We picked a lot of damsons in LT’s garden, about 10 pounds of them, as I mentioned the other day.  Tim gave a couple of pounds to Weeza – I’ve no idea how grateful she was – to make damson gin or vodka, half of the rest we’ve made into jam and the rest we decided to turn into chutney, and that’s what has been done today.  We tried using a cherry stoner but it was going to take ages and, though we’ll keep that idea in mind, what we actually did was cook the damsons gently in their own juice, sieve them and then – Tim did this bit – pick out the stones from the rest.

\We also had ten days’ worth of cucumbers and a couple of pints of milk, so I also made yoghurt and some bread and butter pickles.  And it seems to have taken a lot of the day..  But the day was wet and dreary and we wouldn’t have been doing much else anyway.  We went out for lunch – which was superb, Yagnub is very well served for lunch places and we spread our custom round all of them, they’re all worth going to.  And we just bought a loaf of bread and I dropped off my newspaper vouchers into the newsagents and we congratulated ourselves that we didn’t need any more shopping.  Until I was measuring out the spices for the pickles and found that I was almost out of mustard seed, so had to go in after all.  Since it was already 6.30 in the evening, it’s just as well that supermarkets stay open late nowadays.  It’s all done now, potted up and ready for the store cupboard.

And I’m going to finish reading the paper and make conversation with LT.  Here we both are, each on our separate computer…..

In the meantime, another glass of wine, perhaps.