Putting the baby to bed

I drew inspiration from Nigel Slater’s ‘Real Food’ last night, for chicken with a basic store cupboard marinade. I made a sauce with red wine vinegar, Dijon mustard and olive oil, some herbs and pepper, then tossed the chicken about in it and left it for a few hours, before putting it on the barbecue. We had it with saffron rice, sprinklings of salt and lemon, and a nice green salad. We had half the chicken between us, and left the rest for today. Before I ate the chicken tonight, I put the baby to bed, as Babe had to go out to work. Babba is joyful before she goes to sleep at night. Tonight, as on other nights, she listened to her stories (‘Green Sheep’ and ‘Touch and Feel Fluffy Chick’) whilst sitting on my knee, and helped to turn pages. Afterwards, she lay still as I zipped up into her sleeping bag, very dissimilar to the squirming and protesting that she delivers when we tell her to have sleeps in the day. I put her in her cot, and she went to sleep. It was most sparkling and gorgeous moment of the day, indeed of the week.

I finished the chicken by myself at the kitchen table after that, whilst reading Eliot Pearlman’s ‘Seven Types of Ambiguity’. The plot is interesting, although I reckon that Pearlman works a little too hard with his characters dialogue, and in consequence they seem to lie flat and undifferentiated from each other.