Jack of all Trades

This morning, after I’d done my daily yoga session, we were off to Heartlands for John’s immunoglobulin infusion. On the way, we discussed the making of Thomas’s birthday cake. He will be two on Friday and there is a ‘tradition’ of Grandpa making the birthday cakes. Having felt unwell yesterday, John had made no start on the cake and, with a hospital treatment session booked in for the whole of this morning, it felt like Grandpa was going to be cutting things fine.

No worries. I’d had had a long conversation on WhatsApp yesterday with Christiana, who sent through her tried and tested recipe plus an illustration of how to make the cake. In good hands, I suggested to John that I make a start on it this morning. And, do you know what? We have the basis of a cake. This may be as surprising to you as it is to me – I rarely bake cakes and those that I have done from scratch in the past haven’t turned out well, but this one did. Thank you Christiana.

It’s a colourful cake with pink, green and vanilla sponge – and John made its twin this evening, just as successfully, so tomorrow he has somewhere to start on the sculpting of the cake. Fingers crossed it all works well!!

Home from the hospital, we both pottered about a bit with this and that. And then, when we were sitting in the swinging chair in the garden having a bite to eat at lunchtime, I mentioned that the builders, working on the house next door but two, were chucking out the last of their cement into the skip at the end of the day. “I think I’m going to ask them if they’ll let me have a bucket of cement so that I can mend the rocky slab on the patio steps,” I said. John wasn’t totally convinced it was the best idea, but he didn’t stop me. So guess what we did this afternoon? Under John’s supervision, I re-laid a slab and pointed it.

I am now officially a ‘Jack-of-all-Trades’. From mixing and baking a cake to mixing cement and setting a slab – who’d have thought it? Mind you, I am not sure how long the repair will last. It might succumb to little boys running up and down it within one visit, but we’ll see.

I watched the tennis on TV while John made the second cake this evening and then, having exhausted ourselves with our creativity, we both sat down to watch a documentary this evening. Aaaand…..breathe.

Take care everyone. Covid’s about. Try to avoid it if you can and wear a mask in indoor spaces. Who knows what it’ll do to us and our beautiful children in the long term if we catch it more than once? God bless.