Quite apart from the fact that I've started engaging in conversation with the television, yesterday morning illustrated to me the dangers of living alone.
The alarm went off at its usual time. I hit sleep rather more times than I should but I was still relatively relaxed about making my 9am meeting with plenty of time to spare. I listened to some doom-mongering about how Europe is on the verge of collapse, enjoyed some quality time with my hair straighteners and decided what to wear for work. I have a pretty standard uniform of black dress/trousers/skirt and a colourful cardigan. For an accountant, this is pretty edgy dressing.
Yesterday, I felt it was a dress day so I grabbed one of my favourites off the hanger, checked it was actually clean (I have a bad habit of putting away dirty clothes without thinking about it) and slipped it over my head. All good so far. The dress has a zipper going all the way down the pick and two zips so you can pull one up from the bottom to create a slit in the back and use the other one to do the dress up at the top.
Incidentally, some of my old colleagues at my last job used to try and see if they could under my dress while they were walking about the stairs behind me without me realising. Good times.
Anyway, the dress went on and the zip went up. Only it didn't go all the way up and snagged on the lining. And it just would not budge. Normally when a zip gets stuck you can jiggle it around sufficiently to come loose but not this time. I tried everything I could think of to try and un-stick it but nothing was working. By this point the zip was sufficiently high (and, er, tight) that I couldn't actually get the dress off.
It was at this point that I started to panic. I was all alone in the flat, miles from any friends or family. I considered throwing a jumper over the top and trying to get to work without any embarrassment but I wasn't sure that I really wanted any of my colleagues poking around in my bra-regions. I started picturing some firemen having to cut me out of this dress. Or that my boyfriend would come home from his work trip to find me contorted and still trapped inside. Melodramatic? Me?
Thankfully, by dint of a Herculean effort and some contortions that wouldn't be out of place in an episode of the X-Files (did anyone else love the Squeeze/Tombs episodes? I used to have them on video and would watch them at least once a week. They still creep me out majorly. That was proper vintage X-Files), I managed to emerge triumphant and free myself from my polyester prison.
(It is perhaps indicative of how badly I deal with solitude that I have been able to write so much about getting stuck in a dress. If my boyfriend had been in the country, he would have had to listen to this story and I probably would have felt less of a need to share it with you all).
It will surprise nobody that after my struggle, the only sensible thing to do seemed to be to sit on my bed for a while and eat a couple of cookies. Lemon and white chocolate chip cookies to be precise. Crisp and buttery, with the bright sharpness of lemon and the smooth richness of white chocolate, they are everything that I want in a biscuit. There's no big chewy American-style cookies here. These are English biscuits of the highest order. Perfect for afternoon tea or when you've just spent half an hour trapped in a dress.
Lemon and white chocolate chip shortbread
Adapted from orange blossom shortbread
Yield: Approx 40 small cookies
Ingredients
- 125g unsalted butter, softened
- 55g sugar plus more for decoration
- 180g plain (all purpose) flour
- 1 lemon, zest plus 1 tbsp of juice
- 100g white chocolate chips
- Preheat the oven to 175oC. Line a baking tray with parchement paper.
- In a bowl, beat the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.
- Add the flour, lemon zest, lemon juice and chocolate chips. Work into a dough with a wooden spoon or your hands making sure that all the flour is incorporated.
- Dust a work surface with some flour and roll out the dough to the desired thickness.
- Cut into shapes and place on the baking tray. Chill in the fridge for 30 minutes. Bake for 15 minutes until golden brown. Allow to cool for 10 minutes before transferring to a wire rack.