To all united in isolation
Plans have been laid, ideas are hatching and the sun is shining so most of them can wait until another day. One scheme of my mother’s is to grow a new lawn, well regrow half of our lawn at least. The half that surrounds the bird bath is mysteriously far more luscious, possibly due to the Robins who appear to be attempting to doggy paddle through the inch deep water, thus routinely emptying the bath in a manner familiar to anyone who has given a toddler a bath whilst waring nice clean clothes. We have identified two large patches of barren turf that my father has excavated. It looked like hard work so I stayed safely on the exercise bike, [which is still miraculously working in spite of being exposed to British spring], and listened to an audio book so I could pretend I would have offered to help, “if only I’d noticed”. The next stage of the operation was for my mother to carefully fill in the crater with layers of compost and top soil, methodically sprinkle grass seed in the exact pattern described in the manual, and drag a rake through the whole precisely structured setup. Then, the very same birds who water half the lawn for us must at all costs be kept away from the newly planted seeds. I say at any cost, we have put down some plastic netting and we hope that’s enough, we haven’t started employing the neighbours’ children to stand on chairs and watch over the fence so they can scream at any bird landing on our seedlings… yet.
Another ongoing project is my effort to train for the great British Bake Off. This weekend I learned a valuable lesson: Mary Berry recipes online are different to those in her books, different as in free and wrong! As a result, the gingerbread I was meant to roll out simply crumbled under the rolling pin. Fortunately my dear mother is fantastic in a crisis, [unless failed links to zoom are involved, at which point she becomes a wolverine capable of biting an IPad in two], so we packed the gingerbread crumble into a single baking tray and cut the shapes out of the resulting tray-bake. I decorated the surprisingly sturdy house with far too much royal icing and then, encouraged by my sister, I performed the first cut with my teeth. It took me several attempts since I miss-judged the orientation of the roofline but I was eventually able to “cut” a mouthful of mostly icing from the apex, providing the inhabitants with an unplanned sky light. The second was particularly interesting as I got both a larger dose of the very tasty gingerbread and a little extra texture from an inch of broken cocktail stick used to hold the roof in place. This appeared to be a load-bearing beam as the second “cut” quickly lead to structural collapse, giving rise to the question “what cowboy built this in the first place?”
I have posted the video of me savaging the gingerbread house on Facebook and hope to start a new fad of #FacePlantChalenge so if you are enjoying a cake or other confectionery at any point in the near future, please join me by videoing your techniques and tagging me in when you post them. I look forward to your videos.
Best wishes and love to all
Richard
Richard Wheatley BSc BPBH