the hottest day

I made it to London and back without any train delays.  On the hottest day of the year this came as a major relief.  Mind you, I did abandon any plans of going to a gallery or museum in the afternoon, which I would normally do to extract maximum value from my day return.  Instead, catching the 3.18 out of Liverpool Street and escaping from London before the rush hour seemed the sensible course of action.  One of my former colleagues was heading straight back to Lewisham on the same principle.

There are many ways of telling that you really are well and truly middle aged, but one is finding yourself, when you are in Oxford Street with three quarters of an hour to spare before lunch, down in the basement of John Lewis looking at frying pans.  I did not buy one, because I did not want to turn up to my work reunion lunch carrying a frying pan, and supposing I had decided to risk the rush hour trains and go to the Hokusai exhibition at the British Museum they would probably not have let me in with a frying pan.

When I got home I read the online review of the pan I'd liked the look of, though if there is anything more middle aged than hanging around the John Lewis kitchenware department it has to be looking up online reviews of frying pans.  Some people said the pan was brilliant and some said it chipped and ceased to be non-stick very quickly, and I became totally undecided and gave up.  We will just have to go on eating fragments of Teflon coating each time we cook using the old one for a bit longer.  I am fed up with pans coated with non-stick finishes that scratch however careful you are, but I would like a pan that I could make omelettes and pancakes in without them sticking to the base.  The Systems Administrator wants a metal handle so that the pan can go in the oven.  It would be easier in so many ways to be less middle aged and never cook and to spend any odd three quarters of an hour that I had in Oxford Street looking at shoes.  Though John Lewis' basement has very nice air conditioning, and they do not call it a basement, with its connotations of spiders and boilers and psychotic caretakers; it is the Lower Ground Floor.

When I got home the SA had done most of the watering, and I would have had time to assemble ten new frames so that I could add a super to one of the beehives that needs it, only the parcel containing the parts for the frames that was sent yesterday for next working day delivery, and that was out for delivery by 07.54 this morning, never arrived and is still travelling around Essex in a van somewhere.  Actually, by now it is probably back in the depot in Chelmsford.  I thought I had enough frames, but when I went to get the supers on Monday the wax moth had got into one of them.  I feel rather mean leaving the SA on FedEx watch two days running, but I suppose I have spent quite a few days myself keeping an eye out for delivery vans bearing discounted military history books and bits for the model railway.

Tomorrow we are due to have a thundery breakdown while I am in a coach travelling to Kent with my mother.  This is unfortunate.