By 9.30am I was back in the kitchen post-drop-off - Mol & Liz deposited in their various institutions - cracking eggs into a bowl of super-gloopy-Nigel Slater chocolate brownie mix (http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/oct/18/nigel-slater-chocolate-brownies). My house smells like I'd want it to smell if I was trying to sell it - I'm sure this sort of smell adds about 40% to the sale-price. Guaranteed fresh-baking-smell! This house comes with 3 loos, 100-year-old-cracked-plaster, original cornicing, slightly rotting sash windows and, yes, this could be yours, the smell of freshly baked cakes Every Morning! All for £3,456,999!
Anyway. So the house smells good. But it looks pretty awful as we're having it re-painted on the outside, hence reference to rotting sash windows. Phil-painting-guru has discovered that pretty much every windowsill has rotting wood on it somewhere. Which he's picked off with such diligence, a bit like the attention I give to the ever present pimples on my face, and has refilled with some kind of stinky filler - wrinkles cracks & all - gone! Vanished! I'm nearly tempted to get some of his filler and slap it onto my own wrinkles and cracks but the effects may not be so positive on a human being.
I'm baking brownies, and then I'm moving onto banana-fairy-cakes and then hopefully a Victoria Sponge - this a small offering to a friend who has recently gone through the life-mangle, and I'm hoping that the sugar & chocolate & sparkly decorations will provide very small relief at a very horrid time. I have to do the baking now whilst the house is kid free so that M&L don't realise that all this scrumptiousness has been produced for someone else.
5 more minutes on the pinger then down to the kitchen, out with batch3 of brownies. Then down to the ever-handy Tesco Metro at the bottom of my hill, more butter, sugar, eggs (maybe some bagels for lunch) to restock for the next baking adventure.