We were late for work.
We have been so busy that no amount of rushing seemed to make any difference, and apart from a cup of coffee instead of breakfast, hastily drunk whilst we were doing something else, we were still late for work.
This does not seem to matter because the taxi rank is very quiet and there are no other taxis here anyway.
Mark is doing everything that comes in because I am writing to you. I am just here for anything that shows up whilst he is busy.
We are almost, almost at the end of the List.
Mark’s mate Hairy Stuart, the one with the tractor and massive trailer, turned up on Saturday morning. This was not a splendid moment because of working late on Friday night. We had known he was coming, and so had planned to go home early. It was a quiet evening, so indeed we did, but we had hardly unpacked and started on the washing up when the phone rang, and we found ourselves besieged by requests for taxis.
Of course we went back out and worked again, but it meant that we did not get to bed until three, which meant that the alarm at eight was not a welcome jangle, I can tell you.
Mark and Hairy Stuart hauled all of the firewood back to the field. Mark said afterwards that there is thirty tons of it, so we will be all right for heating for the foreseeable future, and all we have to do is bash it up with a log splitter and saw it into stove-sized chunks.
We are very pleased about this. It means that we do not need to worry about heating bills for a jolly long time, and also we could give everybody some firewood and a poopy for Christmas, which would be a very lovely present, and I expect all of our families would be thrilled.
The poopies are getting very daring. They have taken to attacking our feet when we stand in the poopy corral, which we have got to do whenever we are working from both sides of the work surface. This does not matter because they do not have very many teeth yet, but it is a very peculiar sensation to be wearing flip flops and to find one’s toes being ferociously and wetly gummed by a small growly creature far below.
We have done quite a bit of working from both sides of the work surface lately, because of the Christmas chocolates, which I am pleased to announce are now finished, and even packed into boxes. Tomorrow morning we will wrap them all up and dispatch them into the eagerly clawing hands of the Royal Mail, who will no doubt shove them in a cellar and keep them until January.
This activity has kept us very busy indeed, and despite having washed my hands about thirty times an hour in the process, probably more frequently than a brain surgeon, my fingers still have a vaguely sticky sensation, and the aroma of cocoa seems to have taken up permanent residence in my nostrils. Also the boxes that we bought this year turned out to be smaller than last year’s, and we have had to do some tight chocolate-squeezing to get them all in. We had to tie the boxes shut with string in the end. I was tempted to use elastic bands, of which we have a happy abundance since Lucy started dating a postman, but decided that string was more seasonal.
Anyway, they are done, apart from some faffing about with cardboard and brown paper, and my Christmas tasks are almost completed.
All we have got to do now is buy Christmas presents for people, cook dinner for the Christmas Eve Extravaganza, and save up some cash for our Christmas dinner in the happy haven of the Prince of India, and it will all be over.
We will be able to watch films and loaf about.
I tried to switch on the television the other night to play the YouTube video of a fireplace with a flickering log fire, but it is so long since I had used it I had forgotten how, and the television had forgotten me. It insisted that I identify myself several times before it would reluctantly admit me to the glorious cyber-universe.
Also the old Google voice has been sacked from the television in our absence, and some new Google has moved in. This is a bit unnerving, an unexpected stranger in our living room. He is not very friendly, although possibly a bit more reliable than his predecessor. He sounds stern and disapproving. Mark says he is probably a special hard-case version brought in because I shouted at the old one so much.
He will not answer any of my questions about where the old one went.
I hope he has not met with some terrible decommissioned scrap heap fate.
He was useless but I quite liked him.
