Alas, there was no Pienaar's Politics this morning on Radio 5 because it was bumped off the airwaves to make room for the Australian Tennis Open. I was reminded of how, back in the glory days of Gardeners' World when it was presented by Geoff Hamilton, I would sit on a Friday evening during Wimbledon fortnight, keen as mustard after my week of commuting to the office and with my new garden outside, only for the programme start time to be pushed back and then delayed again because some wretched Brit was battling it out on number one court, until the final announcement that there would be no Gardeners' World that week. Until that moment I would be sitting there willing them to lose quickly, since they were going to lose eventually, so that I could see the gardening programme. True to form, Andy Murray lost this morning. It is a real drag for those of us who have absolutely no interest in sport to have the things we are interested in knocked out of the schedule to make room for tennis, golf, football et al.
It rained intermittently all morning, and the wind was too chilly for gardening even by my standards. After a month of suffering from a more or less continuous cold I should probably try and be vaguely sensible and try not to catch another one. Instead I made a cake, trying out a new recipe for cinnamon honey fruit cake from a book I was given for Christmas. I haven't totally cracked the art of fruit cake in the Aga, having eventually produced an edible Christmas cake one year but only after the two previous attempts ended up on the bird table once I'd scraped the charred outer layers into the bin. Today's cake was supposed to be cooked at 170 degrees C, and putting it on the floor of the lower hot oven with a heavy metal tray above it to act as a heat baffle seemed to do it. Or at least, the top didn't catch and the sides and base don't look too dark and dry. We haven't actually eaten any of it yet.
It's unfortunate that sugar is now officially the demon food. It used to be butter, and back in the early 1980s I don't think we were supposed to eat more than an egg per week, but now it's sugar's turn. Fruit juice is guilty by association, and those smoothies turn out not to be innocent at all. The raisins and prunes in my cake, that would have counted as healthy eating even a couple of years ago, are now tarred with sugar's guilt. I was surprised recently to see my favourite breakfast cereal, Dorset Cereal's Simply Delicious Muesli, named and shamed as being high in sugar, and can only think that's the natural sugar in the dried fruit since the recipe doesn't contain any added sugar at all.
It's a pity, since I like cake. And after an afternoon pulling up brambles and carrying logs about, you don't want to come inside for a cup of tea and some raw vegetables, you feel like cake.
Addendum We have now consumed two ceremonial slices out of the new cake, and it was OK. The SA spoke approvingly of the dark colour as coming from the treacle, so I didn't mention the prunes. I like prunes, but the SA does not share my enthusiasm at finding them on hotel breakfast buffets, and I didn't want to prejudice him against the cake.
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