I am on the taxi rank.
It is very quiet indeed.
There are half a dozen taxis sitting here, and we are being disturbed only by the occasional passing of gritting lorries. It is jolly cold.
I have just eaten the most magnificent picnic dinner of goose and vegetables with cognac and walnut stuffing, fried up with eggs and squished into my flask. After that I had banana toffee pudding and a mince pie.
It was an absolute feast, and was, of course, one of the benefits of having eaten at home rather than being waited on in some gleaming hotel dining room.
Please do not assume that this means we will always be eating Christmas dinner at home, however. Useful as it is to have left overs, we also had things like washing up, although my conscience compels me to confess that actually Mark did that.
Also I would like to remind readers once again that there is always my favourite sentence in the English language to be considered, which is: “Would Madam like red wine with that?” This sentence is restful music to my ears. When I hear it I know I am somewhere where my spirit can be at home, and the thing is that I like it with my Christmas dinner.
Having said that the goose has been plentiful and lovely, there is still loads left. Also the floor is covered with fragments of happily-crunched-up goose bone, because the dogs have liked it very much as well. Also I have got a large Kilner jar full of fat and shall be making sausage rolls once the excitement is all over and we are safely in the new year. I should have put some rosemary in it to help the flavour along but tiresomely I don’t have any, it will have to be bay.
Events at Ibbetson Towers have been muted today. We slept late, achieved nothing and had a little snooze in the afternoon before finally coming out to work tonight. The children have been almost completely invisible apart from coming down the stairs occasionally to ask how much longer it is going to be before we go flying.
In short, it has been a perfect winter holiday. The children have remained resolutely in their pyjamas and we have drunk a great deal of tea and contemplated our small piece of existence contentedly.
In the end after our little sleep we waddled off out to work to try and earn some cash, which was a hopeful prospect because of it being double time in a taxi tonight since of course it is Boxing Day, but once again the world has ceased to come to Bowness for its drunken extravagances, so instead we sat on the taxi rank drinking tea.
My evening had a pleasing distraction when Elspeth called to tell me that her family were being seasonally tiresome and that she would like to come and drink tea. At this point I stopped drinking tea with Mark on the taxi rank, and buzzed off home to drink tea with Elspeth for an hour, which was very pleasant. I made sympathetic noises about teenage hormones and secretly hoped that Lucy doesn’t get them, she is an untroubled soul for a teenager, we have been very fortunate.
Eventually of course Elspeth went off home with her fortitude renewed for cohabiting with her teenage offspring, and I had to go back out to work, which is where I am now. It is very quiet.
It is going to be a long winter.
I didn’t have a picture today so I have added one of Lucy with her new make-up application that she learned in Manchester.
It was either that or a picture of a jar of goose fat.
