We have spent today mostly working and sleeping, so this might be a short entry.
My exciting thing of the day has been the trial run of a rather splendid invention which I bought on the marvellous Internet a couple of weeks ago.
It is a pair of heated gloves.
As I have started turning into an old lady my hands have become knobbly and sore, with little sticking-out lumpy bits on the joints, which have meant I have had to shelve any latent ambitions I might have had to become a model for nail varnish.
I am entirely convinced that this is because of the absence of holidays in the Caribbean, and the consequent lack of Vitamin D. I have observed in the past that if I am sitting by a swimming pool in the sunshine drinking champagne I am not remotely troubled by aches and pains of any sort, and therefore the remedy is obvious.
In a cruel twist of fate, however, this cure turns out not to be available on the NHS and therefore I am obliged either to start a campaign in left-wing newspapers and get Jeremy Corbyn to support me, or to sort out a low-budget alternative.
I am not a great admirer of Jeremy Corbyn, I think he lacks ambition. Hence I have come up with the plan of heated gloves.
These are not much like champagne and swimming pools, but warmth undeniably helps, so as an experiment I bought these for three quid from a Chinese online retailer a while ago, and to my surprise they actually arrived after only a couple of weeks.
Tonight is the first chance I have had to try them out, because of the organising involved.
They are flat black pads which loop around my fingers and sit on the backs of my hands underneath a pair of pretty fingerless gloves. There is a wire which runs up my sleeves and out at the neck of my shirt, so as not to become tiresomely entangled in the steering wheel or my flask of tea, and then the whole lot plugs in to a little charging thing stuck in the cigarette lighter.
It looks a bit ridiculous when I take them off, like having the sort of mittens that my mother used to attach to a string and poke down my coat sleeves when I was at primary school.
Despite looking unflatteringly infantile they have turned out to be a rather splendid invention. The little heating pads get hot in seconds, and feel reassuringly warm on my knuckles, and I am promising myself that they are very nearly as good as the sunshine and swimming pool idea. Mark says he will try and organise some batteries that will fit in my pockets so that I can actually wear them for going on walks and things. I am feeling very pleased about the whole thing, how nice to have soothingly warm hands.
Apart from the excitement of new gloves it has been a quiet day, I am afraid we have now gone past the thrilling highlight and have got to the dull bits.
We slept late and had the usual coffee in bed with Number Two Daughter. She is going in just a few weeks now, it is going to be terribly quiet without her. I can hardly remember what’s it was like to have coffee with just us and the dogs in our bed, it is going to be very sad. Unless we win the lottery we won’t see her again for at least two years, and maybe not even then.
It is so exciting to think about all of the things she is going to do, she has got her camper van and is going to have grand adventures all around Canada.
Next summer she is going to go on what she calls a road trip to a place called Vegas, which I think is in America, with her two best friends who are called Nellie and Taylor, she has all of her most daring adventures when they are all together.
When she gets to Canada she is going to pick up a truck for her friend and drive it across Canada to wherever it is she is going to live. It is a magnificent, thrilling world. When I was a child I just assumed that growing up meant becoming either a teacher or a nurse: and here are my daughters sailing boats and skiing and driving trucks and lifting weights and fighting in wars and diving and speaking Chinese. There has never been a better time to be alive.
I have not done anything as thrilling as that today. Before I went to work I put the autumn fruits in muslin to strain so that I can make fruit jellies.
My life is pretty good as well.
