Saturday 1st August 2015

Hey, is it August already? I mean, where did the rest of the year go? I seem to remember some stuff in February and going to Wembley in May, but August?

But yes, it is August, and at the end of the month I reach 50 years on the planet. And where did all those years go? Man, it has been a rush. Well, more of a blur. We shall see how the month pans out, but before that big day I have the school reunion next week. Why did I say yes? Seemed like a good idea at the time, and looking way back, the who thing might have been my idea in the first place. So, blame me.

Anyway, let us round up the last day of July first....

Friday

And what do you know, the last day of the week and month, and I am home, with little work to do? I have some tidying up of documents to do next week, but all is in control and so the last day of the month is a monitoring exercise, especially as the big end of week meeting is cancelled. Again.

Inbetween writing mails, I do other stuff. First, I amke a huge pan of pasta salad, boil the pasta up, then add grated cheese, low fat yogurt and cottage cheese. It smells so good already. Next, as we have just frozen bread in the house, I decide to make some rolls, so I mix up 500g of dough, add a handfull of chili seeds and let it rise for two hours.

Finally, I get down to the serious cooking: limoncello and grappa tart. First up is half a pound of shortcrust pastry, add two punnets of fresh raspberries and then leave in the fridge until I have the filling done: 12 egg yolks, 300g sugar, 250g ground almonds, 100ml limoncello and 50ml grappa and then the zest and juice of three unwaxed lemons. Mixx it all up until it is a bowl of smelly golden gloop. Pour into the base, bake at gas mk 3 for 50 minutes.

Yum.

Let it cool naturally, then place in fridge and wait for Jools to come home so we can cut it and eat it, or some of it!

Work is very quiet, so I switch off at half two and go into the garden to tidy it up. We have let the grass grow for a couple of months now, and it looks ok. We have some long grass, but due to little rain, it is not lush. Anyway, it needs a mow, so I do that. I get less than two mower containers full of clippings, which is about right. I don't expect to cut it again until the end of autumn now.

Finally, I tidy up the standard tree stump; which despite having been felled, the tree is not giving up and is now putting up dozens of new shoots, some 3m long. So, I get the secateurs out and begin snipping. I am still doing this when Jools comes home, and she helps with the final snips. Heck, I even put the clippings in a bag and stack them neatly, and then pick up the tools, place them in the shed and lock it up.

Needless to say, we were both keen to try the tart, so I make coffee and cut two generous slices. It was the best one I have made as yet, as I made sure the mix was really thick, and so it set really well and the tart did not need over-cooking. That said it did fill us up, to the point we did not need anything else to eat for the rest of the night.

As darkness fell, so did the temperature, and we did not fancy sitting outside; a shame as it was a blue moon, or the second full moon of the month. There was a shroud of thin cloud in the east anyway, and it wasn't until ten in the evening that the moon became visible, by then we were tired, poor lambs, so we left the moon to cast its silvery light over the land as we zedded away until morning.