I can set bread on fire with just a bit of parchment.

Yes. I am just that good.
(The oven helped.)

Cooking is something I've always enjoyed. I hosted my first dinner party at 8 (yes, a real proper one with real, proper food and real, proper people. Well. Real people, anyway). The ten years I was on my own I did all the major holiday meals for our patchwork family, and still do Thanksgiving (step-dad enjoys cooking as well so we split holidays). Probably if I enjoyed massively fast-paced working environments and other people messing about in my workspace it would have been a career path, but as it is it's just something I do whenever I have enough people around (ie more than me) to feed.

Being that step-dad has been away, I took over the cooking duties for the weekend and succeeded more or less without incident until tonight's caramelised chicken with ginger bread (which is amazingly lovely, by the way). You have to cut the bread into thin slices and toast them on a baking pan, which I did. But, in preparation for the impending move, the AGA's been turned off so I had to use the oven, which we rarely do and is somewhat perplexing to operate (probably why we rarely use it, not to mention that the AGA is lovely to cook with). While the bread was toasting, I did my customary puttering around, we took the furry escort out for a smoke and generally went about our business. At one point I thought I noticed a vaguely fiery smell, but told myself, nooooo... Nothing could be on fire. 

Then I pull out a pan of flames. With brilliant reaction skills, I took the pan to the sink, then stopped. I couldn't exactly just put the water on, or the bread would get all soggy but there didn't seem to be any other way of putting it out. La-la, fellow firebug, came over to assist, but the same conclusion was reached. Nothing to do but watch it burn itself out. So we very responsibly stood and watched every bit of parchment paper burn up, leaving the toasted ginger bread slices (which hadn't exactly burnt) with a few errant flames which were easily put out with a saucepan lid. 

Fire bread is totally the new thing. 

We've also decided the village (which we are still convinced has a Hot Fuzz-esque underbelly) is really a television show. The village itself is technically two roads, but really more of one L-shaped road because once you go beyond the L you're not in the village anymore. Population-wise, there were more people in my 9 AM lecture on Renaissance lit the last week before Christmas term. In theory, you should walk down the street and always run into someone you know. 

Not so. This occurred to me around walk 5, which meant I'd been wandering around the village with the dog pretty frequently over the past two days, encountering various people on the street and not once was it the same person. I also managed, this entire weekend, to not encounter a single person I know. And I'm pretty sure it was the same black car doing a loop of the village Saturday afternoon just to create the illusion of traffic. So I thought about it, and realised that all the main figures in the village are only seen 1. when in the pub 2. in the post office and 3. in someone's home (namely ours because we live in the big house party house). Naturally, of course, this makes sense. Why put out the money on the main cast as background when you can just pull in extras to people the streets? You don't. You only bring the main cast in to further the plot, and walking down the street (typically) isn't going to do that. Our contracts weren't renewed because the show's demographic found the occasional influx of "those odd, artsy young people" a little too unsettling for their viewing pleasure, thus we've been ousted from the house to make room for the much more conventional nephew of the lord. This weekend's episode, by the way, featured the parents' trip to London, with a brief cut-to of the fire bread incident just to show we haven't disappeared. 

Five minutes away from Darlington station, and La-la had ratted me out on the fire incident. Karma got her back when she drove past the turn off to the village and we took a 15 minute side-trip down the A19 and back. 

I have to say, it was nice having the parents back. This house is entirely too big for one person and the furry escort, or even two people. La-la and I have barely edged out of the kitchen except to sleep (and for her to watch the football match). But the rest of the evening was spent hearing about their trip, David Almond and various stories, with several interjections of bantering, anecdotes and the Sashi and La-la sideshow. As much as I love my flat (and I do very much so, just not the city it happens to be in), and am more comfortable there on a long-term basis, it's easy to forget how nice it is to have to compete with four or five other people to be heard, keep up with a group of highly intelligent and creative people and the general comfort of belonging to a pack. 

My family is a pretty awesome pack, too, if I do so say.