Ridiculously early by Orthodox standards (April 8; earliest it can be is April 4), and still quite early by Western standards. So the supermarket I still call my favourite, though that may change once they’ve finished refurbishing my usual instance of it with, among other abominations, a “cook-and-choose island” right where you come in, where you can buy what is basically a meal kit for two adults and two children; useless, not only because I prefer to make my own choices, but also because I have too many children to fit their marketing concept. And anyway, they’re teenagers, so they Grow. And Eat. Ah well.

… what was I saying? Oh yes, the supermarket has chocolate Easter eggs on the shelves. In January. One of the teenagers tells me that another shop already had some last week. Not that I object to chocolate Easter eggs; on the contrary, I’d probably buy and eat some now if it wasn’t for the fact that I, you know, celebrate Easter.

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I intended to make a Ginger Cake of Extraordinary Sharpness, but it turned out as a pleasant ordinary ginger cake, even though I used eight times as much powdered ginger as it said in the recipe, as well as a whole (albeit small) jar of very finely chopped stem ginger that wasn’t in the recipe. Next time I’ll use twelve times as much, probably three ounces, and chop my own stem ginger, coarsely.

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Years ago, we discovered Bolletje Eindeloos cinnamon biscuits. Thin hard biscuits sprinkled with cinnamon sugar, nice enough to be more-ish, plain enough for fast days, handy to take to work or school because they come in three separate compartments of five biscuits each to a pack.

We all liked them a lot. I didn’t buy many, or often— I could get some whenever I liked, anyway.

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16 bananas, 5 kiwifruit, 5 mangoes, 32 satsumas, 1 orange, 14 apples and 2 persimmons (not counting the persimmon that was being eaten as we took the picture).

Estimated time until so much is eaten that we’ll have to buy more: 4 days. Number of people in the household: 5 (one of whom is absent until Saturday night).

The mangoes, the bananas and the persimmons are very ripe. The rest is just normally ripe. I intend to make banana muffins and possibly mango sherbet ice.

Another trip into the West, not for research this time but, on the pretext of buying tea in Haarlem, to solve my POV and plot problems on the train. A trip Away From it All to get some uninterrupted writing and thinking time, not really alone but at least without people who want something of me.

The POV problem proved easy —a matter of moving one paragraph from the second scene to the first and tweaking a word or two—, the plot problem is still intractable, but the space opera romp I started a few days ago when stalled, because that was something I could do, acquired 71 words, all moving the story forward. One darling I’ll never kill, from an earlier scene: “engineer-scaring gorgeous”.

ETA, in the Skating Cafe: my plot problem has just solved itself. All it needed was for me to delete six words and move a speech tag to the middle of an utterance.

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