So far so good ...

This morning's weather was even more awful than yesterday's, adding grimly intense rain to the heavy pall of cloud that lay over the Firth, making it seem still dark at 8am as I forced myself to get up and put some bread in the machine for lunch. The ominous drips sounding through the wall in the en-suite never fail to alarm... Anyway, we got quite wet just with getting down the garden, into the car, and out again just outside the church - which has the added interest of being on a wooded hillside, that bit higher than the town, thus attracting even more weather ...

Inside the church the weather was making itself felt in the great wet patches on the wall where the leaded windows need work and let a great deal of moisture into the stonework. The warmer temperature merely served to increase the damp, much in the way it did in our first flat the day the estate agent was coming to value it ... but enough of that. Despite a small turnout (weather, plus people fleeting said weather by going on holiday) the service was simply lovely. Led by one of our Lay Readers, this service was the very first time I'd heard in my own church from the pulpit the voicing of the very real fears of the possibility of a pre-emptive strike on the Faslane submarine base in the context of looking at the anxieties that beset our world today. Back in the 80s, we were kicked out for my insistence that living beside not one but two nuclear submarine bases was A Bad Thing, so it was particularly welcome to hear this as we did today, 40 years later. Church is a very different place these days.

Back home, we crouched over the fire cradling coffee and thawing out, segueing seamlessly into lunch with the Sunday paper, before I returned to the Marmalade Saga. This involved two linked operations, involving yesterday's failure and today's preparation for tomorrow's efforts (I told you I'd bought rather many oranges.) For the first, I wrestled open all the jars I'd filled yesterday, still as runny as ever, and tipped them all out - not into the big preserving pan as before, but divided between the big Ikea pasta pot and a heavy pan that we once used for chips. In these I achieved the thrilling rising of the mixture to foam just below the lip of the pots and the all-important level on the jam thermometer Di lent me yesterday

Reader, it worked! (I had doubts about the contents of the deeper pot, but I've just checked the jars and they've all set). In celebration, I give you as blip the arcane mystery of the empty pot with blobs of set marmalade in the bottom, specially left there as tangible proof that all would be well; the second photo is the same one fiddled with in an app called Tangled FX. That done, I squeezed and chopped the second batch, now soaking in the preserving pan till I get the sugar in, after which I shall divvy it up and do another boiling.

That, however, is for the morrow. I've been half-dead all evening and am off to bed. Thanks to all who wished me well in my attempts at domesticity ...