Perfect

I am not going to write much because I am in an hotel in bed in my dressing gown and I am entirely intoxicated.

I am gloriously, ecstatically happy. We are in York because we have got Lucy’s carol concert in the morning and could not be bothered to work tonight and then get up early in the morning and drive. We do that every year and it makes us irritated and bad tempered with one another.

This year we dressed in our best winter coats, warm wool lined with silk. We dumped the dogs on Mark’s patient sister and dashed off.

We arrived in York in the middle of the afternoon. The hotel was not terribly expensive because of the tight budget, and at first we thought it would be awful, but actually the room is warm and comfortable and really very pretty, and so to our surprise we are quite all right.

We abandoned everything and went off to walk round York, which was absolutely brilliant.

We found the Christmas market in the town square. The narrow cobbled streets all around it were lit with countless little lights in the fast-gathering dusk, and thronged with people wrapped up against the evening chill. There was a fairground with an organ, and a helter-skelter, and the smell of roasting pork and mulled wine hung over everywhere like a magic spell. We were utterly entranced.

We wandered along oak-timbered alleys lit with fairy lights and bought beakers of mulled wine from a man ladling it out of a huge pan at the side of the kerb.

This might have been a mistake because of not having eaten anything since breakfast, actually it made us feel very light headed.

I need to warn you that it is not a sensible idea to be drunk in an exciting new place with money in your wallet.

Mark bought me the most beautiful creamy coloured hat and some sheepskin gloves from a bright little stall run by a Peruvian lady. It is made of soft fur, and I have never worn anything quite as exotically lovely. The hat is gorgeously warm and made me feel the way a Russian princess might have felt if they had been looked after by the Disney studios rather than by a mob of revolutionary proletariat.

We gazed and admired and bought chocolate and cheeses and some irresistible Christmas presents for people, and finished up sitting at a table in the window of a candle-lit restaurant, holding hands and smiling at one another dreamily.

We ate gorgeous creamy mushroom risotto and drank more, and staggered happily back through the crowded streets to find our hotel, which is on the bank of the river, was still pretty much where we thought we had left it.

It is here, it is really starting to be Christmas.

Life is perfectly perfect.

I am sorry not to write more but I am going to go to bed.

Perfectly perfect.