Dear everybody,
It is one o’clock in the morning and I am all partied out.
It is gorgeous and lovely and we are in the nicest place in the whole world. We are full of food and drink and happiness and this is the most beautiful hotel ever.
All of the exhausted efforts of the last few days have been worth it. It has been the loveliest party.
I am not going to write much more because of being so sleepy that my eyes have become gritty. Oliver is asleep across the room and Mark has just climbed into bed next to me. This is not as personal an interruption as you might think because the bed is so enormous that it would not fit into the bedroom in our house. Mark is no closer to me than he would be if he decided at home to go and sleep in the bath.
As I wrote those very words he has just fidgeted his way across the bed. He thinks that we do not need the other half of it. I am not sure that I agree. It might be interesting to have some stretching-out space.
It has been the nicest party.
The hotel is called the Swinton Estate, and for those of you who do not know it, it is where the detective got married in the book Lethal White by Robert Galbraith. It is an ace hotel in every way. The bedroom would comfortably encompass our entire house, and it is beautiful and tasteful and lovely. I know what tasteful looks like even though I am incapable of achieving it, and I know that muted red-browns and polished walnut and comfortably stuffed armchairs and crisp white sheets are good taste.
There is a mistletoe wreath on the door.
It is lovely.
The whole party is a present from my parents, which is jolly kind of them. I think if I had been married for sixty years I would probably slope off somewhere peaceful. It is rather splendid that they have asked us all to join in.
It is especially nice that the hotel is managed by an old school friend of Number One Daughter. He joined us for dinner and told stories to make us all laugh, and then when we had the shoes-off giggly sort of party afterwards, appropriated some half-drunk wine left over from the carol singers, so we drank that as well.
It was a gorgeous dinner, and Number One Daughter made an ace cake.
I am not going to write any more. I am going to have a holiday for the last two hundred words.
Mark is snoring now.
Have a picture of our bedroom.
I would like to live here.
