I have been busily Christmas carding.
I am enjoying this very much.
I have not done any more wax sealing. My burned fingers were still sore this morning and we have decided it might be wiser to skip this part of the proceedings. Instead I have been designing pictures and contemplating what I might write inside.
I could just write Merry Christmas just like everybody else, I suppose, but such obedient crowd-following would make for a dull life.
Such activities were pleasantly restful, and occupied my thoughts so thoroughly that I forgot to take the washing out of the machine, and Mark did it when he came home from tootling about with his trailer repairs.
When he came home we were going out, although we dallied about for so long that there was hardly any day left by the time we got around to it.
We weren’t doing anything exciting. We were going to Kendal to collect Mark’s forgotten MOT certificate, and to go to Asda.
This had been facilitated by Mark having been paid for his Norway trip. This was splendid money, because the tax had already been taken out of it by the Norwegian Government, and so it was all ours, with no need to salt some away to kindly donate to our own Government’s ridiculous cash-wasting projects, we could waste it all by ourselves.
We were very pleased about this, and promptly paid some outstanding bills and blew a pile of it on some new printer ink.
Printer ink is one of the most expensive liquids known to man. You can purchase top of the range super-fuel diesel at a motorway service station for a fraction of the price of ink for your printer, but I had run out and so it Had To Be.
I wanted to go to Asda because I had run out of brandy to pour over the Christmas cakes. We have got brandy, but it is decent cognac, and I had no intention of wasting it by sloshing it all over cakes and adding it to butter and mince pies, so we had to get some more. Asda does a very suitable range which is called Asda Brandy, and which comes in a plastic bottle.
We should not have contemplated going to Asda whilst we were still feeling flush with the excitement of having been paid. We had not even got in through the door when we were waylaid by a stand full of tins of Quality Street which leaped out in front of us, waving merrily. Then there was another full of gin. Then there was another with Reduced Price Bailey’s Irish Cream and another with sherry, and before we knew it we had blown another absolute fortune.
We chucked some sausages in the trolley as well, as a gesture towards healthy living.
It would appear that Asda knows what they are about when it comes to encouraging the impulse buy.
We did not really care, because we are almost at our Christmas. We are away next week, and then we have got a week at home before we go to Manchester for our own Christmas bash, which will probably be the last time we see most of the family before Christmas. Everything has got to be ready by then, so really we are feeling much the way everybody else feels when the twentieth of December turns up and they realise that they have not yet got round to any Christmas shopping.
We unpacked it all when we got home, and I refilled my bucket ready for next year’s mince pies. Regular readers will recall that once I have made the mince pie mixture, I fill a bucket with dried fruit and put it to soak in brandy until next October, in order to make sure that the fruit has every opportunity to absorb as much brandy as possible. If it absorbs it thoroughly enough, the brandy becomes part of the fruit and does not cook out of it in the oven.
That was a marvellous moment. It still needs cherries and apricots, and over the year we will cut some apples up and chuck them in as well, but it is begun. Christmas 2025 is in the making already
We have a future.
