By the light of the silvery moon

It’s that time of year again; the time where my evenings are chaotic. If truth be told it’s not often everything in my life goes according to plan, but when we’re back into dark evenings my ability to time everything properly goes belly-up. You see I like to aim to have our evening meal ready at near-as-dammit 8pm – a civilised time when we can relax afterwards and not feel that there’s other things we ought to be doing. I can’t cope with a meal at, say, 6 o’clock, because it’ll be finished by 6.30 and there’s no way I could sit and do bugger-all for four hours till bedtime. So I’d be up doing chores afterwards, working up an appetite and then need something else to eat, and I’d very soon turn into a blimp. It seems that our mealtime’s out of kilter with the rest of the country, but when people go out to a restaurant for dinner, they don’t turn up at 6pm do they? No, they turn up at – ooh, about 8pm. So it seems clear that later mealtimes are the grownup thing. But I digress …

I tend to start thinking about preparing our dinner at dusk, when it gets too dimpsy to work outside any more and the gnats start biting. In the height of summer that might be about 9.30 (causing complaints from the clientele) but when the clocks change, and it gets dark early, I lose the ability to gauge when to start cooking and overcompensate. Tonight I knew it was too early to start when we were busy stuffing banananas in the garage by the light of a 5-watt (at most) bulb, then cleaning screens by moonlight. (It’s cold out tonight, by the way. We might even have the first frost of the season, which is well overdue.) So I ignored my instincts and stuck some banananas on eBay and sorted out one or two problems on another site, and did the ironing, and put today's banananas in their bags and ... oh bugger! Have you seen what the time is?