The wrong man is on my roof

Well, there’s a man on the roof of my office, and a mosquito inside it.  Why can’t it be the other way around?  Not that I necessarily want this particular man in my office, but any human would be preferable to a ruddy mozzie – which I have so far singularly failed to squish.  Grr. 

I know I am turning into a dirty old woman now I’ve seen the wrong side of forty, but honestly – why do maintenance men always look like one of the thuggy guys from “Eastenders”?  They never look like Will Houston, or Gary Avis, or Roderick Williams, or Jeremy Renner...    Or even like Mr Marinated Artichokes, or the Lovely Wes.   I’ve got a great view of this chap’s legs, but I have seen much better legs in my time.

I should explain that I’m suffering my usual atypical response to medication.  Most women lose their sex drive when they get a mirena coil, but mine trebled – it feels like I’m channeling Samantha Jones the entire time.  I’m sitting here eating black olive paste on home-baked mixed seed bread and thinking about what I could do with the black olive paste if I had the attractive man of my dreams (as opposed to the unattractive man of the roof) in here with me; it’s so weird.  I have never been a Samantha Jones-type girl.  Never.  I’ve been a good, quiet, modest lass (as is befitting in one so stout and plain).  But now – well, I have never stared at so many men’s bums in the street as the last few months.  It’s just really, really weird.

I haven’t started acting like Samantha Jones, I should add; just thinking like her.  I actually haven’t got a clue how to become a voracious man-eater.  Indeed, the idea is rather comical.  Whereas becoming a sneaky old letch seems to come naturally.  Oh well.  Thank goodness for the beautiful bodies and faces of actors and dancers and so on, then.  At least I have something to leer at.

Mind you, it’s also since the mirena settled down that I got this wild drive of creative juice and started writing again.  So maybe being juicy in one sense goes with being juicy in the other.  If so, I cannot complain, for anything that keeps my creativity up is welcome and blessed - even if it is also inconvenient and baffling!  But I can and do complain that the man on the roof isn’t a hunk.  Drat it, if I’ve got to be disturbed by all this crashing around overhead, I demand eye candy in compensation!    

One visual pleasure is presenting itself to me; not a man, but a tree.  There’s a big maple across the Green with leaves that are slowly turning the most glorious flaming orange-red, from the top down, as the autumn nights grow cooler.  The colour is practically incandescent in the sunlight.  It’s simply stunning.

Wednesday night is...

...(or rather was)

Christmas Cake Night.

My mother's old Christmas Cake recipe - one of those handed-down things, tweaked slightly over the years and with odd marginal notes - makes the best rich fruit cake I know. If I ever get married, that's my wedding cake recipe. If I ever have a child, or get asked to be a godmother, it's my christening cake recipe. It's basically masses and masses of fruit stuck together with a wee bit of cake and then fed spoonfuls of brandy for a couple of weeks. Is your mouth watering yet? It should be.

It is also pretty easy to make. Almost everything comes in batches of 6 ounces. 6oz sultanas, 6oz raisins, 6oz cherries, 6 oz chopped peel or dried cranberries, 6oz butter, 6oz sugar. 7oz plain flour. 3 eggs. 2 oz whole almonds. 1 teaspoonful mixed spice. That's it.

Last night, a bit late this year, was Christmas Cake Baking Night.

First you prepare the cake tin. Mine is Victorian, a family heirloom; deep and solid and made of blackened wrought iron, it looks more like a piece of steam engine, but it's a cake tin to dream of. Grease it, very lightly. Line it with trimmed baking parchment or greaseproof paper and tie a thick layer of folded newspaper around the outside. Preheat your oven to Gas Mark 3 or the equivalent.

Next, prepare the ingredients. Get the butter and eggs out of the refrigerator. Sort all the dried fruit (checking the raisins and sultanas for stalky bits, chopping the glacé cherries, unsticking anything that is stuck together in lumps). Then blanch and halve the almonds and add them to the dried fruit. Next, weigh the flour, mix in the mixed spice, and sieve them both together. Then, cream together the butter and molasses sugar, mix in the eggs one by one, then add fruit-and-nuts and flour in alternating spoonfuls, stirring with a knife.

As you stir, make a wish. Call the other members of the household to stir the cake and make a wish. Then dollop the mixture into the cake tin, level off and hollow the middle slightly, and pop it in the oven, on the bottom shelf. Turn the oven down a scrap, straight away. After an hour, turn it down another scrap, to about Gas Mark 2.

Then wait.

It takes anything from three and a half to four and a half hours in total. Slowly the house fills with the glorious mixed smells of spices, fruit and hot newspaper. It's a classic smell that evokes childhood and the anticipation of Christmas as little else can do. On the occasions when it takes 4 1/2 hours (like last night) one is practically blotto with tiredness by the time the cake comes out. Then you have to wait another half an hour before it can be safely turned out of the tin. Do not be tempted to turn it out immediately! - it will sag unbecomingly about the midriff, or worse, come apart altogether. I've already got one saggy midriff, i don't need another.

Leave it to cool overnight, and in the morning, wrap in greaseproof paper and stick down with sellotape (or better still masking tape, which will undo and restick several times without tearing the paper). A couple of days later, unstick the tape, unfold the paper, prick the top surface of the cake gently with a fine-tined fork, and drizzle a dessertspoonful of brandy into the top, very slowly. Do this another two or three times at intervals of three or four days.

Take the cake out of the paper. Coat it with warmed sieved jam. Cover it with marzipan. Leave it out overnight to dry. Ice with royal icing. Leave overnight to dry. Decorate, in whatever way you fancy (the year I was eight, it had a pink plastic ballerina on top; the following year, for equality's sake, a toy tank in a green and brown iced battlefield diorama...).

Bring forth, show off, cut in slices. And eat.