Friends

This house is full of miseries this morning. Only one of whom has eaten prunes overnight (hint: icon). They hate it when I go away.

Back in a week. No wifi where I'm going. Expect silence.

I did most of it, I did. I finished the revisions, and sent the book off again. I cleaned the kitchen floor (under strict supervision). I gave the boys Early Tea, as a reward for their supervising, and powered up the vacuum while their backs were turned. And addressed it to the dining-room floor, and--

And suddenly it was sucking nothing, on account of the hose ripping itself to shreds.

This is the almost-brand-new expensive vacuum, you understand. Which I bought from some dodgy online deal and am now somehow going to have to find a contact for, to kick and scream at them in the new year.

Meantime, I suppose I could dig out the twenty-year-old vacuum that still works perfectly, but...

Nah. Sod that for a game of soldiers. I'm going to the pub. Catsitters will just have to walk on crunchy carpet.

Mac is learning how to operate my devices. Barry has already taught him to switch the bathroom light on and off (by leaping wildly for the dangle-string). Yesterday he taught himself to switch on the vacuum cleaner, by leaping down from the mushroom-box. He was so startled he dropped his mushroom, oh noes!

This morning, immediately after I switched off the radio, he switched it on again. Presumably he wanted to hear about the banks' overdraft penalty fees, which I most exactingly did not. Fine: I left him to it.

In other news, Newcastle has not been above freezing all week, and yet young women still expose their midriffs to the frost. It is insane. They will freeze through the middle and snap in half.

What else? Only urgency. I left the Lit & Phil at half past twelve, and yet it is now two o'clock. I need to eat: prawns and mushrooms and dried fish and noodles, I think. Perhaps an egg. And then I have thirty pages of book yet to wrangle through the computer, and that's done; and then I have to clean the kitchen floor and push the vacuum around a bit, if Mac's not going to do that for me; and then I have to go back into town. In, um, three hours' time. It's a lot to ask. I shall probably fail at one of the above. I'll leave you to guess; it's all a mystery to me.

Tell you what, though. I don't care what anybody else is going to say (and they are). I like the way this book ends, damn it.

Down by the river, that's where this day went. Walkies in the snow. Hours'n'hours of walkies.

There might have been a pub involved, halfway.

Now what I really want is tea'n'toast. What I really don't want is to be sitting here chiselling words out of this manuscript.

*chisels*

*scowly-face*

In other news: I appear to have written a climbing scene where nobody slips to hang perilously by their fingertips above a dire drop. They climb carefully and sensibly and get where they're going sans any intimation of disaster. What was I thinking? No wonder I'm not rich.

Okay, folks, here's a challenge for you: define the difference for me, between being gratified and being grateful.

It's a hundred and two miles to Chicago pages to the end of this revision. I've got a house full of food*, all the coffee that isn't in Brazil, and three days to finish. It's bloody freezing, and I'm wearing thermals.

I really ought to get this done. Tho' friends may get in the way; you know what people are like.

This particular page I'm looking at, though - I guess I didn't like it very much. There seem to be scribbles on every line. Could take me half an hour just to fix this one page. Urk. I'm goin' in...

*I'm thinking chicken-and-mushroom risotto tonight, but I forgot to get any parmesan, oh noes. What I'm thinking, truffle paste. As compensation rather than substitute, you understand...

There's hail in that there snow.

These east winds do portend no good to us. Tomorrow I think I might just stay in the house all day, and eat soup and noodles interspersed by unnecessary chicken sandwiches. I think that's a plan. *nods*

Last night I flung the duck-carcase in the slow cooker, with residual red cabbage and ginger and a star anise.

This morning I have dark rich flavourful soup-base. And cabbage and crevettes and noodles and chilli and garlic and soy and such. Fish sauce. Beansprouts. Om, if I may say so, nom.

In other news, as I reached for clean socks this morning, I thought "Didn't I buy new socks just yesterday? Sure I did. I wonder what happened to...?"

And came downstairs and discovered what happened to. They had been Mightily Hunted from the bag wherein I left them, and dragged all across the vasty barren plains of the carpet, and left mockingly on the doorstep.

Barry, I suspect. It's generally Baz who hunts trophies. Mac just hunts food.

Talking of which...

*zooms*

Here's an uncertainty: I have less than a hundred pages to read through, or I have fewer than a hundred pages to read through. Either way, depending. Is it less than a [hundred pages], the single unit of a century, or is it fewer than [a hundred] pages, the actual count? Certainly it's fewer than two hundred and twenty that I still have to work through the computer. Urgh. And less than a week to go.

It seems I can only bake perfect bread when nobody else has to eat it. I tried to adapt the sourdough process on Sunday, to have it fresh for a lunch date: left it in the fridge overnight, got up at six (!) to give it a swift final knead and set it to prove in the airing-cupboard. At nine, it was still chilly; dough is apparently a very poor conductor. Who knew? I baked it as late as I could get away with and it looked okay, but it turned out very cakey and not particularly nice.

Still working on the process, this morning I shifted the dough from fridge to airing-cupboard at 4am (not sleeping, see: last night I couldn't sleep, today I couldn't breathe. I wait agog for the next symptom) and kneaded it at ten, left it proving while I went into town. Baked it at 3.30, and it is heaven on legs. Without the legs, obviously.

(Which reminds me, I have been reading Alan Bennett's diaries, and he proposed a competition for the best men's legs in art. Tragically I cannot now remember his own recommendations...)

I must work more. I only have till Wednesday next. (Which remind me also, I heard reviews last night of the Chicago run of the new musical of the Addams Family. Not flattering reviews, but, y'know. Addams Family, and Nathan Lane: I'd go.) I keep getting flakey, cutting myself a little more slack. Also, people keep wanting to see me. What is this sudden popularity, damn it? I've been here all year, y'know...?

I just discovered a literal hanging participle. Fat general, hanging out of window:

Leaning out like this, perilous above the fall of it, the sound of hammering...

No, dear. The sound was not leaning out, tho' it might be perilous in and of itself.

*fixes*

It may, possibly, have stopped chucketing down out there. Certainly they have fished the drowned car-corpse out of the gutter and towed it away, which is all to the good.

Even so, even if it is not raining, I am still not going out. I have coffee, and the fire's on. Also, I have as much work to do here as in the library, and days are running out on me. Onward.

Sometimes Wikipedia is a good thing. I was just sitting here thinking "the broad flat end of an oar is called the blade, but what oh what is the other end called? 'The other end' is ... inelegant," I thought. "Haft? Shaft? Who knows?" And cast vaguely about for my pictorial dictionary, which is what I usually turn to first when I don't know what the word is for a thing (because I can't look it up elsewhere if I don't know what the word is, y'know?); but I never can find my pictorial dictionary when I want it. So I went to Wiki and looked up "oar".

The shaft, it says, or loom.

Loom! How lovely...

And then of course I am smitten by anxieties. "Closer at hand, here was Pao taking one hand off the loom" - not every reader sits with a dictionary at hand or will stop to look up an unfamiliar word. Many readers will sit there thinking "Loom? What is this nonsense, loom? He's in a boat, not weaving! Moron!"

So, for this draft, a compromise: "Closer at hand, here was Pao taking one hand off the loom of the oar," and people can look it up or not as they choose.

Actually, of course, I shoulda known it anyway. It hath a vaguely familiar feel to it, but more than that: I grew up in Oxford, damn it. Oars are a feature of an Oxford childhood, or used to be...

So this damn duck has been hanging in my bathroom all weekend, with the door blocked off against marauders. Who have been sitting all weekend outside the bathroom door, plotting together. At night I have heard sinister scratchings, but to no avail.

So this morning, nine o'clock found me out in the back yard, plucking the duck into the compost bin. With the boys in the little window, watching intently.

I chopped off head and wings, drew out the pluck, kept heart and liver and discarded the rest. Not into the boys' bowls, because I didn't know if it would do them any good...

Then, into the slow cooker went red cabbage and onion and apple and the duck, a splash of oil and a splash of red wine vinegar, a little salt and pepper. I went into town and left it to work its gentle heat-thing all day; came home this evening and put the duck into a deeply hot oven for twenty minutes just to crisp up the skin as a contrast to the tender flavourful flesh, while I chopped up and fried the liver and heart and spread it on toast as an accompaniment. Om nom, if I may say so, nom.