Intelligent design

We have started on the countdown to Christmas.

It suddenly seems as though everything has caught up with me and there is hardly time to do anything. In another week Lucy will be home for the holidays, followed by Oliver a couple of days later, and then we are all off to Manchester for the pantomime and the beginning of the whole grand Midwinter Party.

You thought it was still ages away, didn’t you? Well, it isn’t.

With this in mind I have been engaged in the manufacture of Christmas presents, whilst we are still child-free.

Since I have been fully occupied, Mark has taken over the running of the house for the last couple of days, in a sort of role-reversal. Usually he is the one endlessly faffing about with time-consuming projects, whilst I cook and tidy up behind him.

It has not been an exact role reversal. In fact we have eaten rather well, in the way of enormous platefuls of eggs and cheese and thick slices of fresh bread laden with garlic butter.

The tidying up needed some attention, though, when I finished this evening and looked around me.

He has even made us some candles. We had burned our very last ones down to smoky stubs, and so today he melted some fresh wax and chucked in all the last of the old ones, for reasons of housewifely economy, and made newly lavender-scented candles.

He had an experimental go at one with a wooden wick, like the really expensive Woodwick ones that we like but can’t afford until some more people come here on their holidays. This was moderately successful, it burns but not as brightly as the shop ones, Mark says that this is because their wicks have a little network of holes to hold the wax. He thinks he will try that next time. It is fine anyway, and the next one will be perfect.

In short, it has been a fully occupied sort of day. Mark did not have to go and do rural broadband today, he is going off to do that in the morning. He has pottered about organising our lives around me whilst I have been busy.

During our coffee break he explained to me his design for the new central heating system. This was one of those times when extreme tact is called for. It is very important to Mark, and he has been thinking about it really carefully.

He thought that he would go through his ideas with me, so that I could be properly helpful and contribute my thoughts and opinions to the plan.

He drew diagrams as he talked. I have attached one so that you can see our new central heating system as well.

If anybody can make any sense of it could you please drop me a line.

He explained it in a lot of detail, including all the problems that he expected to face with the new solar tubes, and pumps that should push water round, or suck it in, I forget which, although it was important. There is a bridge bit for hot water and it will all go up or down without the need for anything electronic.

I have not got the faintest, foggiest idea what any of it was all about.

Even listening as hard as I could I lost the plot after about the first minute and a half, whilst he was explaining how the solar tubes will work, and how they will need a T piece.

After that I was utterly, and completely lost.

This is an awful place to be. I did not like to interrupt to explain my continued ignorance, because clearly the very act of explaining was helping him formulate his thoughts and come up with new ideas. Every now and again he would say something enthusiastic, like: “I know. I think if I fitted an endgame here, to the little inlet zygote, it would fill the dextrous and eliminate the need for a merkin,” and I would nod, enthusiastically and say: “What a good idea.”

I did not wish to break a splendidly productive flow, either of ideas or of hot water, by asking some inane question, like “how will we get the water tank on top of the pipes like that?” in case it spoiled it.

I made the most sensible noises that I could manufacture, and they must have been good, because he did not in the least notice that he might as well have been telling Roger Poopy. He sketched and talked and I nodded sagely and occasionally repeated the thing he had just said in order to sound knowledgeable, and in the end he closed the book and said: “So what do you think, then?”

I had to think carefully to come up with a truthful answer.

“I think you’re very clever,” I said. “It looks just splendid.”