I am still, still, slowly bashing my way through my shockingly neglected Advent Calendar project.
If I don’t finish them soon it will be too late and they will have to be for next year instead.
I should have finished them today, but it did not happen. Today should have been a tranquil process of getting everything back on to the rails of order, ready for a smooth glide down the last stretch of the annual roller coaster, which is the gentle homeward slope towards Christmas.
I don’t quite know how I have managed to make such a pig’s ear of it. I seem to have been rushing about for weeks and I am still not in a lovely mellow December frame of mind. Instead I am harassed and flappy and not succeeding at anything. Not a mince pie has escaped my oven, not a sprig of holly has returned from my walks, I have still not quite finished all of the repainting required after the Inferno, and the living room is still full of kitchen.
Today has not helped.
It started to go wrong before we had even got out of bed. Ted rang whilst we were having coffee to say that he had been called away urgently and Mark should not come into work.
This is always a mixed blessing. Whilst it is lovely to have Mark at home doing things, it is most tiresome not to be earning anything, especially coming up to Christmas. In any case I was thrown into a fuddle of confusion as my measured, husband-free routine was upended by his mild, but nevertheless un-ignorable presence. Somehow routines do not work properly when Mark is home.
He dug some of the floor up in the conservatory whilst I tried to restore order to the house after a weekend at work. I failed at this, and whilst I was confused, Roger Poopy panicked and did a wee on the carpet.
Worse, when we came to today’s banking excursion, where we hand over our weekend’s takings and the bank promises, untruthfully, to look after them, it turned out that when I had done my sums about bills I had got them wrong. This was by a couple of hundred quid, and obviously not in our favour.
We paid them, of course, but I groaned and growled afterwards, about penury and seasonal hardship, and the unfairness of not being a millionaire.
Perhaps I could be one if Jeremy Corbyn wins the election, he has promised to divide everything up, in a sort of Robin Hood gesture to us poverty-stricken masses.
I was going to carry on down that joke, casting Boris Johnson as the Sheriff, but then thought about Diane Abbott as Maid Marion and lost the heart for it.
In any case I decided in the end to Count My Blessings.
My friend came to visit this afternoon, and told me about her ex partner, who was somebody I actually liked quite a lot. He was of a somewhat rascally turn of mind, and not exactly reliable, but all the same he had been witty and entertaining and I had liked him.
He has contracted a hideous disease which after only a year has left him utterly paralysed in a hospital bed, only able to move his eyeballs.
He is still perfectly alive inside. His mind is working just fine, and he communicates by looking at a computer.
His lungs are being made to breathe by a machine. He can’t swallow and his motionless arms and legs are wracked by cramps. Every now and again he is overwhelmed by panic that he is drowning, which of course he is.
My own chest contracts at the horror of this.
His children are visiting him but unsurprisingly are beginning to exhibit some signs of distress.
He will not get better.
No matter what my December problems are they pale into utter paltry insignificance.
I do not even mind the discovery that the inexplicable bits of odd-coloured unpleasantness in tonight’s loaf of bread are in fact a Remembrance poppy.
This was pinned to the curtain once they went out of fashion on our jackets, and must have fallen into the bread maker.
I do not know how I managed this.
The stalk was still recognisable but the petals had vanished, leaving the loaf of bread a vaguely pinkish colour.
We ate it anyway, and Mark did not seem to notice any difference.
It is far, far better than having to write letters to people using only your eyeballs.
We are so fortunate.
Have some more pictures of the Lake District.
