody stood over me while I was filling my bags, and I could have added another shovel full to each undetected, but didn't.  They charge £1.50 a bag, the same as the mushroom farm, and at first I felt a slight pang that at the farm we were allowed to fill the bags up to the brim, or at least as full as we could heave into the truck, and got so much more compost for the money, but the stuff at the garden centre has rotted down more, so you are buying less water.  Anyway, it is very handy having it just up the road instead of twenty miles away, and it is easier to handle and probably better for the garden, and I don't have to enlist the Systems Administrator's help to get it, but can nip round and get half a dozen bags when I need them.  My seven bags didn't last me very long, and I shall be back there next week.

The Systems Administrator managed to sit outside the front door in the sun in a deckchair, reading, and later on volunteered to supervise chicken exercise time, which was handy for me, since I was nominated cook.  The SA is dead right that if I were left to do the cooking during the light evenings of summer we would live mostly on bread and cheese.  Well, I like bread and cheese.  However, the SA expressed a desire for something cooked, so after a fruitless search through the kitchen cupboard for a tin of corned beef I went down to the village for a packet of steak mince.

It threw my timings rather, since I also needed to water the pots this evening as I'm working tomorrow, having swapped my Saturday with someone else's Friday.  We are supposed to be going to a family barbecue on Saturday afternoon.  That's friends' family, not ours.  I presume family barbecue means an informal party at which children are present.  I really didn't think the SA was going to be up to it, but the SA said that by then things would be fine and anyway, we didn't have to stay very long.  It was good of my colleague to agree to swap days.  This year, almost everything I've been invited to at a weekend has coincided with one of my working weekends, and there's a limit to how many days I want to take off.  Next time you go out on a Saturday, shopping or eating lunch or whatever it may be, spare a thought for the staff.  They have friends and relatives too, and being there at weekends to serve you is sometimes as inconvenient and limiting for them as it would be for you.