I am afraid the Gods have noticed us again.
They have been rather quiet and withdrawn over the past few months, which probably they have occupied encouraging Liz Truss to challenge Boris Johnson, suggesting amusing times to have postal strikes, and possibly hanging about football pitches waiting for a good moment to poke Harry Kane in the ribs for a surprise.
Anyway they have got bored with these activities now and they are back at our house.
I can tell they are at our house because so many terribly amusing things are happening.
Amusing if you are the Gods, I mean.
Today I have been doing my Christmas cards, and I think the Gods were watching.
You probably know that these are a massive effort involving paint, computer inexpertise, and quite a bit of alcohol. Anyway, at long last the design has been finished, the blank card purchased, and I was just waiting for the latest purchase of printer ink, which arrived this morning. I was glad about this, because it is pretty much the last day we have got before the Royal Mail stops working in perpetuity. We have run out of time. We are going to Scotland tomorrow.
I was very excited about the ink, and went rushing up to the office to make a start.
The printer would not work.
It never works really, it is the most rubbish printer on the planet. It switches itself off and refuses to do things, makes little dinging noises and sprays ink all over the place. It did all of those things this morning.
I was very patient with it. It is hard to do Christmas cards anyway, you have got to work out which way to put the card back through the printer so it prints pictures on the right sides, none of them upside down, so that the card opens properly, the way cards are supposed to. This all involves a level of non-verbal reasoning that is completely beyond me, and I usually get Mark to do that bit.
He was at the farm today, so I was on my own.
I got it right pretty much by pure chance, if you scowl and stick your tongue out and think really hard whilst trying half a dozen alternatives, you get there in the end, like a multiple choice exam that lets you go back again and again to try the other answers.
I printed six, and then the printer started to make a horrid noise.
It was a rattly noise, and the card would not feed through it.
I messed about with it for ages. Then Mark came back so of course I rushed downstairs and asked him.
He finished stacking the firewood and came to investigate.
He said it was dead.
Eventually, moved by my anguished pleas, and by it being the last chance to get the Christmas cards out, after ages and ages of frowning and faffing about, he agreed to look at it.
It is now in a million pieces. I have gone to work, but Mark has not. He is still laboriously extricating minute bits of printer and trying to see which ones are not working.
It had squirted ink everywhere.
Mark said it appears to be designed deliberately to waste as much ink as possible. It squirts a bit out every time you ask it to do something, even when it refuses to do it. There is a fat wedge of felt stuff in the bottom, placed there by the manufacturers, to soak up these gallons and gallons of deliberately squandered ink.
I think that is absolutely wicked, although regrettably if I was a person who made printers for a living, I would do that as well, because of course it is the sale of the ink that makes the money. They practically give you the printer.
It is now hours and hours later and we are still nowhere near pretty pictures of holly stuck all over with glitter. Mark has become cross about it and I am sorry to say that his hands have become indelibly black. I mean really black, not just like the brown colour that you might be if you call yourself black. They are black all over.
We are going to Gordonstoun tomorrow and to the lovely Midland a couple of days afterwards. He is not pleased.
I hope he manages to fix it but I can tell you now it is not looking good.
We might even finish up GoingCardless.
