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It is very hot. That’s perhaps just as well, as I tried to turn on my oven yesterday without success. So, it’s a week of salads and (assuming the hob works, although I’ve not tested it) omelettes until I go off on holiday next week.

I could do microwave dinners, I suppose, but that’s really not me…

Beans on toast, perhaps.

Oh, it’s all very vexing. I was trying to bake cakes for Dan’s birthday and fortunately had turned it on to heat up before mixing my mix - not my usual style, so I’d have been stuck with a bowl-ful of raw eggy coconut if I’d followed normal procedure.

So, I have a bag of unsweetened dessicated coconut going spare. I wonder if I could auction it on eBay. Anyway, Mum and Andrew took us out to celebrate (celebrate the birthday, not my broken oven) and the excellent food made up for the veeery slooow service. All told, we were sitting there about three hours, but the surroundings were pleasant and the chat was lively, and when we were done we came back for tea and a guided tour of Sal and Dan’s India photos.

They looked fantastic. Lots of clean sandy beaches and turquoise sea. Not at all Clacton. Friendly smiley people sitting around. Friendly smiley cows wandering everywhere. Knock over a person with your car and you get a fine, apparently. Do the same to a cow and you get life in prison. They are sacred.

I guess that means burgers are a no-no. I wonder what McDonalds sells over there. I would check, but it seems nobody has yet registered www.mcdonalds.in…

It turned into a late night, which led to the inevitable late wake this morning, but after a shower and a quick call to check when we’d be meeting up again for lunch I headed out in the car and the sunshine to take pictures of summer. I’m reluctant to post too many on here as the front page is getting a bit picture heavy and it’s slowing down the load-times, so perhaps I’ll squeeze some on later in the week when the ones on there now have dropped off into the archives.

The trees and flowers were fantastic, though, in spite of the fact that the thistles clawed at my bare legs and the twigs and branches did the same to my slowly burning chest and back. I should be grateful I was at least wearing shorts or I’d not like to think what all the nettles might have done.

I was only up the road from mum’s, so from there it was a short zip along in the car to find them all lounging around at the back of the house, the fountain making relaxing tinkling noises and the horse going quite mad in the field, running backwards and forwards again and again until the sweat ran off him.

Cat lay under the shade of a tree and watched him with the kind of idle superiority cats have.

Of course, being a barbeque we all ate far more than we should have done, and being the only herbivore among us I had my own little corner of it reserved for non-meaty foods. I don’t usually worry too much about them being cooked on the same grill - you can never know what goes on in a restaurant, after all - but it’s always nice when someone makes an effort.

I stayed far longer than I should have done, and arrived home late afternoon, after several more mugfuls of tea and a communal bashing of the crossword book. We didn’t do too well and ended up checking most of the answers at the back, but we made the effort and that’s what counts.

Decided on Harry Potter as my subject for tonight’s Through the Night feature on account of the fact the new book comes out on Saturday, so spent the rest of the afternoon checking out sites.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 15th, 2003 at 11:15 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.