Jam Making.

A wet night, showers in the morning and drier in the afternoon.

The outside chairs were too wet so I had to bring a chair out for my morning wake-up with a mug of tea and the cat on my lap. I should have brought my camera out straightaway (I usually do) so that I could have captured the reflections of birds flying low over the water or our resident robin perched on the wizard's staff by the garden gate but hey, I was still waking up. Instead I got a nice shot of a young herring gull none too happy at being parked on next door's roof while its parents went off fishing and was letting the whole world know with its piercing peeping.

There must have been a few fish around because amongst the floating herring gulls some black headed gulls were diving into the sea. They're not as tidy divers as the gannets with their missile like plunging into the depths.

It took me a while to work out that this was a juvenile cormorant. It stayed floating on the surface while the nearby adult bird surface dived for fish.

I kept changing my mind about cycling to the community gardens and had finally decided to take a chance when down came another shower. So I drove instead taking a large punnet of plums for anyone who wanted them. There I helped cut back the brambles and willow that were making it difficult to get the mower along the grass paths between the allotments some of which seem to be nothing but brambles. To be on the safe side we had our cake, a Victoria sponge, in the watershed.

Once home I spent the whole afternoon making plum jam from a kilo of the smaller plums that I had kept back. The recipe I found said to cook up the plums, stones and all for 25 minutes before sieving and cooking with sugar. Being me I went my own way, brought them up to the boil before I left in the morning and just stuck the lid on while I went out. The plums were nice and soft but I hadn't cooked away the liquid and had to spend a very long time cooking and stirring the sieved plums until they reduced to the volume the recipe said I should have. Another hour of boiling and stirring once the sugar was added and I had ........ a whole two small jars of admittedly tasty plum jam.  It's not as if we eat jam often, only when I've made some. But I couldn't let those plums go to waste. Making jam on such a small scale isn't very efficient, how on earth do they knock up jam so quickly on Bake Off? More sugar perhaps? 

Cleaning up wasn't too bad, nothing like the carnage when I used to make large quantities of blackcurrant jam by the same method. I gave away my jam kettle and I doubt if it would work on the induction hob anyway.

And then it was time for aerobics. Much fun and exertion as always.