Horse drawn kettles, and eating barbed wire

Oct 5
Its back to student days today.  The kettle has packed up and until tomorrow when we can make an emergency dash to the shops, I am making tea the old fashioned way: drawing the water laboriously from the well, filtering out the tadpoles, hitching the horses to the kettle.   Or, to put it another way, its back to the student method of heating up water in a saucepan.

I think the last time I had to do this was in our early years in Expatland, when the Sheik, Chuck and Mary, and all the divers went to the Maldives, and I stayed behind house and kitten sitting for Chuck and Mary.  They had three very tiny and valuable Persian kittens (plus mum and aunt) to be sat on.

My first morning there it dawned on me that Americans don't have kettles as they don't drink tea.  There was a coffee making machine that could have flown me to the moon - and would certainly have made me a cup of coffee had I wanted one.  But I didn't.  So I was reduced to saucepan tea.

In the early hours of the following morning I had a strange dream of being at a big Buckingham Palace style banquet and lifting the food to my mouth, only to have it turn painfully into barbed wire as I tried to eat it.  I woke up to find that two tiny Persian kittens were fighting on my head.

Audrey and I were out on the doors this morning. We finished our territory and then I took Audrey to her Russian lady.   A quiet night in lies ahead for me and Captain B, I hope.  I am anxiously practising my talk for Thursday.