When I went on Facebook this morning I discovered that they had kindly posted my diary entry from this time last year to my page, which of course I read with interest. I do not keep copies of this, on the occasions when I have needed to look back I have been obliged to ask my father.
I was amused to discover that in fact many events described on this day last year turned out to be duplicated on this day this year. Several events were practically interchangeable, how nice to have become a creature of such predictable seasonal rituals.
I have been posting foreign Christmas cards and ironing school uniforms and making Mark’s favourite coffee-and-cream chocolates.
In the end Mark came and helped with the chocolates, because there were a lot of them, and I had made an unpleasantly sticky mess, and am in any case hopelessly clumsy at fiddly jobs. He was supposed to be going to the farm, but kindly said that he would go when he had got the things done that I needed him to do, and then of course there were so many of these that he never got there at all. I was grateful for this, because much as I need the camper van in a state of pristine repair, today I have been very busy.
We are off to Manchester on Sunday. This is the most exciting thing to happen in the whole of the year, and I am looking forward to it enormously. However of course going to Manchester involves a great deal of pre-departure organisation, some of which is necessary, like packing our clothes and wrapping everybody’s Christmas present, and some of which is not exactly necessary but highly desirable, like dusting and hoovering, in order that we return to a lovely pristine house in time for Christmas.
It is this organisation which has occupied me today.
There is such a very lot to do.
The children have brought home sacks and sacks of washing and mending, school seems to have stopped doing laundry about a week before the end of term by the look of their luggage, and there are towels and quilt covers and sports kit and pullovers and dressing gowns and it all had to be washed: and a lot of it has got to be ironed. So far today I have ironed sixteen shirts, four pairs of trousers, four skirts, some handkerchiefs, and lots and lots more.
Once ironed it has got to be taken up to the loft to be re-packed. I have run up the stairs several times today with armfuls of clean things, and on at least two of those occasions have come down with newly-discovered unwashed things to add to the pile. On top of that we have been wearing our own smart-middle-class-aspirant clothes during our recent orgy of festive concerting, and all of these needed to be washed and recycled into the suitcases to go to Manchester on Sunday.
In consequence of this I have become discouraged with washing. It is everywhere, dangling irritatingly all over the house like the foliage in the Jungle Book, damp and limp and uninspiring. The fire is lit, and the dehumidifier is whirring irritatingly, and I am longing for sunshine and a brisk breeze, even for a few hours.
I like laundry when it is done, so by tomorrow everything will be restored to tranquillity and happiness again. There is nothing nicer than the smell of cleanly washed clothes, even ones dried over a wood smoky fire rather than in a garden. It is nice to take things upstairs and lay them carefully in their places in the trunks, crisp and lavender-scented and with a tiny homely echo of wood smoke.
I have finished making our Christmas chocolates, and there are meringues slowly drying out in the oven, because Oliver wants Eton Mess for Christmas pudding. He likes this when they have it at school, and is amused about the boys who aspire to go on to a school which is called after a pudding.
The children helped a bit, and when we had all finally given up we had a noisy sort of dinner of sausages and cheese and crackers and red wine, which culminated in the children and Mark playing a riotous and untalented game of charades whilst I wrote Christmas cards.
In the end it was bedtime. I am sitting at my desk writing to you and listening to the cheerful family sounds of people getting ready for bed in the house around me.
It is time I joined them.
I shall empathise entirely with Widow Twankey in the pantomime.
