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.

Trolley Dolly

It always seems to happen like this.
One moment I am sashaying round the supermarket fairly vacantly. If push came to shove, and an impertinent soul were to ask, then I would admit to being perfectly proud of the trolley.
For glance at it – a-bulge with organic produce showing the world that I am, contrary to rumblings in the chorus, not a bad sort of person. Spilling over indeed it is with impressive fare: bunched carrots, and peppers, fairtrade bananas, 2-4-1 raspberries, half price strawberries … (ok, the halo’s slipping, the parsimony starting to show, but the principle is still good: it’s fruit, it’s veg and we are Getting Away With It, even though, yeah yeah, I should have gone to the greengrocer with my hempen trug. Begone.).
Let it be said, through gritted teeth, that at this stage the trolley is most certainly 100% impressive, and yet not any soul to admire it.

So that is One Moment, and the next?
Ah, the next is my undoing, being me coming upon the Bargain: Reduced section, turning self almost upside down in a greedy rummage, elbowing pensioners out of the way in pursuit of a cheap pie, snorting like a piggy at the trough, tearing desperately at cut price Cornish pasties, possibly made in Slovakia, possibly involving knees and beaks; unwanted cheap cheeses; and a random pud.

And it is shortly after that love-in fest with bargains (from which I emerge triumphantly grateful and pink in the face), and a random Supermarket Sweep grab at the wine shelves, that I bump into a mother from school, The Healthiest Nurse in the World.
She is also the only person I have ever met who can segue any conversation – whether ostensibly regarding boilers, the weather or a parking slot – into sex, in fewer than 3 moves. But that is incidental to this blog and perhaps I need to meet more people.

(you encountered her here first: //http://milla-countrylite.blogspot.com/2008/03/huffing-and-puffing.html, read down to Andy, penultimate para, see! Earthquake to sex without blinking an eye).

(I neglected to report a time I played tennis with her. One sniff of a hangover on the part of your scribe, and she was into resuscitation mode. “Oh Milla,” she said, in very caring tones, “you can’t exercise” (don’t guffaw reader) “and recover.”
“Recover,” the cow actually said “recover.”
Then she said, “That’s how heart attacks happen,” or something unnecessary and medical like that. Heart attacks indeed. Well Really! How slippery and alcoholic and near death on a daily basis does she have me?
Pause for anxious thought.
Does she really believe all that insensitive guff about a mere 14 units a night? I mean week. How, as F9 says so very frequently, how offensive.)

Anyway, she came upon me when her trolley was spanking fresh out of the vegetable aisle and therefore still impressive, while mine had tussled with bargains and booze and lost.
I spotted her but was too slow to slide, a la teeny tiny binkin over porcine bum, one small packet of organic oats across a massive family pack of crisps, nor did I have time to conceal a virtual shelf full of yellow stickered Green and Black chocolate bars with the few small packets of sesame seeds I must have snatched up by mistake. There’s only so much a girl can do.

The conversation was awkward: I felt exposed, vulnerable, and found wanting. I realise that I am a horrible control freak and do not like being exposed or found wanting.
Mrs HNW was chortling about her holiday. Just back from Florida, the stocks in their freezer had melted, thanks to a power cut.
“Oooh, I see you’ve found plenty of goodies for your” (inference: sub-standard) “freezer,” she said in the congratulatory terms one might use when a toddler managers a turd near the pot.
“Mmmm,” I said, defensive of my piggy-grub.

Later, much later, too too late, when I had done penance with some aduki beans and – get this, black turtle beans – I saw HNW in the distance hovering by the DVDs and, en speedy route to encounter her casually with a happenstance transformed trolley, I suffered the gross misfortune of banging into Whispering Mother instead. She who is in permanent search of prey having someone’s private details to divulge, a secret tumbling from her lips at any given moment even, I imagine, when asleep.
Being merely a vector for her conspiratorial germs, I could have been anyone, anyone whose initial secret it wasn't, that is. But it held me up and meanwhile HNW, from whom I was still fretfully hell bent on retrieving nutritional brownie points, was on her way out of the store and I was stuck nodding at something idiotic and judgemental regarding party invitations.

The need casually to smuggle “as I was reaching for the aduki beans” to indicate my on-going au faitness with fibrous goods, into any conversation which might lurk in the future with HNW was bothering me. I’m yet to suss how she masters it with sex. Shamelessly, it goes without saying.

My chance came later. And inevitably it was due to go tits up.
I was rolling out some pastry, using a wine bottle so to do, for we still haven’t unearthed the rolling pin since moving here 2 years ago.
The doorbell went and in a frenzy of flour I went to the door, wine bottle in hand. Well, it might have rolled on the floor. Reluctant to leave the dog in charge of the chocolate was still on the side, I shoved them from the edge, 2 slid, I snatched up the errant bars. Temptation is a cruel thing and rarely resisted by Lolly.
“Ah, Milla,” said the waiting HNW, uniformed and prim, and perfect. "About this tennis ..." a leaflet was in her hand.
She looked me up and down, frowning at my mid-afternoon drink of choice, taking in my snack of choice, processing for later dissection my marriage to the bottle, that wine was my comfort rag, chocolate my prop, necessary both even to answer the front door.
I fish-opened my mouth.
A whispery little “aduki beans” was in there somewhere, chums with “black turtle beans,” but just … wouldn’t come out.