Marigold Wine and nostalgic jam pots

The marigold wine is not quite as clear as the carrot & apricot (it should have been decanted; we'll remember with the next bottle) but it tastes wonderful. It seems I made it a sweet wine. I wish I could find my wine-making notes. They are in the previous 'inner' for this notebook case that I bought in Florence seventeen or eighteen years ago, and they were very detailed: what yeast I used, how much sugar added, how long fermented, and so on. The current inner has mostly botanical notes.

my Florentine notebook cover

DivingDaughter came over from Edinburgh for a  couple of Christmassy days and she brought me some posh jam which caused a bout of sweet nostalgia.

It may seem for small pots of jam to cause nostalgia so here's the story. When my dad was very ill with lung cancer and we were still living in Oxfordshire, I would drive up to Poulton-le-Fylde on as many weekends as I could manage in my trusty old car, Diggory. Diggory had a personality and is remembered fondly by DerbyshireDaughter and DivingDaughter. He was still around and chugging along nicely when Toadlet was born. The photo below is of her with Diggory, or Diggory Old Bean, as I used to say when he was being temperatmental, as in: "Come on, Diggory Old Bean!"

Diggory continued chugging along for another five years after this photo was taken. Eventually we had to take him to the car graveyard, not because of engine failure, but because the cost of repairing the rusting chassis was going to be too much. At some point after this photo I tied a piece of string round two bits of the front grille to stop a rattle. It stayed there to the end, as did various bits of Blutak inside stopping more silly rattles.

What connection does this have to my dad's last illness? Well, on my Friday evening drives up north I would stop at a service station somewhere in the middle of the four-hour drive and have a scone with butter and jam and a pot of tea. I never used the whole of a motorway service station pot of jam so I'd bring them away with me and put them in Diggory's glove compartment. I always meant to take them into the house and use them up, and I think that sometimes happened, but they also accumulated in the glove compartment. Somehow the wee pots of jam in the glove compartment became part of Diggory's personality. And after my dad died, it would have seemed wrong, somehow, for there not to be a few small pots of jam in Diggory's glove compartment in memory of my dad.

Hey, Dad.