Stollen

I've spent the day in the kitchen like Women's Liberation never happened. Or maybe those women could never have pictured how knowing we'd get and the solace of the domestic would actually be quite nice. The pace of the stollen has fitted in quite nicely with my necessity for rest at this time. Mix yeast ferment, make marzipan and soak fruits in brandy, lie down, add ferment to dough mixture and leave to prove, a nap, mix fruits into dough, roll up with marzipan, leave to prove. Then I put a wash on and made a carbonara with the yellowest organic egg yolk, almost too yellow, and some chestnuts. Chestnuts are miraculous. They are everything you want an ingredient to be. I am sad when they disappear from the supermarket but their rarity makes then hallowed.

I am going start the orange knitting, watch the other half of the film. I am wallowing in my own time scale and actually quite like this. I am ill again. I had to come home early from the Warp party and miss Battles. Am I really guilty of burning the candle at both ends, as he put it, but merely with choir practice and ballroom dancing class? Not exactly hardcore, even nudged to the 5.30am starts. I was just refining my facebook photos and wondered if I had grown old suddenly this year, whether the experience shows on me. It reminds me that not everything is chronic and that's comforting.

I just shook icing sugar over the stollen and it was most pleasing. Andrew Whitley says it won't stay without the chemicals but I sometimes find him a bit of a martyr. Perhaps it is just my ills but sometimes I feel so satisfied by the smallest of acts, things that are so pleasurable, for now, it doesn't matter that they lead to nowhere. I finished 3 separate packets of past ingredients exactly in the course of the recipe, their amalgamation worthy and ringing so true. I am warmed. I love it when stuff fits, when things roll together quietly and make small sense.

I just met my postman properly. He knocked on the door, and yet again I am still in nightclothes in the afternoon. He decided I was a cynic, he a romantic, and bumbled through the pile of mail in the pouring rain. Grim weather, I commented, you see, he said. The hand that gave the rose that took the rain to make it grow. What? We started to laugh. You need to laugh, he exclaimed, look how you changed! I laughed at my laughing and hid behind the door. Part of me worried I would just cry. I agree, I need a romantic to break me, perhaps break my heart, not in a bad way, but break it into laughter. Some times the smallest things make the day worth it. And Whitley was wrong, the icing sugar is still there.