And On The Seventh Day

APOLOGIES loyal followers, we have had no web access since Saturday so like London busses nothing and then three come along together.

Sunday, the day of rest, a day to be spent with a late breakfast, coffee, a pile of  papers, stroll to the pub, roast dinner with every accompaniment possible, afternoon nap, football on TV and a good refreshing sleep.

Well maybe for some, but not for 12 week students.

THE concession was a cooked breakfast - even this, though, was actually a tasting of assorted free-range pork products from those awfully nice people at Rosscarberry products and a comparison of breads combined with the use of a colour chart to check the organic provenance of the scrambled eggs.

Mmmmm Breakfast

Then it was heads down again.

Over a week of Demos you amass a huge number of recipes and allied paperwork, H&S lecture notes, Fire Prevention advice, the comparative rates of excise duty on wines across the EU, advice on composting, organic gardening etc etc. If this is not to crush you under an avalanche of verbiage an efficient filing system must be devised and implemented.

Initial hilarity at being issued with 4 ring binders, 2 packs of dividers and over 800 plastic pockets turned to relief, and finally to deep despair.

With my own filing idea being marginally less complex than the Dewey Decimal System, I soon realised that I needed more dividers and copies of some recipes if I were to avoid the kind of cross referencing not seen since the KGB and Stasi re-invented themselves as your friendly local police service.

So only proto-filing took place with papers divided into major headings such as Starters, Soups, Breads, Tarts etc. The individual recipes will be filed into the relevant category as received. More general information has gone into the additional binder that I bought before arriving, much relief at that purchase!!!

One and a half hours of filing seemed adequate so with a more cheerful disposition I turned to the matter of laundry. We are well equipped to keep whites etc clean and tidy – can’t risk demerits by appearing as if I was going to work! So after a wash with added whitener and a good tumble drying, I tackled the ironing. It was ironing in the sense that a hot iron was applied to cloth on a purpose built stand thingy but in no other sense of the word. Fortunately aprons cover a multitude of sins or in my case crimes against smoothing and creasing.

With the evidence safely hidden in a wardrobe, an hour of hunt the stick took up much of the remains of the day – or at least afternoon. We have a wonderful open log fire but this requires feeding in the form of kindling.” There’s tons of loose wood and twigs around the farm”, we had been told “You’re welcome to take them home for the fire”. Slave and labour were two words that sprung to mind, but exposure to a balmy afternoon and the prospect of a crackling blaze on a cool evening, combined with that sense of pride in a tidying operation, and a green glow from being environmentally active made even that enjoyable.

So, late in the evening, only the work plan for Monday to be done, and Sunday passed with little opportunity for the “man of wealth and taste” to make work for idle hands to do.

In the immortal words of Samuel Pepys “And so to bed”