We have started to make our lives lovely for Christmas.
I explained to Mark that in a perfect world our house would be so beautiful and shiny that I would not at all want to spend Christmas staying in an hotel.
This is not the case at the moment and so it is going to mean some considerable tidying up and also having a minimal number of kitchens in the house. People are allowed more than one bathroom, this is popular, and indeed I have heard of couples who have one each, or at least two sinks next to one another. Presumably this is so that you are not ever going to be troubled by the sight of your partner’s spat-out toothpaste lurking in horrible blobs around the plughole.
His And Hers kitchens are less common, especially in ancient terraced houses. Especially when one kitchen, in our case His Kitchen, is piled up in a scruffy stack in the living room.
We have not yet moved it, however the Christmas preparations are coming along apace.
Today we took the kitchen apart and cleaned it and repainted the walls and ceiling.
This would have needed doing even if it had not been coated in grimy smoke from the Inferno, because Mark once painted half of the ceiling purple before discovering that I did not want him to do that. He desisted immediately, but we never got round to painting it out, and the ceiling has been half-purple for ages.
I took everything off the dresser and washed it all. It was coated in gritty grime, and smelled of smoke. It is gleaming now, and feels wonderful.
Mark finished repairing the bathroom work surface. You can see this in the picture and you will not be able to tell at all where he has cut a huge chunk out and replaced it. Not only do we not have His And Hers sinks, we have not got any sink at all and we are going to have to clean our teeth over the bath again tonight, because he wants to put a second coat of varnish on it.
We painted the whole kitchen and washed absolutely everything. We took the curtains down and washed them, and we washed the tiles, and we washed all of the cupboards and shelves, and we washed the rack where the pans hang above the cooker in order to get the full benefit of all of the greasy steam that comes from cooking.
This bit is exciting. We threw all of the pans away.
Actually we kept one that I like to use for soap making. Also it had some curry in it.
Apart from that we threw them all away. Then tonight we went to Asda and bought some more.
We did not throw them away because of the greasy steam. I am not that bad a housewife and I have been washing them quite regularly. We threw them away because there was no longer any non-stick coating on them. I have always suspected that this has been coming off, a little bit at a time, in our dinners. The thing is that we are now entering into a new stage of our lives. We no longer have any children in the house, cooking things and scraping indifferently away at the Teflon with tiresome metal cooking spoons. We will be able to cherish and treasure the new pans and they will last us into our old age.
Of course we still have Oliver in the house sometimes but he never cooks anything so that is all right.
We cleaned and cleaned and then we went to Asda and refilled the cupboards. We bought things for eating at Christmas. We have now got a freezer with lots and lots of sausages, and even better, we have realised that we will be passing the best butcher in the known world in a couple of weeks.
This is miles and miles away in Bedale in Yorkshire, and I have never got round to ordering from them online. Today I rang them and explained that we would be passing and asked if they would prepare an order for us to collect.
I ordered some sausages for Christmas. We will be having Wild Boar and Pear sausages and Pheasant and Honey sausages. Also we have ordered some pork pies. We are having Pork and Apple and Pork and Cranberry, and some plain pork ones. This is all part of the current plan of making our lives lovely for Christmas, and if that doesn’t work I don’t know what will.
If you are a vegetarian I am sorry to have upset you, I did not mean to be tasteless. Of course it is a shame about the poor pigs, if only they were tasteless as well.
I spoke to the children to wonder about what we might do on Christmas Day.
Both of them assured me, in response to my tentative queries, that they would be excitedly hanging up their stockings because of course they still believe in Father Christmas.
We are going to have the most colossal overdraft.
Ah well.
