Child labour

I am on a very, very wet taxi rank.

It is also very quiet.

I don’t mind about this because of having time to drink my cup of tea and write to you, actually it is nice to shirk. It has been a day filled with lots of frantic rushing about, and I am relieved to do nothing in particular for a while.

It started at about eleven this morning. Actually, it didn’t start then. Yesterday carried on for quite a long way into today before it even got anywhere close to being over in order that today could make a punctual start. Taxis seem to have become something of a late-night occupation this week, and I have not made it into my bed before five in the morning since last I wrote to you.

Hence I was not exactly pleased when my telephone rang not long after ten,  and it was another taxi driver asking me to come out and cover some taxi jobs in the torrential rain. This was because the trains had stopped running and all of the taxis had buzzed off to mop up their extremely disgruntled leftovers.

I staggered blearily out of bed and leaped into my taxi to go and rescue some of them.

I faffed about with taxis for the next hour.

I got home to discover that I had been rescued by the children. This has been a theme of the weekend. I have rushed about doing seasonal manufacturing until my head has been spinning, leaving a trail of devastation in my wake which has largely been mopped up by the children.

I got home last night to discover, for instance, that the new printer had arrived and been installed for me by Jack, who has also done piles of washing up and several dog-emptyings, not to mention fixing the headlight on my taxi.

Emily washed the horribly  encrusted pots and scrubbed the revoltingly sticky kitchen after I had spent all day making Christmas chocolates in it. She has hoovered Oliver’s bedroom and helped with the fiddly bits of chocolate manufacture and box filling.

Oliver has also done dog-emptying and clearing up. I have left him in charge of the laundry when I came to work tonight, and he has dashed about emptying bins and manufacturing chocolate boxes.

They have been utterly heroic.

We have finished the chocolates. We finished making them last night just before I went to work. It had all taken rather longer than I had expected, which was why I had been obliged to abscond from the clearing up. We filled the fridge with trays and trays of them, some of them rather improbably balanced with rather thrilling consequences when I opened the door once, fortunately managing to poke my fingers through the crack and lift the tray back up before any actual harm was done.

All of the usual contents of the fridge had been stuffed into the vegetable drawers at the bottom and into the door shelves next to the milk, and some extra space created by disgorging all of the bottles of emergency alcohol, kept there in case of an unexpected celebration or the arrival of visitors we would like to impress, into the living room.

The living room has been a sore point. Rosie had a shocking outbreak of incontinence on the carpet last night. Nobody is speaking to her even though it was yesterday. She knows that she is in so much disgrace that she has not even bothered begging for bits of pizza or sausage.

It was not an accident. She did not ask to go out. She was in the kitchen with us and just sloped off to find an unsupervised corner.

She has been the wickedest dog in the house.

I have nearly finished the Christmas cards. Some are posted, some are on my desk waiting to be posted, and the last few are sitting in a pile waiting for me to stick glitter all over them, which I am planning to do when I get home.

The house is beginning to feel like Christmas. The chocolates are neatly packed into their boxes, waiting to be wrapped in brown paper and posted in the morning. The carpets are twinkling with spilled glitter and the kitchen surfaces are lightly powdered with icing sugar, and Mark is coming home tomorrow.

Tomorrow I will go to the Post Office, after which I can start packing our newly-ironed clothes to go to the pantomime.

Christmas really might be getting started.