It is almost finished.
We are working tonight, and then it is over until weekend.
We have reached the time of year when one becomes a mere taxi occupant rather than an actual driver, as there are very few customers and hence the evening can be entirely filled with interesting things like knitting, almost completely undisturbed by tiresome persons wishing to be transported to somewhere else.
Tonight it is Double Time so we are at work anyway, although there are not many customers. This does not matter when every single one is going to give you at least seven quid, but it is making the evening rather slow.
Worse, I have eaten all my chocolate. I didn’t even eat it tonight, it was yesterday, and so this evening I have no chocolate at all. This is never good news at around three in the morning, when the world has gone cold and the yearning for bed is at its most potent. I might have to rush home in a little while, and steal some dog-chocolate from the Christmas tree.
Of course Lucy is home now, and so we do not just have dogs, but marauding kittens as well, and indeed, they are marauding just about as thoroughly as is possible. Wherever one looks there is a kitten, often already at eye level, staring haughtily at you from the middle of a shelf full of wine glasses. We had a small horror this afternoon when we realised there was a disturbing cat-odour in the kitchen, and finally discovered that they had found their way underneath the cupboards and under the floor. We are not able to access the space under the floor, on account of not being tiny and slender and delicate of paw, and so we will just have to live with it until either it fades away or we just get used to it, which ever happens first.
Mark boarded up the hole, but not before he had been distracted for a moment, and a small curious creature had batted away all the screws, never to be found again, presumably until next time the hoover is blocked.
We made sure the kittens were not in the hole first, obviously. It was clear that they had not been eternally incarcerated about five minutes afterwards, when I was getting the night’s picnic ready. They have learned about begging from the dogs, and when I sliced the cheese there was suddenly a large milling pool of hopeful fluffy creatures around my feet.
I gave them some cheese but they would not go away.
They have learned how to climb up the handles on the oven, and keep making unexpected appearances on the top of the cooker, the kittens, not the dogs, obviously. I am discouraging this because of the potential for an unexpectedly ignited kitten, but they seem to feel that I am just a large party-pooper, and have become determined.
In between times they have retired to the conservatory, where they are hunting Barbie. They have already massacred her horse, which we found on its back with its legs in the air, and are sampling the plants to see if any are going to turn out to be hideously poisonous and incur a massive vet bill, just as we are all getting over Christmas. The plants are beginning to look as though we have a plague of colossal slugs.
Dogs are far less trouble. Really.
I am probably not going to write on these pages for the next couple of days. I am going to have a holiday. Also I feel that I have let the side down when it comes to alcohol consumption, and think that I might do some catching up. Few feelings are worse than the awful intoxicated realisation, at three in the morning, that one still has seven hundred words of prose to string together before unconsciousness can be allowed to take over.
We are going to stay at home tomorrow, and eat too much and watch a film. I am looking forward to this very much. Then the day after we are going to go to Manchester to the theatre. It is our Christmas present to ourselves, and it is going to be lovely.
I will see you on the other side.
