It’s Marmalade Day again…
Marmalade Day II
Mr Fox pottered around the kitchen, paws treading softly on the warm flagstones. Early morning, his favourite time. The chickens were fed, the dogs waiting patiently on their sofa for their breakfast; the coffee drip- drip- dripping through the filter ‘peace comes dripping slow, dripping from the veil of the morning’ misquoted Foxy, under his breath. The cats had already returned, dark and silky, to their basket on the clothes dryer, satiated.
Mr Fox looked at the rows of marmalade jars on the counter. Each one freshly filled to the brim, sealed and lidded and cleaned down and labelled: “The Cub’s Marmalade, made at Foxe’s Retreat”. He smiled his foxy smile, and pondered… he couldn’t remove one, they had surely been counted. He certainly couldn’t uncap one, dip his long tongue in, swirl it around in a haze of citrussy sugary wonderment, and re-seal it… Mrs Fox would know. And there would be consequences.
The thought that troubled Mr Fox so much was that there had not been enough Quality Control Checks. The Five Stage Marmalade Analysis had not, to his knowledge, been completed. Granted he had been in his shed, tinkering with an egg delivery system (the problem of the eggs cooking from the heat of atmospheric re-entry was just one small part of the whole rail-gun-chicken-egg conundrum) when the marmalade was being made, but he was pretty sure that further testing was required.
Then, like one of those fake-old-filament lightbulbs occasionally seen in Hipster pubs before The Lockdown, a dim glow crept through Mr Fox’s synapses and arrived at his nose – The Ramekin in the Fridge!
The refrigerator door opened, a foxy snout snuffled in, sniffing and whiffling and there, right on the shelf, was The Ramekin… full to the brim with marmalade from the last batch. Mrs Fox’s words played back in his brain ‘there’s always a ramekin of marmalade left, no one knows how, or why…’
Mr Fox knew why. Quality Control.
The toaster beeped, delivering the crisp hot slice of Marmalade Testing Platform to Mr Fox’s quivering paw. A smattering of butter, a generous dollop of orange marmalade, and…
Test One: Unguent Factor.
Result: Oh! Definitely unguent. Hugh Fearnly-Whittingstall would be overjoyed. Pass.
Test Two: Paddington Index.
Result: It sticks to the bread correctly, even when upside-down inside a hat. Pass.
Mr Fox chewed contentedly… remembered that there were three other tests, and popped another slice of bread in the toaster.
Test Three: Clarty or Clarity.
Result: Not so sweet as to be ‘clarty’, as the weasels up north would say; and not bitter at all. Pass.
Test Four: Peel Lump Ratio.
Result: The peel is fine, and beautifully consistent. Top marks! Pass.
Test Five: If The Marmalade Were A Michelin Star Restaurant How Many Starts Would It Have?
Result: Mr Fox had never, to the best of his knowledge, been to anything above a one star. He wasn’t sure how many stars it went up to, but he reckoned five. So. Five. Pass.
Mrs Fox whirled into the kitchen, fresh faced from the sunny autumnal yard, just as Mr Fox was putting the buttery knife into the dishwasher. The half empty ramekin was already settled back into the fridge.
‘Coffee, Mrs Fox?’ He queried with a smile.
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