rain stopped play

The FSA has advised that eggs may safely be eaten two days after the 'best before' date.  My initial reaction on hearing this was surprise that Hector Sants was concerning himself with eggs, when he had so many other things to worry about, before working out that it was not that FSA, but the other one.  I ate a couple of eggs yesterday for lunch which were the last two in a box marked 'best before 15 November', and I seem to be OK some twenty-seven hours later.  They were supermarket eggs, as our chickens have gone off-lay for the winter.  Home-produced eggs do not come with a reassuring 'best before' date, but our rule of thumb is that they will keep for up to six weeks, no problem.  We don't give them to unsuspecting visitors, but happily eat them ourselves, without any ill effects so far.  This theory is based not on any advice from the FSA (Food Standards Agency as opposed to Financial Services Authority), which is far more conservative about the shelf life of eggs, but on articles about provisioning yachts for long-distance blue water voyages.  If you are half way across the Pacific in a small boat you really don't want to lay yourself low with food poisoning, and so advice on food storage methods, temperatures and safe use-by cut-offs from experienced deep-sea sailors is going to be pretty reliable.  Which said, I still haven't tried making the rillettes whose authors claim 'These keep unrefrigerated for a month'.

It rained today, mingled with a few flakes of snow, which meant I had to wash the kitchen floor.  I would have done it before, until the Systems Administrator told me that the sinister red splodge near the bins was not where the cats had eaten a mouse, but just the juice from a slice of red pepper that got dropped and trodden on during the preparation of Sichuan beef.  Then I wrapped up Christmas presents while listening to the R5 Live film programme.  I am quite eco-conscious and frugal about a lot of things, but have little patience with the annual clamour that we should give up wrapping paper for the good of the planet, and wrap our presents in re-usable cloth like the Japanese allegedly do, or use newspaper, or not wrap them, or not give presents.  Before washing the kitchen floor I sorted out the pile of papers and magazines on the end of the kitchen table that had accumulated over the past few weeks, and the weight of surplus paper generated by that exercise was much more than my three rolls of wrapping paper.  We signed up to the mailing preference service a few years ago, which has reduced the quantity of stuff dropping through the letter box, but that still leaves the inserts for conservatories, hearing aids, care plans and escorted foreign holidays that come with the garden magazines (guess what the demographic of the RHS membership is), the umpteenth Toast and Boden catalogues to have arrived this winter (I've already bought a scarf and a shirt, I'm not buying any more), the fund raising appeals thinly disguised as newsletters from our Alma Mater, the children's nature detective kit (not sure why the Woodland Trust sent me that.  Maybe they thought I'd like to see what it looks like) and so on and so on.  When the English Garden magazine stops sending me leaflets about the Times Wine Club and The Folio Society maybe then I'll rethink my stance on wrapping paper.

It's like with low energy light bulbs.  I haven't flown since 2004 on ecological grounds (as well as the fact that I hate flying).  I am sitting typing this in a room heated only by our own logs, wearing thermals under my trousers.  I don't leave my phone charger plugged in when I'm not charging the phone.  So why I am I not allowed to buy lightbulbs that I can actually see by?  The other day I had to go and get a torch to find the clothes I was searching for in the wardrobe, because even when I put the bedroom light on I still couldn't see what I was doing.  Couldn't I be allowed to have more of a say in how I personally wanted to make savings, instead of having relatively small and inconvenient savings thrust upon me by others, while far more profligate uses of energy go unchallenged (weekend break in Barcelona, anyone?).  Or failing that, maybe somebody could invent a low energy bulb that adequately illuminates a room, and without taking half an hour to warm up.  The SA claims to have heard that at least some people are getting round the problem of initial ultra-dullness by leaving their lights on all the time.  After all, they're low energy.  They can't be using much power.

surprise

I ought to be at work today, instead of which I have booked Sunday off because we have been invited to a surprise birthday party.  After the birthday party we’re supposed to be calling in at the neighbours’ Bank Holiday get together, and after that, well frankly, I shall need a rest.

I’m not too sure what to expect of the surprise party.  It was described as ‘just a few close friends round’ which could encompass practically anything, socially and sartorially.  I expect it will be very nice.  You could not easily hold a surprise party here, as the other person would be bound to notice the amount of effort it takes to get the house clean and tidy enough.  It is in a fairly typical state of muddle this morning, which goes as follows:

The hall.  On the hall table, besides the things that ought to be there, like a bread crock full of wild bird food, a ceramic jar with Value currants for the chickens, and the telephone, are the following objects:  My best trowel.  The S.A.’s secateurs. The S.A.’s gloves.  A yellow plastic torch that broke when it got dropped on the floor plus the bit that broke off it.  A clip from a picture frame that broke when it blew off the wall.  (There used to be a set of six framed black and white photos of traditional boats, cut out of a calendar, but that is down to four due to breakages.  I have got a new, posh, limited edition copy of an Edward Bawden print to replace them, which has been professionally framed, but is still propped against the wall on the floor in the bedroom.  Before the S.A. screws it to the wall I need to remove the old hooks and paint the hall).  The glass wall and door (1970s house) need cleaning, as does the floor.  Estimated time to clean the hall to surprise party standards:  two hours, or two days if I were to do the decorating.

The inner hall.  Besides the pottery (which needs washing) on the hall dresser (which needs dusting) are the following.  A plastic tub full of fence staples.  A plastic tube containing the shotgun pellets the vet took out of the cat.  A broken bronze watering can rose.  Assorted scarves and hats.  The S.A.’s subsidiary filing including a vehicle tax disk and some Tesco vouchers.  A plastic bag of jam jars my father gave me.  A box of Colchicum bulbs that arrived last Thursday.  A wooden bowl containing stones with holes in.  A pair of binoculars.  A piece of paper with instructions for Pilates exercises.  The floor needs washing and for a party we would tidy away the cats’ beds and the Wellington boots.  Estimated time to clean the inner hall to party standards: at least two hours including washing the china.

The study.  Maybe if it were just a small surprise party we could shut the study door, and direct all the visitors to the sitting room.  Last time, when we were doing a full buffet lunch for circa 50 people, we needed it as an overflow room for them to sit down to eat.  At the moment every horizontal surface that could have stuff on it (my desk, the top of the cupboards, the window sill, the niches at the ends of the bookcases) has got stuff on it, including the following:  My laptop.  My old and almost defunct laptop that I haven’t quite finished copying data off.  My old desktop, ditto, including keyboard and mouse.  Rechargeable batteries.  Battery chargers.  Gardening magazines.  Beekeeping magazines.  Assorted bills. Books.  A broken lampshade.  Chequebooks.  My Zen desk calendar.  The boxes from the previous three calendars with old pages stuffed in them for use as shopping lists and notes.  My camera.  Railway magazines.  The S.A.’s folding umbrella.  A pinecone.  A green ceramic frog.  A wooden bowl containing half-discharged batteries.  A padded envelope containing small change.  A crème fraiche pot containing interesting stones.  A jam jar containing long thin stones.  A solitaire set (needs dusting).  A filter that might have come out of the vacuum cleaner.  A wooden artist’s dummy.  A toy wooden duck that walks down a ramp when you push it.  A boxed set of 100 penguin postcards, partly used.  At floor level there is the following:  A pile of paper for recycling that has spread to approximately one metre square.  Several plastic storage boxes (empty).  The packaging the new telly came in, which I am not allowed to throw away yet in case the telly stops working.  Some nails that were in a pallet we burned in the stove, which I felt had sculptural possibilities, if only I knew how to weld.  A wire cat basket.  A plastic storage box containing empty water bottles that the S.A. thought might come in useful on the boat.  A shoebox containing interesting stones.  A cardboard box the grey tabby likes sleeping in.  A Band of Brothers DVD box set.  A paper shredder.  For full party mode we would need to rearrange the furniture as well as clear away the clutter and clean the room, so estimated time to bring up to party readiness:  at least half a day, probably more like a full one.

The kitchen.  That isn’t too bad, as we are both quite keen on not getting food poisoning.  The Aga needs a thorough clean and polish, and the floor could do with a quick wash, and I think it’s time I cleaned the fridge out.  In terms of clutter we have:  My gardening diary.  Three gardening magazines.  A beekeeping magazine.  Some catalogues including a couple I actually want to buy things from.  Bills.  The 2004 Good Beer Guide.  A black marker pen.  A fact sheet about stag beetles.  An empty ginger powder jar that is supposed to remind us to buy more ginger.  Some marketing gumph from Fidelity addressed to the S.A., who isn’t going to bother to open it.  Estimated time to clean the kitchen, if I were to do the fridge properly and including getting the drips of glue from the flypaper off the top of the vegetable peelings recycling bin:  at least half the morning.

The cloakroom.  This is fairly clean, just needs a quick wipe and vacuum.  When the electrician came to trace the wiring fault, the Laura Ashley remnant curtain that hangs in front of the ceiling level fuse box, and coiled  power take-off cable in case we were to run a generator (it was there when we moved in) got half ripped off the ceiling.  Estimated time to sort out the cloakroom:  about an hour, including re-tacking the curtain to the ceiling.  Longer if lumps of plaster fall out of the ceiling.

The sitting room.  This doesn’t contain too much clutter, as we retain a veneer of Modernist minimalism at that end of the house by dint of shoving all the bits and pieces into the study.  The S.A. vacuumed it very thoroughly the last time we had people round, including hanging over the banisters to try and clean up the grey fluff that had stuck to the wall in the stairwell, but it would need doing again.  And we would have to move the furniture round, which always uncovers new exciting bits of dust you couldn’t see before.  For a full party I would dust the tops of the radiators, and the mantelpiece, which I am critically too short to see so it doesn’t normally bother me.  Estimated time: a couple of hours should do it.  Maybe three.

So that comes to between two and three days to get the house ready, before you even started thinking about the food and drink.  Fortunately it is not going to happen, as the S.A. and I have promised each other that we will not put on surprise parties.  I did check before the S.A.’s fiftieth, in case the S.A. was secretly hoping for one, but the response was ‘Good god, no’, and we went to Norfolk for the day instead.