Goodness, this New Year is getting under way with a faint and un-startling pop.
I am very pleased to announce that almost nothing whatsoever is happening to me.
I am not frantically striving against the endlessly-ticking clock to achieve things, nor am I writing long and hopeless lists of all the things I ought to achieve before the day is done and tomorrow births its own expensively dreary and equally unattainable list.
Today I simply carried on restoring order to my life.
There has been quite a lot of laundry involved. I have washed everything, from the cats’ pillows to the camper van dishcloths, and of course Lucy came home with the usual sack of lightly worn young-person garments in need of refreshment.
I do not think I mind about any of it. Indeed, the day has been such a tranquil non-event that I can hardly recall what I did with it, still less object to any of it. I hoovered and folded and wiped, and at the end of it I sat peacefully in front of my computer and wrote several undisturbing paragraphs about my heroine attending a church jumble sale. Nothing could be more pleasingly bucolic.
Mark has also been setting his life in order. There is nobody in the holiday house next door and so he climbed on the shared wall to apply some flashing to the leaky section of the conservatory roof. He could have done this whilst people were on holiday there, but people can become quite unreasonably alarmed when a strange man in a bobble hat, clutching a hammer in his teeth, suddenly appears at their first floor bedroom window, so he didn’t. He has been explaining his intention to do this repair for about two years now, but so far a strategic bucket has sufficed as a solution to the problem.
It is fixed now. We shall need the bucket no longer.
At any rate I hope we won’t.
After that he took the dogs off to the farm to cut up some more firewood. Lucy retired to her bedroom where we will not discuss her activities. It would not be appropriate to disclose what an officer of the law does on her days off.
All the same I was quite astonished to discover that you can do Speed Awareness courses online now. The last time I was caught speeding I was obliged to attend a downstairs basement room in a Holiday Inn to be patronised by a fat lady and a small smug bald bloke. The best bit was the tea break, when a doleful man said that the last time he had attended such a course he had actually got a speeding ticket on his way home afterwards. He had written a letter of complaint to the Chief Constable, explaining that clearly the course had not worked and he wanted his money back, but he had been ignored.
You no longer risk such disasters now, being able to attend a Naughty Motorist Rehabilitation Programme from the comfort of your own bedroom, without even needing to get out of bed if you like. There are some small benefits to our new cyber-existence.
I could do the next bit of my University course online as well if I liked, because it is simply a progress meeting with my tutor. We are going to discuss my current story, being the one with the jumble sale, so hence it would be more than possible to arrange for her to sit inside my computer for the afternoon.
We are not going to do this because I have got to attend another interview in Cambridge in the same week, and so I will be heading south at the end of the month. I have got a room reserved for me at Lucy Cavendish and I am going to spend several days simply getting on with the things I am supposed to be doing.
I am looking forward to this very much indeed.
January is going to go out with a joyful bang.
