I am beginning to feel very excited with the world.
It is nearly Christmas, and we have been getting ready.
There is getting ready going on even as I write. Mark and Oliver are downstairs dismantling Nerf guns. They have taken these apart to service the motors, and are discussing tactics for Thursday morning’s Nerf War.
For those who don’t already know, this is a spectacular piece of unruly behaviour that occupies all of the morning on the pantomime day. It involves racing up and down the Midland Hotel, shooting one another and generally not being quite as grown up as perhaps we should. I do not race about because I am the referee, so I am in charge. I hide the trophies and make sure that rules are being kept. Not rules like ‘do not run in the corridor’, but exciting rules, like ‘three hits and you’re dead’. It is the best fun, and made us all feel a happy little buzz of excitement when we remembered that it was almost upon us again.
It has been a day of getting things ready to go, and has been the busiest of busy days. To start off with there was all of the washing that was still draped about all over the house after our recent Scottish excursion, steaming gently and getting in the way of absolutely everything. If we are not all very careful it gets sooty and smeared or falls off and gets some dog paw prints, and then the whole process has to start all over again.
It is mostly put away now, apart from our smart clothes. These have been neatly ironed and folded, which self-important took ages, but tomorrow I can pack them in our suitcase, and when we get to Manchester we will have beautiful flat clothes to wear.
We leave for Manchester, the lovely Midland and the pantomime, the day after tomorrow, and there is still an awful lot to be done before we go.
It is not like an ordinary holiday. It is Christmas, and so there are things to be done.
My first thing to do was not about Christmas but was an online meeting with another student about our end-of-term assignment. I have written this, as you know, and have been exchanging self-important bursts of critical analysis with other students. They are better at this than I am, critical analysis not self-importance, which is one of my strong points. I am going to have to try harder. I have got to write a thousand words of critical analysis myself before the New Year and so I will have to get on with it.
It is not the reason why I have not yet packed a thing to take to the Midland. That was an organisation failure, and might have been related to the wine this evening.
Even Oliver has packed. That is to say, he has packed the things that he has got. He has outgrown all of his trousers again, so we are going to have to stop somewhere on the way to Manchester and purchase some more.
I have managed to get the suitcase down out of the loft, which is a start.
I have even dusted it.
After that it was all Christmas things. I have got lists all over the place, which say things like Tel Rest. re Thurs, and which take almost as long to decipher as to do. I have finally finished our Christmas card, and this evening the children printed them all out and stuck glitter to them, also to my desk and the carpet and the dogs. They have not quite finished yet, but they are almost there, and we will be able to post some of them tomorrow.
Mark and I made Christmas chocolates. We have not finished yet either, but we had to stop because of it being one o’clock in the morning.
It is nearly here. We are covered in chocolate and glitter, and the day after tomorrow we will be gone.
It is very exciting indeed.
