I took the picture on my run this morning.
I tried so hard that for the rest of the day my legs hurt so much that I could barely limp upstairs. The impression that I have always had of super-fit people bouncing everywhere like rubber balls has turned out to be completely rubbish. I hardly jogged at any kind of speed at all and it has left me with a temporary but agonising disability. If ever I get to the exciting stage of trapezes and running marathons I will probably need a wheelchair to organise the rest of my daily affairs.
Once I had got myself into this state, I had to find something sedentary to do for the rest of the day. Fortunately I have been in the early stages of organising our Christmas pantomime party, which meant that I could sit contemplatively in front of the computer for an unseasonably festive hour with no guilt whatsoever.
Hurrah!
It was the nicest thing to be doing. I looked on Booking .com for hotel rooms, which turned out to be brilliantly cheap, but this might have been because I just booked ordinary rooms and not our usual Luxury Superior Christmas Extravagance Overdraft Broken Credit Card sort. There is time to change if our finances improve.
Once I had done that I rang the theatre. This took some doing because they have hidden their phone number from their website to try and make you book online. I do not trust online for anything that important, so I found their number on an email from last year and rang them up to be pedantic in person. You can’t tell on an email whether or not you are going to get exactly the seats that you want, or whether some other kind of rubbish is going to be in place.
Last year they suggested that they put a box of Theatrical Snacks on every seat, for the bargain price of an extra tenner. I considered this carefully, but once I discovered that they were not including champagne and chocolate, and only had a range of crisps I lost interest, and we had ordinary diet seats. This was fine because as you know we had just eaten a massive Chinese buffet, except me. I was too excited to eat very much at all, and in consequence was very intoxicated indeed by about six o’clock in the evening.
After that I contacted everybody who usually comes to the pantomime on the Facebook messaging service. I explained carefully what I had booked, and hoped that it would be all right with everybody. You can do this with a group booking because I have got ages in which I can change it as much as I like, so if anybody doesn’t want to come it won’t matter apart from that I will be sad not to see them.
I called the message group “Hurrah!” which turned out to be a cheerful thing to do. This was because every time somebody wrote a message to me it started off by saying it, which gave me a splendidly celebratory feeling, as if everybody was feeling happy.
It did not take long before the whole message group chat degenerated into reminiscences of rascally behaviour from last year, partly due to my hungry intoxication. This was lovely, but which made me want to hang about laughing at the computer instead of getting on with my day. I resolutely turned it all off and went to make a curry for Mark’s dinners at work.
I hope it is all right. I put a lot of spinach in it because of vitamins and minerals, and it has gone very green. It is supposed to be a korma, but it is completely the wrong colour, so I shall have to pretend that it is something else, and not just a korma modified to use up leftovers from the back of the fridge.
He stirred it a bit when he came home later, but didn’t seem to notice that it was an unusual colour, so I will avoid mentioning it and just put it in his flask. When he does notice he will probably be miles away in Preston anyway, so it won’t matter.
Christmas is coming.
