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Report from a land of frost and fog
Dec. 13th, 2012 01:48 pmMore precisely, from Doncaster Station, where I am sitting in a first class carriage with my complimentary sarnies and a complimentary tumbler of Romanian chardonnay, and have just been passed by a steam hauled train in all its glory (tentatively identified as the York Yuletide Express).
We are on our traditional pre-Christmas visit to London, southbound on the train, and I'm feeling that lift of responsibility that comes with the knowledge that it's too late to worry about the packing: anythingI have failed to pack we will have to do without. It's tempting to say likewise that anything we didn't find time to do will have to wait until we get home, or better still remain undone - but I have packed the unwritten cards, and a number of not-yet-wrapped presents, and hope to make progress while we are away. And as we head south out of the mist and into the sun, and the landscape changes from white to (rather muddy) green, I feel foolishly optimistic abot that.
For once, it isn't entirely our fault that we have left undone things that we ought to have done. We had set up a very full and sociable weekend on the assumption that we would still have the early part of this week to catch up - and then the days vanished in a perfect storm of visitors, a funeral, the planning committee and I wouldn't have done anything differently. I would have chosen not to have the car give out on us, I suppose, though if it hadn't been hiccuping so ominously we might have felt obliged to visit some garages in the search for a new one, so perhaps it's just as well. And it is now with the mechanic who will tell us on our return what the warning light is warning us of, and whether it is worth fixing. We had planned all along to make this trip by train.
I'm not sure what happened to yesterday. We didn't go swimming (of course we could get to the pool without a car, but it woud require more conscious decisions than we were ever going to make) and I didn't complete the piece of work I had hoped to finish, though I did other things. I made poppyseed - I want to say rolls, because the dough is rolled, but that sounds like individual rolls - roulades, perhaps? The recipe demanded that the dough be rolled out to 3mm thick, and perhaps that would be possible with a drier dough (see previous post) but I as pleased with what I achieved, and the quantity of poppyseed filling was enough for the whole batch of dough. We had a couple of slices for brakfast, and the rest went in the freezer - I wished I could have brought some with us, but my backpack is full of fruit.
We went into Newcastle for an evening of ghost stories with Gail-Nina Anderson. Possibly this was the pleasure we should have foregone, but who could resist an original ghost story, a selection of photographic ghostliness and a reading of a classic (Dickens) ghost sory, followed by the cheapest banquet at the Happiness Inn for four? Home by train and straight to bed, and what we hadn't done yesterday we did in a flat spin this morning.
And now we are on the train...
We are on our traditional pre-Christmas visit to London, southbound on the train, and I'm feeling that lift of responsibility that comes with the knowledge that it's too late to worry about the packing: anythingI have failed to pack we will have to do without. It's tempting to say likewise that anything we didn't find time to do will have to wait until we get home, or better still remain undone - but I have packed the unwritten cards, and a number of not-yet-wrapped presents, and hope to make progress while we are away. And as we head south out of the mist and into the sun, and the landscape changes from white to (rather muddy) green, I feel foolishly optimistic abot that.
For once, it isn't entirely our fault that we have left undone things that we ought to have done. We had set up a very full and sociable weekend on the assumption that we would still have the early part of this week to catch up - and then the days vanished in a perfect storm of visitors, a funeral, the planning committee and I wouldn't have done anything differently. I would have chosen not to have the car give out on us, I suppose, though if it hadn't been hiccuping so ominously we might have felt obliged to visit some garages in the search for a new one, so perhaps it's just as well. And it is now with the mechanic who will tell us on our return what the warning light is warning us of, and whether it is worth fixing. We had planned all along to make this trip by train.
I'm not sure what happened to yesterday. We didn't go swimming (of course we could get to the pool without a car, but it woud require more conscious decisions than we were ever going to make) and I didn't complete the piece of work I had hoped to finish, though I did other things. I made poppyseed - I want to say rolls, because the dough is rolled, but that sounds like individual rolls - roulades, perhaps? The recipe demanded that the dough be rolled out to 3mm thick, and perhaps that would be possible with a drier dough (see previous post) but I as pleased with what I achieved, and the quantity of poppyseed filling was enough for the whole batch of dough. We had a couple of slices for brakfast, and the rest went in the freezer - I wished I could have brought some with us, but my backpack is full of fruit.
We went into Newcastle for an evening of ghost stories with Gail-Nina Anderson. Possibly this was the pleasure we should have foregone, but who could resist an original ghost story, a selection of photographic ghostliness and a reading of a classic (Dickens) ghost sory, followed by the cheapest banquet at the Happiness Inn for four? Home by train and straight to bed, and what we hadn't done yesterday we did in a flat spin this morning.
And now we are on the train...
