Family Meal

Nellybert have the decorators in. Well, to be honest, just the one decorator, Banjo Man, and he keeps breaking off to drink Guinness and play his banjo. I'm not complaining. He is doing a wonderful job and we're not even paying him. So the house is a bit upside down. It didn't help that I pulled all my wine out to do stuff with it and that Bert has been on lock down in his shed building a dog house for Jazzer's incontinent dog. Working man suppers had to be made (lots of meat and potatoes) and, consequently, I'm rather behind with household chores.

Today I'd planned a Family Meal. And I needed Bert to help me prepare. Bert, when he takes the notion, is a good focused cleaner. He likes to throw things out, he likes to lecture me on how my cleaning routines are haphazard and inefficient. He cleaned the scullery, threw lots of things out, spent at least 40 minutes in it. Meanwhile I haphazardly and inefficiently cleaned the rest of the house, baked a cake, made fifteen scones, a stack of sandwiches and mopped the scullery floor. That's teamwork.

London Sister is visiting. We also had Martha, Evie and their parents, Hannah Banana and three family dogs. Family Meals are great. They consist of a lot of different kinds of food, mismatched fancy china and a family.   Zoe brought terrible things from Ikea, herrings and Swedish blood sausage. Bert and Dave fell on them with glee. I tried not to look as I concentrated on my scone, piled high with Les' delicious damson jam and whipped double cream. The cake was a triumph. It was an apple sponge made with a combination of Les apples and Lidl apples. It actually fell apart when I was removing it from its dish (should have lined it) but I managed to piece it together and joined it at the seams with runny icing.

From now on Family Meals shall be the order of the day.

Afterwards the girls brushed their teeth and put on pyjamas all the better to be straight up the stairs and a bedtime story as soon as they got home. Then we took some photographs. I was in such a good mood that I even forgave London Sister for looking every bit as young as my children.