Magic and Marmalade

There's a man on a ladder in the bathroom - mending the ceiling light over the basin. It needs a new transformer he says, as the burnt-out one was put in in 2004. He's our lovely local electrician. If you call him he nearly always comes the next day - unless he's on holiday in the Gambia where he was last week. He's old school, polite, shakes your hand when he arrives and leaves. He has a strong Devon accent and says to my husband who is going out for a drive,

Sorry not to talk to thee.

We've known him for ten years now.....my husband doesn't remember his name.....wouldn't recognise him in the street .....doesn't know what he's talking about but thanks him for coming anyway....says how grateful he is. Me too.

While the electrician does his magic with the electrics in the bathroom, I go downstairs and start making marmalade, scooping out the squidgey pulp from the shells of the Seville oranges (which I boiled for 3 hours and which have been sitting in their bitter juices in the fridge for a week, waiting for me to find a  clear stretch of jam making time).

I always use the same recipe, a Frances Bissell one, given to me by a dear friend,written out on pretty note paper, which is a bit sticky and smeary now but I know it by heart. Jane Grigson has a similar recipe in her Fruit Book. You boil the oranges first, so cutting up the skins into shreds is a doddle. The only part which requires stamina and patience is rubbing the soft flesh and pips through a fine sieve into a smooth gloop to add to the bubbling syrup.

It takes me ages - my right hand still sore from pruning all the blackcurrant, redcurrant and gooseberry bushes on the allotment on Sunday - and I can feel that familiar ache in my forefinger - pretty sure it's arthritis. So grateful for my hands though - how lost I'd be without them.

Grateful too for the new bright light in the bathroom.....even though it highlights my random grey hairs and I'm sure I didn't have so many wrinkles before we went to NZ.....  wish I could just slot in a new  younger transformer whenever I feel old and slow and weary like I'm feeling now....