Old-Fashioned Fruitcake
No, I didn’t have to mount a daring raid to rescue my ironing board from an international gang of ironing-board abductors (if such things there be).
When I read this post from the Dreamstress, I realized that the cover of my ironing board needed replacing too – had needed it, according to my comment, for about the last ten years. So naturally, having waited for the Seven Years of Symbolic Significance to pass since then, this week I did something about it.
Continue & CommentIt’s been 27 degrees C (80.6F) every day this year. This may not seem hot to you (particularly if you live with air conditioning) but it’s all a matter of what you’re used to, and this climate has conditioned me to mostly dwell in the teens.
Unfortunately, my to do list for summer projects includes things like “clear out woodshed” and “stack cord of firewood” (that’s 3.6 cubic metres/130 cubic feet, by hand), and “dig drainage ditch”.
Due to our proximity to the longest day, the sun pours down for about fifteen hours at a stretch. Fifteen hours and three minutes, if you want to get precise about today. This means that it gets cool enough to go outside and get to work on the garden about ten minutes before it gets dark enough that you can no longer see the garden – about half an hour before bedtime.
Mrs. Swaffield perched upright on the edge of the armchair and smiled across at them encouragingly, bringing into the room’s cheerlessness a reassuring ambience of homemade jam, well-conducted Sunday schools, and massed women’s choirs singing Blake’s ‘Jerusalem.’ Both men felt immediately at home with her. Both in their different lives had met her kind before. It was not, thought Dalgliesh that she was unaware of the frayed and ragged edges of life. She would merely iron them out with a firm hand and neatly hem them down.
from Death of an Expert Witness by P.D. James