Mumbai

There was an interview on the Today Show this morning with a Briton who'd been rescued from one of the besieged hotels. This one, oddly, moved me.

I heard the same guy yesterday, saying that he was in his room with the bed up against the door, barricaded in. Today he described how he got out, and then he said he'd eaten in the restaurant the night it started, and then he stopped, and apologised, and tried to go on, and couldn't, and he said "the waitress -" several times. Then "she was one of the first to be shot."

Then he cried.

There was more to the interview. He was going home. He had meetings in Delhi, but he was going home to see his children. And his wife.

"Thanks," said the interviewer, in the studio in England, beginning to end the interview.

"No, thank you, Jim," said the businessman. "It's so good - so good to hear a familiar voice."

Sleep over

Linnea spent a chunk of this afternoon finding and packing her gear for a sleepover. At least she was packed - "In this bag which I don't like but I have to use because it's the best one we have," she said sadly - and I helped her on with her shoes and socks and coat. I gave her a big hug and a kiss.

She wiped the kiss off. "I don't want a kiss tonight."

Right.

"Will you miss me?"
"Yes," I said, "I will miss you a lot. I will miss you all the time you're gone. Will you miss me?"
"Freya won't miss me," she said.
"No, Freya will be WITH you."
"And I won't miss Freya."

Right.

"YOU can have a kiss." She kissed me. "And you can give me a goodbye hug, but no kiss."

So that's what we did.

Mumbai

I also heard an interview with a woman who was waiting for her brother outside the hotel.

"He is in there, I don't know where he is, I am just waiting."

The BBC interviewer said "And is he - does he work at the hotel?"

"No," she said, somewhat flatly. "He is a [management or higher position, I forget]."

The interviewer had the gall to sound surprised.

A Very Special Visitor

We are having guests to dinner tomorrow and in a bizarre quirk of fate they are the people who run our co-op market where we buy all our food.

We will have to buy some of the meat elsewhere but obviously I'd like everything else to be from the market. Which deals in local, organic, fair-trade, seasonal etc. Unpackaged dry goods, bring your own container. And we haven't planned ver well for this, either.

So here's what we've come up with so far.

To start, bacon and tinned pineapple in juice, probably baked together with brown sugar (Muscovado) and then put on warm plates. If things get hectic, we'll skip the starter, because they tend to confuse Rob anyway. They complicate timings.

Main course: some kind of meat (we'll go to the Proper Butcher tomorrow unless I find co-op or Waitrose vouchers; they both do organic certified meat) and potatoes (probably mashed with the nice mayonnaise, and roasted in the meat fat). Carrots and parsnips mashed together. Celeriac and squash, possibly. Peas. The sauce depends on what kind of meat we get - apple sauce? gravy, anyway. Bread sauce for most of us if it's a bird. And various things might come with stuffing, which C will have to just not eat.

Dessert: that's the hardest part, because we have one egg intolerant who doesn't like chocolate, one wheat intolerant, three dairy intolerant, and a soy intolerant, all of whom can tolerate small amounts of whatever it is but not much. So here goes nothing. I'm soaking raisins, sultanas, and currants, and little bits of dried apple, in hot water and mixed spice tonight. Tomorrow they should be all soft and squooshy. We'll spoon them into half-peaches (bottled) in ramekins, and bake them until all hot. Then we'll pour oat-based cream-substitute around them OR if we're VERY organised vegan soy-free custard-substitute. If I'm very clever the cream will go under the peaches properly and we'll get yellow ramekin, white cream, orange peach, dark dried-and-soaked fruit. We'll have hot apple-and-cinnamon to drink with it.

Then tea, coffee, crystallised ginger, and nuts.

They've had the Pat Kight curry several times already because it travels so well in the trike (in the slow-cooker wrapped in a towel) so we take it to market and they eat while they're working.

(In other news, I baked two loaves of plain white bread today, using the kids' step as a counter, because I was so depressed by the state of the kitchen I had to cook. They came out ok).