It was nice to wake up and be at home this morning.
Oliver did not wake up for ages, and when he did we did not see him. This was because for his birthday he had a new game called Red Dead Redemption. It is about cowboys and a zombie massacre. I looked on the website before we bought it. It says that it contains Undead Nightmares, and Demonic Horrors From The Graveyard. These would give me bad dreams, but Oliver seems to be entirely untroubled
You do not give your child games in a box any more, in the way you once used to if you were giving them something like Trivial Pursuits or Monopoly for Christmas.
Actually I have never given any of my children board games, in case they want to play them with me. I loathe playing board games, or cards, or anything of that nature. Every now and again one of them has come back from a friend’s house, full of what a lovely time they have had playing Snakes And Ladders, or Scrabble, or even Snap, and wondering if we might consider…
I am immovable.
Anyway, the nature of games has changed out of all recognition since my youth. Now you give a child a game for Christmas by making a mysterious cyber transaction with your credit card, for which you see no result whatsoever. Nothing arrives through the post. There are no large boxes with battered corners to shove in a cupboard with the jigsaws. Instead your child switches on his computer, or his laptop, or his Playstation, or all of them, in Oliver’s case, and there, in the Cyber Store, is a blue button next to the chosen adventure, which says Download Now.
This is very environmentally friendly but rubbish for filling up spaces in Christmas stockings.
The result is several child-free days and a lot of banging and yelling coming from their bedroom.
We have barely seen him this exeat, because of Red Dead Redemption, apart from during the occasional sausage collection.
We have not minded this, because we are busy now organising our lives for Christmas.
You might have gathered that Mark has not finished building the conservatory.
I have hardly mentioned this at all. I have been a model of sweet acceptance on the subject.
Nevertheless somehow Mark has become guilt-ridden about it, and has offered to paint the living room so that it is fresh and tidy before we put the tree up.
I do not know if I want the living room painted. That is the sort of thing that I usually feel inspired to do in January, as the tree comes down and the grubby spaces behind it are once more exposed to the daylight.
I explained that what I did want, since I couldn’t have a conservatory, was for him to remove his colossal pile of clutter from the living room. If we had got a conservatory he would have been able to put it all in there, but we haven’t and so he would just have to think of something else. Not that I mind about the conservatory, of course, but even Mark must agree that it would have made life rub along better, if only we had a conservatory. I supposed that we would manage, somehow, without a conservatory, but it would not be nearly as easy, and so he had jolly well better get his clutter out of the way.
He moved it.
There were bits of board that had been stored behind the sofa, and a cordless drill plugged into its charger, an enormous chrome stick that is supposedly part of the conservatory, some ingredients of solar panel manufacture, half a roll of stick on vinyl and a box of spanners.
These are not delightful living room ornaments.
They could easily have made the components for a song called the Twelve Days Of Things I Didn’t Want For Christmas.
Things began to look a bit better.
I had another of my occasional Worries about the sofa.
We never sit on this because it smells horrible. It smells horrible because the dogs sit on it, because it is always empty, because nobody else ever sits on it.
I thought today that perhaps one of the reasons that I never sit on it is because it is in the wrong place.
We moved it. It is in the kitchen now.
I stripped the cushion covers off it and chucked everything into the washing machine. We sat on it, experimentally, in the kitchen, and decided that we liked it.
We told the dogs that they were banished to the floor for the rest of their lives. Mark promised that he would give them a haircut this week, which would make them smell better, although once they have had haircuts they do not like being on the floor at all, because it is cold.
We are going to think about this.
In the meantime we have cleared a space for the Christmas tree and created an opportunity to be idle in the kitchen.
Christmas preparations are coming along nicely.
