It is all done.
Everything that should have been dispatched has been dispatched, apart from the things I have forgotten. Everything that should have been washed has been washed. Everything that should have been cooked has been cooked.
Of course this last has been helped along by the small advantage that there is no turkey in this house and hence no vegetables to be peeled, nor gravy to be sieved because it has inadvertently become lumpy. I am not wondering anxiously about defrosting times, nor debating whether or not it is helpful to cut a cross in the bottom of every sprout.
We are going to have our Christmas dinner at the Prince of India, where somebody else will lay the table with festively-folded napkins and crackers. Somebody else will pour the wine, and somebody else will wash up. All we have got to do is sit on the taxi rank this evening until we have earned sufficient cash to pay for it, and at six o’clock on Christmas Day, dinner will materialise magically on the table in front of us.
I am, in short, free.
Obviously I am only free if you do not count going to work, but I do not mind that. It is not like a real job. It is only sitting in a taxi. Even better, I am writing this before I set off, and so once I get to work I will be at liberty to peruse the pages of the august Daily Telegraph and read my book.
I have got loads and loads of books. Number Two Daughter has purchased about a dozen of the ones that I am supposed to read for my course, and they have been plopping through the letterbox and on to the doormat all week. I am very pleased about this. There is no better way of spending a holiday than with a glass of wine and a good book.
Today I have done the last things. We have got milk and eggs and orange juice and smoked trout and all of my favourite sorts of cheese. I have made some more chocolates. These are for us. When I make chocolates to give as presents, we find that it is a couple of days before we can bear the smell of chocolates again. I made dozens and dozens of them a couple of weeks ago, and my hair seemed to feel sticky for days, no matter how many times I washed it.
I have recovered from this now, and it seemed as though coffee and brandy chocolates might be the very thing to round off butter chicken with pilau rice and a good wedge of Peshawari naan bread, so I made some this morning whilst Mark washed the taxis. These had become so filthy that I could not actually see out of the rear window of mine.
This morning I swept and hoovered and emptied the dogs, and Mark did taxi things. Of course it might be some time before petrol stations re-open, and we have got to be at work quite a bit over the next few days, so he has put fuel in them and blown up the tyres and wiped the worst of the sticky fingerprints off the dashboard. We are prepared for whatever the next few days might bring.
We had just finished all of this satisfactory clucking about when the dogs barked at the conservatory door, and Number One Daughter and Number One Son-In-Law appeared.
This was a splendid rounding off to the day, because it gave us the most perfect possible excuse to loaf about on the sofa with the pretend-fire on the television.
I am sure I must have told you about this, but if not then I will tell you now. If I have already told you, you can either skip the next paragraph or just put up with it, it isn’t as if I charge for reading these pages so you can just be patient.
We do not have a fire in the living room. The fire is in the kitchen, where it is properly useful, for things like drying washing and putting dough to rise, or yoghurt to set. One would not want to put mud-encrusted boots to steam in a living room, or hang dripping jackets beside the sofa.
It doesn’t matter where the fire is anyway, because you can’t see it. It is inside the stove.
Hence we put the television on to YouTube where there are hundreds of films of splendidly flickering log fires. They run for about ten hours so you can just put one on the television and gaze at it. They never need a chainsaw, and they do not make dust. It is a very nice way of feeling warm and relaxed. If you have never tried it then I recommend it.
This was what we did this afternoon. Number Two Daughter telephoned, and Number One Son-in-Law put her on to his magical phone where we could all see her and wave, even though she is on the other side of the world.
She said that it is minus twenty eight degrees where she is.
I hope that she has some good thermal underwear.
She also told us that Mrs. Number Two Daughter, who used to work for Nestle, had explained that your favourite Quality Street sweets were likely to be different depending where in the UK you are. I do not know about the others, but the fudge and the caramel finger and the golden penny all indicate that you are from the north west.
We were chastened, because these were all our favourites, except that I do not like the golden penny because it does not have chocolate, and I always feel a bit cheated. Nevertheless, we are obviously a product of our environment in ways that I had never even considered.
We drank tea and ate mince pies and thought what a nice family we have.
And tomorrow it is Christmas.
Happy Christmas.
.
