We closed the Adsetts Centre early on Friday. Several hours early. 2pm! I suppose we could have stayed and worked on, had we chosen (though only until 2:30 when the University as a whole closed). I didn’t. I caught the next train back to Chesterfield.
I am enjoying travelling by bus and train at the moment. We may not have had much fog, but the rest of the country remains enveloped. Gareth reports that Cambridge has been entirely covered in fog all week. In and around Chesterfield it has been icy. Very icy. I quite enjoy letting somebody else worry about the travelling conditions while I read my book. This week an exciting tome on motivating students in information literacy!!
The Builder met me at the station and we made our way out to Chatsworth. We found some fog out around Baslow, but not a huge lot. Chatsworth was very full. And somewhat reduced in vegetable supplies. No leeks :( Can’t make leek and potato soup without leeks! Will get leeks tomorrow. But apart from leeks and syrup – oh and bread rolls (Chatsworth was denuded of bread rolls too), I think the shopping is done. Let’s go home!
It’s the first time for ages that I’ve seen the garden in daylight. And it looked absolutely GORGEOUS. Everything was covered in ice. It looked like those pictures where people are trying to depict snow – all feathery and crisp and shiny. Everything was white, except for a tiny bit right down at the very back where the chicken run is eventually going to go, which is the only bit to get much in the way of sun at this time of year.
I still think of the very back of the garden as being somehow separate. I haven’t yet mentally linked the two gardens as ours yet, or indeed as one garden.
Lobster for dinner. Dressed Scottish lobster which I had bought with a view to making lobster bisque. Then I found in the freezer at the supermarket larger American Maine lobsters at half price. I have no idea why they should be at half price just before Christmas but I wasn’t arguing! We’ve kept the Scottish shells to add to the broth!
Yesterday the ice had all gone and the cloud has come in and the temperature has risen. The fish will be liberated from their icy cage if this goes on! (We can see them swimming about underneath the 1 or 2 cm cover of ice!). An early morning dash back to Chatsworth where we found leeks and bread rolls in abundance. And Clarissa and Mike who, it seemed, were intending to join the phenomenally long queue for the meat counter! We, happily, do not require meat!
And so we moved into a pleasantly slow and relaxed Christmas Eve eve. It’s like having three Christmas Eves in a row. We were doing Christmas Eve things, a bit, on Friday as well. We went to the Dunstan Hall Garden centre and spent my birthday vouchers from Jeanette and Matthew on two green, one red and one yellow gooseberry bushes. We bought a candlelit lantern and some chain and The Builder has hung both my candle lanterns (Kathryn Conway gave me one back in the summer and it’s been wandering about the house ever since, but unused for its proper purpose) in the Christmas grotto. Father Christmas has made an early fly by and dropped off some presents to adorn the grotto, which now glitters and glistens festively. I’ve made leek and potato soup for the first of the Christmas Feasts on Christmas Eve night when we are expecting Freyja and Mark. We went on a planning wander around the new garden. It really is stuffed full of junk. I think we might have to empty the shed on a slow-but-steady basis, nibbling in from the door, and clear the junk heap in a similar way. The Builder has a simply enormous van and there are several van loads of rubbish there. But we can clear the “orchard” side quite simply and get that underway. It was a lovely day, really. Remarkably calm, not much frenzied cooking, no frenzied shopping, no panicking.
And then we went out to dinner, through fog and gloom, to the Famous Red Lion (no, no -- I still don’t know why it’s famous) on the Darley Dale road near the evocatively named hamlet of Spitewinter. I had a plate of smoked salmon (would have been enriched by the presence of some toast!), roast turkey and then, not Christmas pudding, which had nuts in it, but a truly lovely little baked chocolate pudding with ice cream. You have to keep reminding yourself that it is only a pub, lest your food expectations be too great. It serves not top restaurant food. But it does serve absolutely magnificent pub food. Next time we shall go in a taxi. I hadn’t thought to go in a taxi last night because it’s an out-in-the-country pub. But there was a taxi dropping people off when we got there. Never mind. The Builder had a pint of beer and a glass of wine with his dinner. And it’s not as though we are short of alcohol at home!!
Tabitha rang me on Friday afternoon with a sad, sad story. Their friend Maryk has to work on Boxing Day and was going to be lingering sadly in his lonely garret bedsit, all on his own on Christmas Day. He’s coming to us instead. Must remember to peel a potato for him!
Right. It’s nearly 20 to 7. Better get up and make the lobster bisque. And perhaps a cup of coffee
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