Complications

The little car has decided to misbehave. Yesterday when the Professor unlocked it, it mysteriously wound down its windows, and it was quite difficult to persuade it to wind them up again. Later in the day it was required again, and wouldn’t start. The first thought of course was that it had done in its battery: Tony turned up this morning with jumpleads, and clearly it is not that. Nor is it a fuse; after prodding at its innards for a bit, he was compelled to admit defeat. Later in the day, the AA will turn up and see what is to be done. All very tiresome. We ended up having a pottering sort of morning – since Tony was most obligingly turning out on a Saturday it seemed like a good idea to have something for him, so we had a play with a rather nice book we bought ourselves for Christmas, Great British Bakes, which contains archaic recipes of various kinds. I made ‘old Welsh gingerbread’, which turned out to be delicious; it’s actually a sort of loaf sized treacle scone, with butter, but no egg, and Tony was enthusiastic. The Professor, meanwhile, wanted to make Honeycomb gingerbread, which is a sort of brandysnap, because it sounded intriguing. It is now cooling – I’m not sure we have got it quite right. These sugary things are tricky because they are soft when they come out of the oven, and then either go hard, or don’t, and if you overcook by just a fraction they will burn. While all this was going in, with Tony pottering in and out reporting on the car, we virtuously dealt with the Root Mountain. The Two Nice Girls’ veg-box is rather root prone at this time of year. We drew the line at neeps, Burns night or no Burns night, but the Professor has made céleri-remoulade with the celeriac, and I have  peeled and cut up beetroot, carrot, and parsnip, which can be variously deployed over the next couple of days. We have a friend of a friend staying awhile, who was recruited from Kuala Lumpur to  head up a firm in Oldmeldrum, such are the oddities of international commerce. He is in the middle of a complicated arrangement of getting cars to the right place: he is currently in Edinburgh and will be brought back here tomorrow by a friend, so soup and a sandwich are on the agenda. I think it very likely that the soup will be carrot, in the circumstances.

Catch up

It’s been an awful long time since I did anything about the blog – the reasons are many and various. We had a succession of guests over Christmas/New Year, and then in the first week of January, went South.  There were several reasons for this. One was to see the Greatest Living Shakespearean, who was passing through London en route to I Tatti and had an evening spare, there were various work related considerations, and also, there had been an SOS from Rory the Sculptor. Two or three years ago, he was commissioned to produce seven martyrs for the screen of St Albans Cathedral, replacing the ones destroyed at the Reformation. They are a mixed bag of Protestants and Catholics; Oscar Romero, Alban Roe, Amphibalus and Alban (inevitably), George Tankerfield, a protestant martyr I hadn’t heard of who was burned just outside the cathedral, Elizabeth of Russia,  and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Rory took it into his head to use the Professor as the model for Alban Roe, noted for, among other things, playing cards with his warders the night before he was hung drawn and quartered. Rory was most urgent that, as the project neared the finishing line, he needed to see the Professor again, so off we went to Cirencester. It’s pretty soggy up here, quite uncharacteristically so, but the south-west was completely waterlogged. One of our friends in Oxford reported that her garden was completely full of water and she had sandbags at the back door, and certainly, the view from a westbound train was a dismal vista of silvery sheets of water with dispirited bushes and trees marking the lines of what would normally be roads. It was lovely to see Rory, but after lunch, we took off in his spectacularly decrepit car for his workshop. This is a congeries of disused sheds in a corner of the local agricultural college, and is entirely without heating. Icy mist shimmered up from the saturated ground, and we got colder and colder. It was all very interesting, we considered Elizabeth of Russia’s nose and what could be done about it, and I was even, I think, able to be mildly useful on the topic of Roman military uniform; the Professor was rephotographed from all angles, and eventually we tottered off, frozen, in the direction of London, and from thence, home. Where what with one thing and another, we both went down with hideous colds. Apart from unavoidables, invigilating and marking, we are both staying as quiet as possible and trying to get better. I’m mostly all right now, though the Professor is still making noises like a sea lion. But the first of the snowdrops are out, and it has finally stopped raining.

PS: the ever helpful Tony discovered why we had electrical problems on Christmas day, which was a bit of a relief. Not the bothy, I am thankful to say, since fault-finding would mean digging up 60 yards of buried cable, but the little oil fired heater in the greenhouse, which has gone rogue in some fashion. Easily replaced. We had forgotten that all the outside electrics come under 'bothy' in terms of the circuit breaker layout