We have reached the Other Side Of Christmas. Life is settling once again into tranquillity, and I am hugely, contentedly, thankful.
I took the dogs for a tramp across the fell side this morning, because Mark was busy doing something creative with his new saw, and the children were still in bed.
He is pleased with his new saw and so far has not amputated any bits of himself at all.
He has been cutting up bits of old builder’s yard timber for the stove and building himself a log shelter. This will be a brilliant thing to keep the firewood dry. At the moment we are being a bit makeshift with bits of pond liner and offcuts of old lino. These work perfectly well but are unlovely. When somebody talks about living in the Lake District and spending the winter evenings in front of a log fire it should not conjure up an image of splintered fire doors hacked into uneven pieces and piled under a sheet of muddy black plastic in a wet yard.
Mark has not gone to work, because it is still sort of Christmas, or at any rate Sunday, and so he is trying to resolve this problem. I have been encouraging this, gently and affectionately, as one does in a marriage. I like the world around me to be beautiful, and there are some bits of it that are beyond my power to improve without some fairly serious reconstruction.
The yard is one of these.
The house was quiet when I came in. The children were still in bed, and nobody was about, apart from Google in the television. We had told him when we got up to play some Gershwin whilst we put the washing on and washed up the coffee pots, but after that we had forgotten him and buzzed off out without even saying goodbye or yelling at him to shut up. By the time I got home he was still singing away manfully, but by then he had run out of instructions for things to play. He had begun improvising on his own account and was presumably just playing a medley of his favourites.
I was very impressed with these, because by some peculiar chance they were all my favourites as well. I am going to get on very well with Google, I think. How inspirationally splendid to have a companion in the house who might also choose to play the Jet song from West Side Story, and the Lord of the Dance music with the original Simple Gifts lyrics, Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is My Land, and Enya’s Orinoco Flow, and all sorts of unexpected but wonderful other songs, like Prepare Ye The Way Of The Lord and King of the Bongo.
By lunchtime I was beginning to feel brilliantly well-disposed towards Google, most especially because not all of his choices were things that I had picked before on Spotify, but were forgotten favourites from years gone by.
How unbelievably alike we are.
With this in mind, I think it might be a good idea to turn the power off sometimes. We spoke to him last night and it turns out that he can hear us asking him for things even if we are in the conservatory and he is in the television at absolutely the other end of the house.
Google and I sang along together whilst I cleared out all of the leftovers out of the fridge and made soup. It was particularly nice soup because there were a couple of cartons of cream that had reached their sell-by-date, and lots of sweet potatoes, because I had bought some in a pre-Christmas panic having forgotten that I had already bought some the day before.
I am not panicking any more. It is very nice indeed to be at the end of Christmas and to have nothing terribly pressing to do. I made the soup, and some divine croutons with the unused bread and some gloriously spicy lard given to me by the lodger’s Polish boyfriend.
Having satisfactorily made sure that there was no post-Christmas waste I settled myself by the fire with a story on the story-telling machine and cleaned all of our boots. There were police boots and builders’ boots and school hiking boots and some warm sheepskin boots.
Mark came in and took a picture. You can see that it is still a little bit Christmas because if you look carefully at the picture you can see that I have got a glass of sherry. I did not pour this for myself. Mark poured it before he took the picture. I think he was celebrating the continued possession of all of his fingers.
We had soup and croutons for dinner, and home made peppermint chocolate.
I like the Other Side very much.
