The secret to making apricot jam, I have not long learnt, is that any idiot can do it. It takes almost no effort at all.
First, you halve and pit the apricots – done in about the time it takes a one-armed Michele to have a shower these days – before throwing them into the biggest pot you own. Next, you pour sugar over them, about enough to cause a diabetic coma, it seems to me, and then give the whole thing a good old stir.
After this, you wait a day or two, occasionally giving the apricots and the half a tonne of sugar another good old stir.
As you wait, something sort-of magical happens. Slowly but surely, the apricots soften and break down as the sugar draws the liquid from their flesh and the contents of your pot become an enormous mess of pulpy goo.
This process, Michele explained to me as if to a dozy beagle, is called “maceration”, a strange sort of word, which, our elderly, 1950 edition of the Shorter Oxford Dictionary tells me, comes from Latin, with possibly a bit of Greek, and goes back to the 16th century. It means to soften something by steeping.
Once macerated, your apricot goo needs only a quick boil, a quick whiz with a stick blender, and bottling, and just like that, you have made enough bright-orange apricot jam for an entire year. Who, I wondered, would buy the stuff when it takes almost no effort to make it yourself?
Well me, I suppose, until I was given the task of doing it, something occasioned by Michele being one-armed because of her recent fall and operation, which means her right arm is in a sling until the first week of February, and will probably be a bit useless for another month after that.
According to me, the division of indoors labour at Lush Places is that Michele does (almost) all of the cooking and I do everything else. According to Michele, this is bollocks because she does everything, including the cooking.
A United Nations’ special envoy would likely conclude that when Michele has the use of both arms, we share most of the indoor household tasks with the exception (mostly) of the cooking.
But post-accident, breakfast, lunch and dinner preparation and cooking falls to me (mostly) with Michele (mostly) ordering me about. It seems (mostly) to be working. Despite the irritating condescension from women friends, not to mention Blokesy Stokesy, about my fitness for the job, I can actually cook, but have never really enjoyed it much. But needs must, and so far, there have been (mostly) no complaints.
The burnt onion on the bottom of this pan, however, is that my arguments with Michele about the best way to do something have been getting ever more common as the weeks pass.
At least we can agree on one thing: my first batch of apricot jam is delicious. Much like her – though she pulled a face when I suggested it – it is a good mix of sweetness and tartness.
When not shaving parmesan or mincing garlic, I have been having what I am calling “wood worry”. This self-diagnosed and entirely made-up mental health condition has been caused by the near non-stop rain at Lush Places over what was supposed to be our brief, sun-soaked break from the badly-paid business of typing words for a living.
In the run-up to Christmas, John from up the road delivered four trailer loads of firewood into the usually sunny spot by the water tank, where, like a pan of oven chips, the wood was supposed to bake on a high heat until done.
But almost as soon as John dropped off the last load, summer pissed off and I was forced to throw tarpaulins over the lot.
When I pulled them off last week, after the sun appeared for the first time in nearly three weeks and no rain was forecast, I found much of my precious firewood was as damp as this so-called summer. Some of it was actively growing mould.
If the sun doesn’t return soon to season our wood for next winter, apricot won’t be the only jam we are in.
