Too much to do

Oh dear, I’m much too busy. How I would love to be a stay-at-home mum. What bliss that would be. I’m very much at jam-in-the-sandwich stage, when both the offspring and the parent (not to say, to some extent, the husband) require my time and attention. This would be a lot easier if I didn’t work. Teaching is an exhausting job.

Last week featured the 23rd birthday of our youngest, the son. (Hence the chocolate of the previous post.) This makes him a near twin of Thimbleanna’s son. Twenty-three years! How time flies (and similar astonished comments). By the time he arrived, we already had two daughters. Somehow I didn’t think I could produce a son, and we were so pleased with our daughters that we would have been happy to have another. I didn’t think I knew how to do boys. However, he’s a pet: clever, kind and funny. And sometimes his room is even tidy.

This photo makes him look cheeky, but he never was. All his teachers used to say how quiet he was - though in fact, he was always good fun.

So we had various birthday celebrations with (my) mother and aunt and (his) girlfriend. To add to the busyness, I had my book group for dinner on Saturday. We take it in turn to host the evening, but when we started the group, we just had drinks and nibbles . Then one member invited us for a meal when it was his turn, which then became the norm.

Personally I’m not at all interested in cooking, though I do it reasonably efficiently. There are ten in the group, and my fellow-members are quite foody people. They watch television chefs, and tend to say things like, “Ah, is this from Nigella’s latest book? That lemon grass gives it a very subtle flavour, doesn’t it? ” So I did a Delia main course this time. It was an all-in-one-dish thing which I thought would be easy, but of course it had ingredients I don’t have in the cupboard such as saffron stalks and fresh coriander, or that I’ve had lurking there for some time with sell-by dates of November 1996 – can’t feed guests on those.

The dish was easy once it was in the oven, but frankly, preparing it was a bit of a footer, as we say in Scotland. A fiddle. I don’t spend much of my life toasting cumin and coriander seeds and then pounding them with a mortar and pestle. Indeed, I don’t possess a mortar and pestle and had to substitute the end of a rolling pin and a bowl. It worked well enough. I reached the end of my patience, however, when Delia instructed me to strip coriander leaves from the stalks. I had imagined this could be done in one swift movement, but no: coriander is a delicate plant, so each leaf had to be removed separately from the fairly large bunch. At this point I dragooned Daughter 2 and her aspiring actor boyfriend to assist. Delia seems to assume that my life might be full of long, lazy afternoons, when I could sit under a tree in the garden delicately picking leaves and placing them in a silver dish…

I bet Delia doesn’t have classes to prepare, marking to do, an elderly parent to spend time with, bathrooms to clean. Kittens to retrieve from under beds.

It seemed to go down well, though. And the group liked my puddings: both the pavlova (very easy) and the lemon cheesecake (another slight footer, though not so much as the coriander leaves nonsense).

When I’m a lonely old woman, I’m going to live on toasted cheese, frozen sweetcorn and bananas. With the odd bit of chocolate.