I am still chugging slowly through the last of the Christmas List.
Today I have started on making the Christmas sweets. This is satisfying if sticky, and the house smells pleasingly of warm chocolate when you come in. Mostly they are for presents, but we will keep some, and I am longing for the day, not too far in the future now, when we will be able to close the curtains in the evening and loaf about watching a film and eating chocolate. This sort of activity is dreadful if you are trying not to be round, but I do not think that I care about roundedness over Christmas. Already I am having to be very self-controlled about the mince pies. The chocolates are going to be much worse. It is very hard not to eat chocolates blended with brandy and cream when there are so many of them in the fridge.
If I can make a couple of batches every day over the weekend then they should be ready to post on Monday.
After that I can go on holiday with a clear conscience. I am looking forward to that. It is some time since I have had a clear conscience.
Mark did not get home from the strip club in Carlisle until after four in the morning. He thought that his customers had wasted a very lot of cash, not just on him, but also on shoving twenty pound notes in ladies’ knickers. I thought that I was very glad indeed that Mark has never wished to participate in such activities, not least because I would be very cross indeed if he spent hundreds and hundreds of pounds and came home with nothing to show for it apart from his underwear on inside out.
I left him in bed this morning whilst I took the dogs over the fells, but he was up and doing things when I came home. He was cleaning out the Poopy Corral. This is a tiresome activity involving picking up the wet newspaper and replacing it with dry. It is tiresome because the poopies are generally disturbed by such activities, and wake up. As soon as they wake up they think they would like a wee. The clean newspaper never lasts longer than about twenty seconds, by which time somebody has widdled on it and it all has to be picked up and done again.
They are getting very excitingly mobile. They will have escaped from the Poopy Corral in a few days. They are already trying hard to clamber over the barricade, little legs waggling frantically whilst we shove them back downwards, because once they have had a success that will be the end of our peace and quiet, and also of our poopy-widdle-free floor. They have just started to charge about inside their corral, beating one another up and rolling around in an enthusiastically growling tumble of fur. They are just getting to the stage where really they need some children to be poking them and cuddling them and generally hauling them about. We pick them up whilst we are having cups of tea, but really they need somebody who will not get bored after five minutes, which I most certainly do, baby creatures are all very nice but I think I might have grown out of that stage of my hormones by now.
Mark went off to carry on mending the chap’s trailer which is occupying his waking hours at the moment, whilst I stayed at home with my List. It has now graduated to being sums as well as a list, the sort of sums that go: Well, if we buy those for the children, and we’ll probably want to go out for dinner and don’t forget we’ll need to go shopping on Monday, and then there’s the people looking after the dogs to be paid, so that leaves us with about forty seven pence to last all of January, do you think that will be all right?
The sums are even less fun than the lists. Christmas is very exciting but I will be very glad when it gets here and all I have to worry about is whether the six glasses of sherry drunk under the Christmas tree will make me fat.
I am going to buy a good book in Manchester and have a very quiet Christmas.
That will be the nicest thing.
