The mills of God grind slowly

     But they grind exceeding small…

You will remember Dominic Cummings, the PM’s arrogant and disliked advisor, whose wife felt a bit ill the day after lockdown began so they drove to the north of England with their 4-year-old son to stay in a cottage on Dom’s parents’ estate (where it was Dominic, the next day, who came down with what was probably covid-19).

Well – it turns out the Cummings family doesn’t have planning permission to turn that building (it’s more barn-like than cottage-y) into a habitation. They won’t go to prison for life, but it will be an expensive nuisance to put things right. It seems a fitting punishment – you’ve got to obey the rules.

I’ve had a good day. Helen came early and marched me around the garden: the family dog Farouk is lame, and her morning had to be devoted to securing medical attention for him. The effect (for me – I’ve heard no more of Farouk) was to lengthen the morning by hours. There’s a moral there.

I’ve knit stoutly on. I’ve also measured, and the result was disappointing. As expected, I guess.

Reading

Thank you, PomPom and (especially) Tandah for encouraging me to go on with Elizabeth Strout despite not much liking “The Burgess Boys”. I’m now deep into “Abide With Me” and enjoying it enormously. And, yes, I know that leaves both “To the Lighthouse” and “Il Cane di Terracotta” to be finished, and I’m sure both will be, but not just now.

Cookery

Helen really spoke this morning as if her family had enjoyed my sourdough loaf. I mean to try again next week – it’s fun – in the hopes that it wasn’t a beginner’s-luck fluke. Conjuring yeast out of the air and actually leavening a loaf of bread with it seems like magic, far more so than fermenting a batch of kimchi. I looked up “bread” and “yeast” on Wikipedia this morning. It’s all too complicated for me, but I learned that bread-making and beer-brewing and wine-making are all rather intertwined, in European history.