We are home.
I am on the taxi rank, and it is all over.
No more Christmas, no more excursions, no more exciting encounters with cocktails. Apart from taking Oliver back to school, the holiday season is finished and done.
Of course it has been lovely, but the relief at this moment is huge.
Thank goodness I can quietly settle back into eating my normal, completely uneventful diet, not need to tip anybody for bringing it to me, and not need indigestion tablets afterwards. I will be drinking nothing more exciting than spiced chai, my stories will be coming from books and not full-screen technicolour, and tomorrow the tiny but nevertheless ceaselessly rascally kitties will be buzzing off home.
Actually they will be heading for Number One Daughter’s house, because Lucy is going down there to take Ritalin Boy back to boarding school because Number One Daughter is off to Miami for a fitness competition, and she has got to be there the day before school re-opens its doors. Hence Lucy and the kittens are heading off on the exhausting and interminable journey not just to Kettering, but all the way to Surrey.
The kittens are entertaining company but as with all good things, it will not exactly be tragic when they have gone. They have discovered a tiny hole in the bottom of a cupboard which has enabled them to scramble anew under the blockaded kitchen floor, and they are slowly filling up the otherwise completely inaccessible cavern therein with the most revoltingly malodorous cat poo.
Mark said wearily that when they have gone we will just take the floor up and clean it out, but we might as well wait until they have gone because otherwise they will just find another way in. We will take it all apart and then fill every imaginable crevice with anti-kitten boards.
We will have to tip a load of new soil into the plant beds in the conservatory for the same reason.
It is just like having Tourette’s Syndrome. Every now and again we just find ourselves swearing uncontrollably.
They have now established the Christmas tree as an acceptable highway between the stairs and the living room. Rosie has been eyeing this up with interest for a couple of days, and has been compelled to desist several times. Thank goodness it will be going soon, because there is no doubt that otherwise a Christmas Tree Misadventure would inevitably follow.
There was one in our bed at about five o’clock this morning, patting my toes with seemingly insatiable curiosity. They have explored every inch of the house from the tops of the curtains to the dark corners at the back of the sofa. They will leap from the stairs to sit on your unsuspecting shoulders and purr thunderously in your ears, but mew with loud indignation when you accidentally sit on them, which happens every single time you sit down absolutely anywhere.
We all sat down together last night when we came home. Exhaustion had finally triumphed, and we decided to spend our last night together watching things.
Last night was actually our last night. Tonight we are working and Lucy and Oliver have gone to the cinema to watch Avatar. I did not want to see this because the august Daily Telegraph said that it did not have a plot, just some good special effects and a lot of virtuous wittering about protecting the planet, not even our planet but some other planet somewhere full of blue people. Lucy and Oliver said they did not care about this, but I am not interested in self-righteous guilt-inducing propaganda, which I expect I could get for nothing here in my taxi if I just switched on Radio Four.
Last night we had a Chinese takeaway, a bottle of Prosecco and almost the entire series of Game Of Thrones The Prequel, which was truly brilliant, with plenty of violence, bad language, sex and other stuff that they warn you about before the opening credits. I loved it all, even if there was lots that I had to watch from between my fingers whilst making squeaky Eeew noises, like a sat-on kitten. Oliver fell asleep before the end and we had to explain it to him at breakfast time this afternoon.
It is over. The holiday is finished and we can slowly become normal again.
I think I can remember what it is like.
