It is done.
Done, done, finished, over and complete.
I have posted the Christmas cards.
After all of the faffing about with ink cartridges running out and the new printer they have probably cost me about £135 per card. The new printer used so many sheets of blank card, helpfully printing out some stupidly pointless document called Ink Cartridge Alignment, that I had to rush out to WH Smith and get some more. It printed these randomly and entirely unpredictably, about six or seven cards apart every time, which was not so bad if I was printing a fresh card, but terribly frustrating if I had already done one side which was then ruined. Nobody wants a page of printer instructions, beautifully illustrated with delicately toned shades of ink, in the middle of their Christmas card.
If you get one of those then I was not concentrating, and you know what has happened.
I do not care any more. I have done it. I have proved myself to be a genuine grown-up. I have sent Christmas cards before the Last Posting Date. I am a Virtuous Human Being.
I did not get the foreign ones out before the Last Posting Date, which I understand had been some time in June, but if you are reading this abroad and are expecting a Christmas card, it will probably reach you in time for next Christmas, by which time the GPO will probably have cleared their backlog. The august Daily Telegraph has been showing harrowing photographs of wire crates loaded with mail, filling several square miles around the postal depots and being eaten and torn up for bedding by the local wildlife. If my Christmas cards are chewed when they reach you, it wasn’t me.
I finished the last one and collapsed in my chair with a sigh of relief. Then I remembered a couple more I had forgotten and did those before collapsing again. The second sigh of relief was not quite as satisfying but I did it anyway.
Anyway, I rushed off and caught the post. I even posted the ones to people in Windermere, it was just too difficult to start trailing around shoving things in letterboxes. I did consider it, as an economy, but since I had already bought the stamps I thought I would just be a hedonist. John the postman can deliver them, probably some time in January.
Anyway, it is still excruciatingly cold.
I posted the next door neighbour’s card through his letterbox, so that was a stamp saved.
In other news, Oliver’s school report has come. It is so glowing you could see by it in a power cut, which made us laugh, because poor Oliver had become so weary by the end of term he had assured us glumly that none of his teachers had even noticed his efforts. The glowing school report was accompanied by a Gold Commendation, I have no idea what you have got to do to achieve one of those but presumably it is not handed out for loafing about in bed and occasionally sloping off to smoke behind the bike sheds, no wonder he is exhausted.
He is beginning to recover from school. He has slept, on and off, for most of the day, and is so thoroughly re-energised that he has resolved to get dressed tomorrow. I do not know what they do to them at school, but it has left him so very tired that he can hardly stop yawning. He is stick-thin, and eating like a plague of blackfly on a nasturtium bed, we will have to go shopping again next week.
It is lovely to have him home.
Pantomime next week.
