At this time of year, my tastebuds have two, at least, wildly different inclinations. One is for crunchy winter salads, with sharp, tangy dressings and the other is for loads of spice and vegetables. In fact, there’s a third, which is comforting casseroles and a bit of stooge. We’ve rather gone through them all in the last couple of days. Tim made a beef rogan josh yesterday, we had gravadlax and salad for lunch and a cauliflower cheese for dinner. Tomorrow, I’m not yet sure, but we are developing a minor egg mountain. Only two or three eggs a day, but we haven’t really eaten any since Christmas. However, Tim is planning to make his Famous Leek Quiche tomorrow, so that’ll use a few.

There’s not the least chance I’ll get involved in the restrictions of Veganuary – just can’t be bothered with substituting perfectly good butter and cheese with substitutes, let alone worrying about making vegetable stock when I’ve got the chicken sort in the freezer, but I do want plenty of fabulous veggies just now, probably as a reaction to eating a fair bit of meat over the last week or so. The newspaper has recipes from a current book at the weekend and I’m very tempted by two of them. Both Indian cooking, as it happens, and I can’t pretend I really need them. I have a feeling that I’m actually just missing India. It’s eight years since I’ve last been there and I’ve no idea if or when I’ll go again. My sister hopes to visit her friend in Chennai next year – Kamala is over 80 now and each meeting is precious; K won’t visit here again, though she used to be an enthusiastic traveller.

Frankly, going to spend a night at Tim’s house in Reading is a pipe dream at present, so better not think about it.

As we shared the gravadlax this lunchtime, I remembered the time I made a version of it – it was for a blog party, probably the third one. I cured a whole side of salmon, can’t remember which recipe I used but it contained beetroot, I remember the edges of the fish being stained red. The difficult bit was slicing it, that I do remember. It was very tricky to hold it, for a start, and to cut thin slices at an angle. I remembered a very thin knife my mother used to have, which would have been perfect, but which I last saw at least thirty years ago. As long as a carving knife but with a very sharp, flexible thin blade. “I know just what you mean,” said Tim, “I bought one like that in Newlyn some years ago, for filleting fish.’ Of course he did and of course he has. He’s very good like that. When he does finally get to Reading, he’ll look it out. Though I’m not really entirely sure that the game of home-curing salmon is entirely worth the candle. Those rollmop herrings were good, though. More work, actually, but I think they’re worth it.

Slightly cheating, admittedly, because I haven’t done any drawing, even failing at it, so far. I needed a piece of glass or clear plastic as a picture plane. I don’t know what a picture plane is yet, I haven’t read that far. But I did know there was a piece of perspex hanging around in the chickens’ greenhouse so I fetched that up. It needed the protective film removing and then it needed to be washed – and then I looked at the book and realised it was about six times as big as I needed. So time to think again.

It occurred to me that I might find a smallish picture that I didn’t want to hang, and I could use the glass from that. So up I trotted to the room where stuff is dumped and I found just what I needed. It was, rather oddly, an aerial view of the village hall and the houses around it. No idea why it was acquired but it was in a glazed frame. The suggested size was 8″x10″ and this is 10″x12″ and that seems quite close enough for me. I’ve put sticky tape all around so that no one cuts their hand on the glass. And so I wait until Monday when the post arrives. Then I have to actually start to fail in reality.

In the meantime, I’ve ironed all the pillowcases, a duvet cover and two of Tim’s shirts. That was quite enough for one day – oh, but I hoovered and also diligently cleaned out the dishwasher. So, if anything, I’ve overachieved, if not at drawing.

It’s been cold and dreary, with the sort of freezing fog that hardly lifted all day. It was also Bin Day – that is, the bin men (people? I’ve never seen a woman emptying bins, it’s always been cheerful, burly men) come early tomorrow morning. So we took the task of emptying all the indoor bins into the wheelie bins and taking them down the drive, as well as Tim taking out the compost bucket and washing it out (which he had to do at the kitchen sink because the outside taps are frozen) as one of today’s achievements. The other was taking down the Christmas decorations. I usually leave them until Twelfth Night but honestly, whatever Yuletide spirit there was this year dissipated quite quickly and we only kept them up this year because Wink was coming through for a sedate New Year’s Eve party. Come to that, they were only up at all because there were small children coming over.

It’s all looking bare and tidy, apart from the pine needles in the corner of the room that I haven’t hoovered up yet. It really has been a day for hunkering down with a slightly sulky air and not doing anything we didn’t need to do. Which might be the pattern for the year, if the last one is anything to go by.