Operation Marmalade - phase three

The day started with a clear blue sky with some beautiful red orange and yellow clouds along the horizon  at sunrise - shepherd's warning. By midday it clouded over completely again. Clare had an appointment at the School of Optometry at ten thirty, so I drove her over to Cathays. Came straight home to begin phase three of Operation Marmalade. I went to the greengrocers and bought a couple of pounds of oranges and a lemon and had them stewing in the pressure cooker by the time she returned  home. I cooked a butter bean and veggie sauce to go with pasta for lunch, then went to the Co-op to buy a couple of kilos of sugar for jam making, and a couple of tubes of tomato paste which I'd forgotten to buy last time I went to the shops.

I set out across Llandaff Fields to inspect the progress of the early snowdrop and crocus crop and when I was as far from shelter as I could get, the rain finally started, fortunately not too heavy. I took a few photos and then returned home. More snowdrop heads are visible, and just one crocus has a fully formed flower in the stretch of grass under the trees at the gate entrance to Pontcanna Fields. Looking at photos taken in this same place in the first week of the year several times told me that this year's crop isn't more advanced than previous colder years. It's been wet recently, but I can remember even wetter starts to the New Year.

Clare was cutting up and de-pipping the fruit when I got home, and with sugar and water added, soon batch number three was reaching boiling point. By the time we sat down to supper it reached setting point and had been transferred to jars, six altogether, as I'd bought a couple fewer oranges than I thought. Never mind, we have twenty four jars to see us through the year! The Seville bitter orange season is quite short, so we're not alone in benefiting from this brief window of opportunity. If we had more jars we could do another batch, but we're out of spare jars now.

I spent part of the evening decanting large photos from my main Google photos account to a hard drive archive, as the free account storage is eighty percent full, not surprisingly given the number for photos that I take. Then an interesting documentary about the art and work of David Bowie on BBC Four. To hear him reflecting when interviewed over the years on his journey of self discovery through creativity. "I just spent all those years learning to be somebody." Food for thought.