A LIFE OF PIE

The autumn daylight fades away, sliding down the sky like gravy from a knife.  The sky is pink and blue where the sun is setting.  The gentle whisper of fast traffic from the main road two hundred yards away is a euphonious hum to my ears.  I sit, motionless, save for my clumsy fingers moving across a keyboard that is far too small, on a garden chair outside the front of my house.  There is late birdsong from the frenetic blackbird and the busy robin.  The swifts and the swallows have gone thousands of miles to catch the sun, and there are only the winter birds left.  The garden is already a mess from fallen leaves and twigs.  It is the same every year.  I am ageing, and clearing up in the autumn is no longer pleasurable, or easy.  The lights go on in the living rooms around the street.  The neighbours must be thinking ‘What is he doing, sitting outside, typing on a computer, even as darkness engulfs him?’  The answer is that I much prefer to be outdoors to the stygian gloom of the house. It is not cold in the open air, it is not unpleasant, and as long as I can see the keys, I will remain out here, looking out over the street where I have lived these twenty-nine years.  The waste baskets line the kerb, waiting for the recycling men tomorrow morning, and the food waste bin sits alongside them.  This is a particularly disgusting piece of equipment, as, when the lid is opened to secure the bag inside, a swarm of tiny flies exits in the direction of one’s face.  In the bag is some old diseased bread, two corn on the cob kernels, and some flour from my earlier attempts at making a pie.  I used too much in making the pastry and the surplus fell in the sink, so was no longer of any use. I made the pie, but it was not a success.  I copied the recipe from the internet onto an index card.  I wrote down that to make the pastry one needed one and three quarter cups of plain flour and twelve tablespoons of butter.  I didn’t recognise the viscous yellow liquid that was supposed to be the dough.  I couldn’t roll it out – it stuck viciously to the rolling pin, so I had to squeeze it into the pie dish with my bare hands.  I scooped in the meat filling, and went back to look at the recipe again.  It suddenly dawned on me that I should have written 1 – 2 tablespoons of butter, not 12.  I made the lid of the pie using the latter recipe and it rolled out perfectly.  When I took the pie out of the oven, the lid was perfect – crusty and russet-brown, but the rest looked like it had been made from crushed daffodils.  It tasted like it had been made from crushed daffodils, too. Now, as I sit in near darkness, I am faced with the reality that I shall have to have margarine on my toast and marmalade at breakfast tomorrow, because I have used up all the butter.  I have one more task to fulfil tonight – to put nine-tenths of a yellow meat pie into the fly-blown waste food bin.