Adventure

It has snowed here today.

Half of the Peppers and I ambled around the park with the dogs this morning, hoping that it might stick. It is lovely when this happens as everybody knows that it is a complete justification for a holiday.

I do not know why, but I object with my entire soul at not being able to work because of the Government and the bat flu and the monstrous suspicious machinations of Bill Gates and the Big Pharma and the aliens with their pillars in the desert. However not being able to work because it is snowing is a cause for a small contented feeling of jubilation.

The human mind is a peculiar thing.

We wagged about, doing the thing where you catch snowflakes on your tongue, or rather, jumped about with our tongues sticking out, failing to catch many snowflakes but probably succeeding in looking ridiculous. Then we went home feeling satisfied with the world, and hoping that it would all get very much worse, which it didn’t.

When we got back I went rushing up to my office, where I spent the day finishing the very last of this season’s Advent calendars.

It took all day, but in the end it was done, and I dashed off to catch the post.

This was a massive relief, not least because as you can tell, Advent started a couple of days ago and I am very, very late.

If I had been selling them in a shop I would have had to put Reduced stickers on them and only charge ninety nine pence.

I make Advent calendars every November, and send them to people in the family. It makes writing a diary very difficult for a little while, because I have to deliberately miss out that bit of the day, so as not to spoil the surprise. This is all right now, because the calendars have all gone, and except today’s, arrived and been opened, and so the surprise is sprung.

Not that it is much of a surprise, since I do them every year. This year I have not sent one to Number Two Daughter, which is both a relief, because of not running out of time, and a sadness, because I would have liked her to know that we are thinking about her, which we are, sometimes.

I did not send one because the last one I sent to her in Canada did not arrive until April, because the Canadians are not very good at post.

Our post office, run by Nigel, who is ace and puts pictures of interesting-looking piles of parcels on his Facebook page, is far more enthusiastic. I went there to post the last calendar today, which was Lucy’s. It does not matter about spoiling the surprise for Lucy since she does not read these pages anyway. Also she knows more or less what they look like since when she was here she helped block out some of the basic colours before I painted over them.

It doesn’t matter that Advent started three days ago because she will not go to collect it from the post office until Saturday anyway, because of work.

They take ages and ages, partly because I am the world’s most clumsy person, especially with glue and cutting-out scissors, even with my tongue sticking out. Every year I promise myself that next year I will start them in August.

This year I did start them in August but I was still desperately rushing at the last minute, and some of them might have been parcelled up with the glue still wet and stuck a bit to the wrapping.

I meant to write Merry Christmas on them somewhere as well, but I was in such a rush that I forgot, along with all sorts of other details that I was going to add and then forgot. If only I was better at planning my time they would have had squirrels and affectionate messages and all sorts of extravagant details, but I ran out of time, and the house is utterly trashed, and so they haven’t.

Tomorrow I am going to have to clean the bathroom, and all of the other things that I have been ignoring. I am sorry about this, because I like painting much more than I like dusting, but there will always be next year.

I am planning them already.