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.