Sunshine and housewives

When is the last time I saw some sunshine? I need some sunshine in my life. Everything is so grey, even the jumpers I am wearing are grey. It is cold, chilly, too chilly for the second week of September. Where is the Indian summer that we were promised to compensate for the greyest August on record?

I am practising being a house wife. We picked blackberries at the weekend, two bagfuls. Thankfully we had Lily the dog with us. Dogs = plastic bags (unused). We brought home, well, back to the holiday cottage, two large food bags bursting with sweet smelling carefully picked purply-black ripe blackberries and I made them into blackberry goo. Perhaps it has a proper name but I do not know it. The blackberry goo is now in the freezer. Back in London I made applesauce. Two carrier bags of Shropshire garden apples. I cut and cored and peeled and persuaded M to help as well. We made a pressure cooker full of apple sauce. The apple sauce too is in the freezer, in small Tupperware boxes. Next weekend when friends come for Sunday lunch I shall make some pastry and fill it with home made apple and blackberry goo. And make custard to go with it. On Tuesday I made banana and ginger and chocolate muffins with some left over bananas, a bit of ginger and the ends of two packets of Green & Blacks dark chocolate. I went to open the cake-tin to put the cooled muffins in but it was already occupied by some white furry mould and what might have been the end of something else I made a few weeks ago. The muffins are now in a Tupperware jug. I think I need some more practice.