DM thinks that this is as close to heaven as it’s possible to get with your clothes on!

I think I agree.

We’ve been to the dentist and been told we have ‘perfect teeth’ – that’s both of us! Very, very cool.

Then, after work, we went into the forgotten corner of the garden and shook the huge old apple tree – you know the one – it’s laden with manky nasty-looking apples (see above) but they’re absolutely perfect…..it’s definitely true to say of these things that their beauty is definitely within, not without!

We shook it because it’s so huge that we can’t reach the apples, even with my patented method of shoving a rake up into the branches, hooking it onto a bough and heaving the boughs down, we still couldn’t get to the apples so DM shook and I dashed around and picked up the apples that were raining down on us.

His view is that it’s the ultimate in free food – go outside and shake a tree then cook and eat what falls down!

I mounded them up in this good old-fashioned mixing bowl – I do so love my beautiful kitchenware and am still ‘sore’ from being ‘forced’ by DM into giving a lot of the stuff I don’t use often to the charity shop before we moved – his view is that it’s cheaper to buy new than to store it all. I suppose he’s right but nonetheless it’s very frustrating when I find myself without that thing that would have been perfect for what I’m doing and realising after hunting through the cupboards that it’s probably in the cupboard of someone in Sandhurst now and the Hospice Shop at the end of our old road is a little better off.

So, as I type, they’re quartered and are boiling their little heads off on the stove with a lemon, a lime and a handful of cardamom pods…..I’m experimenting with the flavour of my apple jellies! By the end of this evening, they’ll be in the Heath Robinson jelly bag, ready to be jammed tomorrow!

I reckon that this tree has been languishing because the fruits are small, too fiddly to use in cooking and too sour to eat as a dessert apple but finding this amazing use for it has made my day. I can tell you that the chilli jam made earlier in the week was absolutely superb when spread on toast and then a layer of grated cheddar put on top and the whole lot shoved under a hot grill – this was our meal for lunch on Wednesday and it was truly a meal fit for the king and queen of the rat’s nest!

Last year I was also obsessing about food, on day two of my photography course.