The morning was a bit of a shambles. I was all set to get on with the gardening, fetchingly clad in black thermal leggings and three layers of t-shirts, only to discover when I went to let the chickens into their run that it was raining. The forecast was for rain early and sun later, so I thought I'd use the time making a cake and then get out into the garden. Cake in the oven, timer set to five minutes less than the recipe said, I thought I'd ring a friend I've been swapping voice mail messages with since midweek. The friend was at home and answered her telephone, and we had a good chat and agreed to go and see Sargent at the National Portrait Gallery, and to a morning concert at the Aldeburgh festival if we could get tickets. Result.
Six minutes before the timer was due to go off the kitchen began to smell over-much of cake. Telephone in one hand and oven glove in the other I retrieved the cake, and found the top had caught. My friend said kindly that she would leave me to it. I thought I could scrape the carbonised layer off once the cake had cooled down a little, and fired up the laptop to book our tickets for Sargent. The booking form took me all the way through to entering my credit card details and then stalled, the little circular icon going round and round while a message said that they were processing my transaction and I should not refresh the screen. For five minutes.
I thought I'd better ring the ticket office to find out whether I'd bought tickets or not, and if not book some. The NPG has an explicit policy that tickets cannot be exchanged or refunded, and I didn't want to end up with two lots. I fired up my tablet, since the laptop was still processing my transaction, and rang the number for tickets on their website, which turned out not to be the ticket office but general reception. They gave me a different number, which put me through to a recorded message that their ticket office was busy at the moment, but I could book on line. No, I couldn't, that's why I'm trying to ring you up. After ten minutes of the recorded message I spoke to a human being and sorted out the tickets.
It was still raining. I scraped the burnt top off the cake and drizzled some water icing over it, pepped up with honey. Crumbs began to surface in the icing, which started to run down the sides of the cake. I put the weeping cake in a cupboard for the icing to set, and when I took it out at lunchtime what was left of the icing on top of the cake had become more or less transparent. I spent the rest of the morning moving compost on to the vegetable beds, and listening to a programme about Pierre Boulez, which confirmed my suspicion that on the whole I much preferred Schubert. Or Haydn, Brahms, Vaughan Williams, Bach, or Sibelius. Or practically anybody.
The afternoon was much better. I went to a Plant Heritage lecture about witch hazels, by Chris Lane whose now out of print book I bought a while back remaindered from King County libraries. The A12 and A14 ran smoothly, I found a parking space in the rather tight village hall car park without catastrophe, and it was a jolly good lecture. It was packed, too. I saw a couple of my former colleagues from the plant centre and got the hot gossip that the owners had put it up for rent, and met people I know from two different gardening clubs, and bought a very fine Clivia on the plant stall for the conservatory for the princely sum of five pounds in aid of Plant Heritage funds, complete with flower bud, so at least I'll see it in flower once even if I can never persuade it to do it again. The afternoon felt much more productive than the morning.
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