Done and done

It is done, done, done and done.

We are ready for Christmas.

It is almost three in the morning, but it is done.

I need to add a note of caution here.

For those of you who get the Christmas presents from me with the dried oranges, I have had an orange-drying emergency and the dried oranges are not.

They dried over the wood stove all day and night, which was clearly not long enough, because the bloody things were not dry. In the end, because I needed them urgently I put them in the oven. Then they stayed not dry on one side and burned on the other.

I threw most of them away. If you have got the dried orange present then your curled up blackened soggy effort is one of the better ones. Under no circumstances eat it, it will almost certainly go mouldy, possibly even before you open your Christmas presents, and I am sorry if it has left black marks on everything.  Extract the orange if it is looking dodgy and put it directly into the compost bucket.

This is not the sort of thing that was depicted in the online newspaper paean of praise for making your own Christmas presents. Not a single corduroy-clad creative young mum seemed to be frantically trying to extinguish flaming orange slices and then trying to scrape sticky black bits off the bottom of the tin into the dustbin..

Take this as a cautionary tale. You cannot trust newspapers, not even if they share your political biases. They present stuff the way it suits them and don’t give a fig for the idiots who believe them. You cannot rely on their veracity.

Kindly spare me your left-wing self-righteousness. The Guardian is just as bad as the Telegraph, and the Scots are the worst of all. Let us not forget the fraudulent fudge recipe disaster.

As you might have guessed, I have had a frantically busy day, and am now drunk. I am so drunk that even when writing the last sentence, when I checked it over it read: I am not drunk. This is clearly an untruth, perhaps I ought to consider a career in journalism.

The thing was that today was the very last day in which we could make Christmas things happen before we are swept into the whirlwind of events and parties and sociability and alcohol consumption: and we did. We have glued and stuck and wrapped and packed and squinted at addresses until we are exhausted. Towards the end we were so exhausted that we helped the whole process along with some wine, and then some more, and before we knew it we were halfway down the box and did not give a fig for tidy sellotape joins any more

It has taken the whole day, but we are done. That is to say, we are mostly done. It is three in the morning, and as I write Mark is downstairs dismantling the sofa, and Oliver is upstairs talking to American paedophiles on the computer. They have to be American ones because all the English ones went to bed long ago. I have told him that he is not to send any naked photographs of himself for less than ten thousand pounds cash up front.

Tomorrow we can pack and tidy up and leave.

I am looking forward to it very much. It will be brilliant to be at a party, to be in entertaining company, and not to be getting ready for Christmas any more.

I am going to go to bed now in order that we do not oversleep so badly that we are late.

It is all done.

Hurrah.