I have been organising our Christmas.
This is one of the most exciting things that I do all year, actually it is probably the only exciting thing that I do during most years. Not this year, of course, because of our trip to Disneyland, but even taking that into account, Christmas takes some beating.
It isn’t Christmas itself that is so terribly thrilling. Christmas is just eating too much and then yawning all day. The exciting bit is the week before, when dozens of the people I like best assemble in Manchester, go to the Christmas markets, drink far too much, ice skate, eat loads, and then round it all off with a noisily intoxicated trip to the pantomime.
It is especially exciting this year because Number Two Daughter is hoping to make a special trip home from Canada to join us. This will be utterly and completely brilliant, it means our whole family will be all together for the first time in years and years, and I can’t think of anything I would like more.
Anyway, I have been organising this over the last few days, trying to work out who else is coming with us. This always produces a satisfying advance frisson of happiness, and I find myself drifting into a reverie of happy memories of Christmases Past, which is a wonderful thing to do at this time of year. It is the first distant breath of the changing of the seasons. We are going to have to start hauling logs home soon.
The season is not changing yet, although it jolly well felt like it this morning. It was raining the sort of rain that doesn’t really seem to have spaces between the drops, where you don’t want to look up just in case you inadvertently drown.
Of course we went to the farm.
We left Oliver here with Harry, who finished school at lunchtime for the summer, and came belting across as soon as he had been released, much to Oliver’s joy. The pair of them have been curled up in Oliver’s bedroom ever since, oblivious to the rain, hurrah for technology.
The picture at the top is not a rubbish flying contraption but the underneath of the camper van driver’s seat. It is being re-manufactured from useful bits of three different seats, the original camper one, one with a swivel bit, and the driver’s seat from the donor taxi. This last is going to have to be scrubbed before we put it into the camper. The donor taxi used to belong to the kebab house in the village, and was used for deliveries, storing litter, smoking and wiping fat off everybody’s hands and on to the seat. The driver’s seat is entirely revolting, and still has a faint scent of ancient grease even now.
I liked that pun very much, which is why I used it in the title.
The problem was that when Mark had a trial run with all of the necessary bits together this morning, even at its lowest point the seat was so high that my feet would not touch the pedals. Mark took it out and has been cutting things off it and welding bits to it and swearing ever since. I was busy painting the door and so ignored him, and it appears that it is now nearly complete. It might have been actually complete, but it had gone too dark to see any more, and so we had got to go home.
When the seats are in it will be pretty much ready for an MOT, and we will be able to use it.
I can hardly wait, what an adventure that will be.
Maybe my life is more exciting than I thought.
