Today has been the beginnings of what is really a frantic panic.
In my quest to have a joyously peaceful Christmas, with yule logs and chestnuts and shining-faced children I have worked myself up into a state of extreme flappy anxiety.
I shouted at Mark for putting too much cling film over something this morning. That is the problem that is finishing off the poor polar bears. You have to be mindful of this stuff. I know all about it, it is on Facebook.
Mindful is a modern word. It is the sort of word that might describe you when you are wearing a corduroy pinafore and not allowing your family to eat sausage sandwiches with tomato sauce.
Mark was very forbearing. He never mentioned a thing when I accidentally tore too much off the roll later on. He didn’t even look smug, which makes me wonder if he noticed, actually.
He has occupied practically the entire day taking the boiler out and making a huge mess.
I do not want to be mindful of that. I would far rather be in the state of mind where I can blissfully ignore my surroundings and think about something else.
I can’t, though. It is a monumental mess.
It is not our wood burning boiler that he has taken out. We use that all of the time and it is important. It is the old gas boiler that was there to run the central heating when we first moved into the house years and years ago.
It has been occupying a disproportionately large amount of space considering that it is utterly without useful function and we have got a very small house.
It has annoyed me for ages. It has been hanging off the wall in the corner of the living room for ever. Some taxi drivers wrote phone numbers on it in indelible ink once, in an emergency, and one of the children added some opinions about which child might be my favourite.
Now that we are trying to create a space of harmony and tranquil beauty in time for Christmas I requested that it be removed so that we could use the resulting space for hanging some of the coats that came out of the now defunct boot cupboard.
It has not been functional for more than ten years, since we installed the wood-burning central heating system, and it has been a very ugly white elephant ever since. We thought about it and could not conceive of any possible use we might one day have for for a twenty year old gas boiler, and so today Mark took it out.
The gas was long gone, but the water was still there.
This was black and squirty, and had to be discharged into buckets.
It was the exact inverse of setting your house on fire, although curiously, every bit as messy.
It has taken him all day. He has been sawing through pipes and swearing.
The thing is that when you have taken a boiler out, you are not left with a beautiful tidy space in which to hang your coats. What is left is an awful lot of black mould, and spider webs, and crumbled plaster, and holes.
One hole, being the vent for the old boiler, went right through the wall, and when Mark filled it in the temperature rose considerably. He is going to replaster it all tomorrow, and then I am going to paint it next week.
He found a tiny sock that had fallen down behind it. It had belonged to one of the children, once, years ago, when their feet were smaller than mine, and made me feel nostalgic for long ago. We do not have any little children any more.
Obviously I know really that this is a Good Thing. Little children leak, squeak and only eat the most horrible gubbins, and even then their eating is a bit intermittent. When Oliver was small he had a special place in a doorway where he used to go to spit out things that he did not like. These used to lurk there as surprises for the unwary barefoot parent and were an important factor in the acquisition of a dog.
All the same, the discovery of the forlorn little sock filled me with warm memories of bedtime stories and excited hugs and toothless grins, and I started looking forward to Christmas. We will not have Number Two Daughter but in a very short time I will see the others, and actually it is a bonus that they are all big enough not to spit things out on the carpets any more.
Not long to go now.
