It has been such a lovely Christmas.
It has been truly splendid in absolutely every way that it could have been, and I am sitting here feeling exhausted and very contented with the world.
Of course we got up late. We seem to have been very busy lately, and we were suddenly so exhausted that a jolly good sleep seemed by far and away the nicest thing that we could possibly do for Christmas. The children have never been early Christmas risers, and this year was no exception, so we started it off with coffee in bed at half past eleven. We were joined by the three dogs, the two kittens, and Lucy, so it was all quite sociable as well.
The kittens have arrived with Lucy, of course, and have added a small tinge of menace to everything Christmas-related, like the unseen alien in the horror film. You know because of the music that it is about to leap out from somewhere completely unexpected, like in the wardrobe or submerged in the bath water, but it is still a horrid shock when it does. They have thoroughly explored the Christmas tree from every possible angle. They have commandeered the dogs’ cushion and sneezed into everybody’s wine glass. They have become quite determined to join in with household dinner times, and every meal is interrupted by warning shouts of Incoming, as somebody spots a kitten about to launch itself on to the table from the top of a curtain, or a light fitting, or has launched itself at the dangling tablecloth.
Roger Poopy still adores them passionately, and his Christmas has been made perfect by their permitting him to stare lovingly at them as they snooze on his cushion. Sometimes they even let him lie down next to them, although not actually on the cushion. He has got to lie on the floor.
Rosie keeps trying to make them run away so that she can run after them and bark. Nobody else appreciates this. Fleeing kittens are not a good thing, even when you are wearing trousers and not tights.
I have got one in bed with me now. It is being helpful with the computer.
We had a walk in the park, and Christmas Eve leftovers for breakfast, washed down with some honey rum purchased especially for the occasion on the Christmas market. This was not quite as rascally as it sounds, because it was three o’clock in the afternoon by then, and the sun was almost over the yardarm. In fact it was so late we had to keep reminding ourselves to be restrained, which is hard when you are having rum and chicken kebabs for breakfast, because we wanted to leave some room for our Indian Christmas dinner.
We were only moderately successful at this. There were a lot of very nice leftovers.
After breakfast we had some time to ourselves, and I am pleased to tell you that this was the absolute highlight of the day. Oliver and Mark went off to screw some last computer bits together, Lucy buzzed off for a little snooze, and I started on my assignment.
I have really started it. I have written almost two hundred words, only seven thousand eight hundred left to go.
I am very pleased with myself.
We did not really do much in the way of Christmas presents this year. We don’t open our presents until after dinner in the evening anyway, and there was an amusing moment this afternoon when Oliver looked under the tree and discovered for the first time that he had got some, and was truly astonished.
He had asked Number One Daughter for a computer keyboard, because of the wonderful new home-build computer. He has been slowly assembling hundreds of small and complicated looking bits over the last few weeks, and the very last piece, today, was the keyboard, and he wondered if it might be all right to open it before dinner, and set it up for when we came home. We all thought that this would be perfectly all right, but he had not been expecting that there would be more than one present under the tree, and was very surprised and pleased to find that there were three or four.
We all had some very lovely presents. There was scented soap, and a candle, chocolates and wine in a curiously shaped bottle. Mark had a beautiful Barbour jersey, and I had a pretty shirt, and Lucy had a mulberry-coloured cardigan, which she wore until she had to take it off to go to bed.
Oliver had socks and handkerchiefs, which pleased him very much indeed. He is the sort of person who likes socks and handkerchiefs.
We had not done Christmas presents. Instead we had bought a single Christmas present to share between all of us, which was a ticket to the theatre in our holiday week in January. We are going to see the National Theatre performing The Ocean At The End Of The Lane. It is the thing that we all wanted most.
We ate most of the chocolates after dinner, and drank wine until we were all very giggly.
It has been lovely.
The new computer works perfectly.
