We wake to a beautiful, sunny morning. It is still damn cold, but at least there is sunshine. I don’t join my parents at the early morning eucharist at 8am (this is the time formerly known as 7am, after all), but I do manage to have porridge with them when they come back. Alas it’s brown sugar and Greek yoghurt (far less healthy than honey and blueberries, but still jolly nice). Then I go to my sister’s, and we head for Church with my niece, who is working at Arundel Castle as a guide. We leave Church sharpish, as her shift starts early. I am amused to find that she has now become a major expert on Duke and Earl related trivia, although her liking for Bernard Marmeduke – just because he had such a silly name – suggests that she is not making the mistake of taking this all too seriously.
After my niece has been dropped off, my sister and I have coffee in one of Arundel’s many coffee shops. She has a caramel shortcake and I have a fabulous cherry bakewell. The cherries are soft, big moist and delicious and evidently without artificial chemicals. Infinitely preferable to a chocolate egg full of E numbers.
There is time for a quick wander around Arundel – and we manage to sort out one another’s birthday presents, when we go into a swanky kitchen shop, full of clocks and expensive stools designed to look like champagne corks. I buy her a rather nice glass vase and myself a baking tray that is deep enough for traybakes – it will be so much more suitable for Nigella’s chocolate brownies than the roasting tin that I generallly use, which has curved corners and sloping sides just when you want ninety degree angles and sharp corners. She undertakes to get me Ottelenghi’s Jerusalem and John Waite Bakes. We are both well pleased.
Then it’s back to my parents for mushroom soup and a beef and tomato sandwich followed by the usual banana, with another toasted hot cross bun with lemon curd at teatime. Then it’s off to dinner at my sister’s, where we start with a bottle of cava and some gorgeous nibbles: cubes of Spanish cheese with paprika irresistably dusted on top of them, salted almonds and bright green stuffed olives the colour of a Prada handbag.
This is only the introduction to a splendid roast lamb with carrots, roast potatoes (with a nice red wine) and a sublime apricot and sultana cheesecake – and I don’t even like cheesecakes – plus a lovely coulis, strawberries dipped in chocolate, and a couple of glasses of the desert wine I gave her at Christmas.
I decide it is time to try and shock the younger generation, so I expatiate on the evils of McDonalds as vile capitalists out to poison the underclass, and tell them their arteries will thank them in twenty years’ time if they keep themselves away from the Golden Arches. Unsurprisingly they pay no attention, although they are perhaps mildly amused.