all I really want

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jam jam everywhere, nor any drop to eat

Having bought some reduced stuff at the supermarket, I had to find room for it in the freezer. Once home - as so often happens - the lustre had faded from my bargains. It dawned on me that never would I want to eat any of it, however cheap, particularly shrouded in ice. To boot, the packaging will crack, thanks to my sturdy forcing, and the label will come awry. A wintry anonymity of deep unattractiveness is doomed to settle on them. The boys will be told to eat up without complaining.

Solid and frozen however, these will be a problem for me to encounter way in the future, as were the three punnets of raspberries, optimistically-purchased last October, which were jettisoned to create the necessary room for this batch of odd decisions.
I decided to make jam of them. I needed jam (Marie Antoinette would understand in a cake / jam way) but it ended up taking 2 days which no-one, even in the wilder throes of mis-placed optimism, is going to say was time well spent.
The pursuit of a cheap thing can be time-heavy and, although I dread to confess it, expensive. The jammy offerings of Tiptree are appearing to be spectacularly good value in comparison. Plus they actually are jam, whereas my efforts cannot be said to be anything other than slops.

“Sauce,” my mother suggested when I told her, “for your porridge.”
“Coulis,” I said sternly; this IS the Cotswolds.
The trouble is I didn’t want coulis, and I certainly didn’t want sauce. What I want is jam. And I don’t eat porridge, so having plugged a gap which wasn’t there, I am still left with a jam-shaped hole.

We entertained chums at the weekend. It worked so well, and that despite a smorgasbord of dietary peccadillos to navigate, that I could crow with gloaty delight. One friend said I should open a restaurant (I do love praise) and that she would play Mrs Overall, shuffling round as cardi-clad waitress. The idea appeals, but not much. Have you seen Masterchef? Do not those sessions in the “pro kitchen” inspire you to promise never, ever to complain, even under your breath, in a restaurant? A circle of hell, but eagerly aspired to by the culinary mad.

I do like cooking, but on a low-key level although I must (must you? yes) shoehorn in an unnecessary boast that my mayonnaise is just delicious. It takes less than five minutes to rustle up and is genuinely, cross my heart etc, worth doing. It is less expensive than “proper” mayonnaise and I couldn’t even walk to the post-office-cum-shop to buy some in the time, let alone factor in the inevitable painful trapping of chat with the Post Office man (teeth, medication, ducks, Spain, hedges in Spain, post office regulations).

Pasta is moot. It's good, better than shop bought, but it is incumbent upon me to confess that I could walk to Tesco and back, even down an icy, winding road in a horrid blizzard, in the hour or more that I spend sending myself crazy sending the dough through the machine.

But as for the jam, I could stroll to Waitrose, friends, which is 5 miles away. I could dawdle in the blissful aisles, hand pick the smartest jars, stay for coffee, read the papers, stay for lunch, stroll back and still be quids in, both time and cash wise.

Saving money is not all it’s cracked up to be, particularly when it means the fridge is full of substandard sauce. But still one persists. And el credit cruncho has resulted in some crazy wheezes peddled by desperate newspapers.
My mother told me of a Handy Tips booklet included with a recent Telegraph where one of the suggestions concerned saving that vital fiver in cocking a snook at room service if you were to reach the hotel after the restaurant was closed.
Yes, latest wisdom is that you can toast your own cheese sandwich.
What is entailed is the cunning inclusion in your packing of some pre-made cheese sandwiches wrapped in silver foil. Once in the privacy of your room, break into your suitcase, extract the sarnies and iron them. Yes, iron them: ta-da!
This they call an “instant tasty hot snack.”
But there are so many issues skirted over. Not least of which the inadvisability of popping a sweaty cheese sandwich in among your clothes in the first place: the pfaff, the potential for error: the suitcase inadvertently being left by a warm radiator, while you get pissed on the mini bar. Then there's the assumption that your room will have an iron, and the folly in expecting that it will be anything approaching “tasty”.
We all know that the bread will remain steadfastly soggy and limp, while the cheese will manage to break free and leak oily globbets on a shirt, plus you’ll have a scorched chest of drawers on your hands to hide from the chambermaid: there’s only so much concealment one can reasonably expect from artfully discarded sachets of Nescafe.
They attempt to pre-empt this last, by suggesting bringing along a bundle of old newspapers – truly – to fashion an impromptu late-night ironing board. By the time one’s packed a tasty snack and a heap of old newspapers you might feel it was easier to stay home and eat it there, rather than Go Tramp in a smart hotel ruminating on your failure to run to the hotel’s offerings.

It doesn’t stop there, and many a use for 'denture cleaning tablets', too, crop up, providing you have such things handy, which so many of us from the Colgate generation just don’t. Otherwise, which is true of many of the tips, you might as well go out and buy the thing that's meant to do the job you are buying the alternative for. Much as I love my superior mayonnaise, it’s to be eaten with salad, not popped on my head as hair conditioner.
And the suggested uses for marshmallows - again, not a permanent feature of my cupboard - would make your eyes water. Let's say home pedicures feature.

Jam-tired this made me, I’m all for eyeing the 100% shop-bought Marmite with interest. Whistling insouciantly, my hand stretched into the fridge, brought forward three sullen jars of nasty sauce and hurled them to the bin. A certain lightness settled on me.

tell the rats that it’s now the year of the ox … but never the year of the dog

My mother was born to a 44 year old widow, and a sister of 17. This sister’s first husband committed suicide, and she is now ensconced, in her 80s, in cold comfort farm, deep in the bowels of the countryside, tending to her second husband. G. He takes all day to eat breakfast, and, on finishing at 6 in the evening, finds it is only time to get ready for bed again. A repetitive business.
Recently, somehow – and, frankly, the mind boggles at the practicalities attendant on such an excursion – these 2 went on holiday. I can’t remember where, and it will have been somewhere most people wouldn’t consider. Bird watching would have been factored in, and swimming in January tides, “So bracing, Milla.”
They asked what time breakfast finished and the innocent waitress informed them that it was 9.30.
"Aahhh," said G.
She'd learn.

Small disappointments hardly break the surface of my aunt’s brand of optimism when in her element, one which is characterised as being fundamentally bleak, whether on holiday or back home, a once lovely house crumbling with defeated neglect.
Postcards note events such as, “we heard that seals bask there quite frequently. We waited all day but none showed up. Clearly busy elsewhere! G commented that the wind was bitter, but I imagine it’s worse in Siberia; we missed lunch, but no matter,” that sort of thing, accompanied by a little drawing of a coy seal. She enjoys deprivation and takes comfort in the certainty that however bad things are now, they will be even worse tomorrow.
Once home they returned to a rat inundation. In the kitchen, under the stairs. They have come in from the cold and opened an account on my aunt’s house.
“Oh,” my aunt said airily, “everyone in the country has rats.”
“Can’t you get a man in?” asked my mother.
“Oh, no. Not round here.”
My mother relayed this to me and I squeezed a genteel shudder and said, apropos of the inevitability of rats in the countryside, “I don’t think so!”
We probably laughed.

But a scant fortnight later, tit’s given for tat, petards have been hoisted and we have taken a tumble both. My mother is on the phone.
She had seen a fat rat strolling around outside her back door while I was main-lining sal volatile since the casual scrapings aside of gravel leading to a hole under the side of the house had been confirmed as a rat run. Real rats, not merely bad tempered commuters stealing a march by racing through housing estates.

I snagged the Ratman in the post office. I think he was relieved to be rescued from a chat about the Post Office Man’s teeth (him of the “Bits. Dropping from meh. Like ice from a glacier”) and scuttled out all eager, clutching his barbecue beef crisps in one paw.
I showed him the hole and he nodded eagerly, and then changed the conversation, just like that, to his dyslexia, and that of his wife and his four children. I found it interesting, to be sure, and offered my trademark kind advice, but would rather have continued on warfarin and neosorexa.
He advised that we concrete in the hole and, when I persisted, told me what it would cost to distribute poison. The quote deterred me, but I paid for my meanness in 18-certificate fear over the weekend, during which time the sounds in the walls grew. I’ve seen ‘Ratatouille’ and am now realising what a big mistake that was. I thought I had no imagination. I was wrong.

Ratman came back and took to his task with a torch. He wriggled in the loft, and “fresh” droppings were found. It’s not at infestation level, no “tail swish” was found in the sawdust – t’ank feck – and pleasing, industrial amounts of poison have been laid. Ratman is firmly in the diary, a date more eagerly anticipated than any teenage tryst, for next Monday. Death had better be widespread. I’m thinking holocaust, species cleansing, annihilation. Call it a massive failing, but I don’t subscribe to the ‘they were here before us’ mentality. We’re here now, and they can fuck right off, however intelligent and clean. I’m brighter, I’m cleaner.

Meanwhile, our neighbours, The Olds have vermin, too, of a different but depressingly familiar sort: Lolly.
Rather than finally earning her keep – I could hire her out, earn a few quid if she would but just grab this chance to shine and be useful in doing what terriers should do: catch rats – she has instead been breaking into The Olds’ garden.
She has zilch taste, for it’s a dull patch: small, frighteningly well-tended, each blade of grass personally known and accounted for. There are boring slabs (which I pray haven’t yet been crapped on) and resin weasels with handbags. Every corner of it is highly visible from just about every window in their house. Since The Olds, when not outside pinning up endless laundry in their garden or trimming shrubs by that vital centimetre, are inside up step-ladders polishing their windows or giving the nets a busy shake, the chances of our Getting Away With It are slim. In fact, they keep a lead just for returning Lolly to us, grim-lipped. And although they go out bothering other oldsters quite frequently, for tea and to watch Countdown en masse (flat-capped and car-coated in their pristine Micra),the snow has not aided my pretence that Lolly is under any control whatsoever.
I let her out yeseterday, hoping she’d rat-catch, but she disappeared like a junkie after heroin next door, the dread tell-tale trail of the addict’s pawmarks heading into the gap in the wall. Their wall, their gap, actually. I must remember to drop that into future conversation, thus steering things away from Dog Crimes.

“Lolly!” I hissed, hoping she’d detect icy fury in my voice and come a-trotting. Yeah, right.
I went further into the snowy garden and, through the Ceanothus that separates them from us, I saw the foul hound, looking frightfully pleased with herself jumping stiff-legged on their lawn. I whisper-bellowed at her, and she bounced some more, thrilled, and then ran round and round, flurries of snow flying from her paws, her trespass laid bare in documentation. There was no way I could hope that they’d think that this was an over-active robin or a break-dancing squirrel. At any moment there would be the careful returning roll of Micra wheel on gravel and fresh out of excuses I would be caught. It’s bad enough being told off for your own shortcomings or those of the children, but on account of the dog? Per-lease. Eating humble pie for a disapproving oldster catches terribly in the craw.
One problem scuttles away, another takes centre stage. As the rats recede, the bigger pest makes hay.