I think perhaps I might be leading a double life.
I am beginning to feel this in the sense of trying to cram at least twice as much into any day as is sensible.
It is midnight, and I have just arrived at work.
The day started at half past eight this morning, when I rang HMP Slade to assure them that I was still alive, and available to come to work should they require it.
Obviously this was not strictly true, had they demanded my presence I would have had a full-blown nuclear meltdown and rushed about flapping madly before probably phoning them back with an excuse.
Fortunately, they didn’t, and I was able to finish my coffee before getting on with the serious business of washing Lucy’s school things and packing everybody’s holiday things, and making things for Christmas.
Today was the last posting day for Australia.
This is an important date if you have got a daughter in Australia.
Unfortunately not only did we not have a Christmas card ready to post, we hadn’t even started making them.
Lucy was hauled out of bed, bleary-eyed and complaining, to put the finishing touches to her artwork whilst Mark and I went shopping.
I was making the fondant centres for the Christmas chocolates today. This requires glucose syrup, which they don’t sell in the Co-op.
We went to Lakeland, which is a large and fascinating shop just at the back of our house. It sells all sorts of magnificent things, and I could cheerfully have spent five hundred pounds without even noticing. They had interesting chocolate-making moulds, and cake tins with moveable sides, and every sort of shiny icing imaginable. I looked admiringly at a mould for a gingerbread house. I have already got one of these, which I never, ever use, but I liked the look of them all the same, because it looked so lovely under the beautiful shop lights adorned with tasteful holly.
It looks rubbish in all the dust at the back of my drawer.
We didn’t have five hundred pounds, though, in fact we had been reduced to burrowing down underneath the seats of the taxis for some extra funds.
We bought some glucose and went home.
Making fondant is a tiresomely difficult job, and today was no exception. It bubbled and spluttered, and then unexpectedly set so hard that it had to be chiselled off the sides of the dish.
We bashed it about and eventually scraped the whole lot back into the pan with some extra water to try again.
There is a lot of cleaning up when sugary things go wrong.
We cleaned it all up and boiled the fondant again, and I left Mark stirring it whilst I went to see about the picture for the Christmas card.
It was done.
I spent the next hour messing about trying to make it all be in the right place on the computer.
Christmas cards look a lot easier than they actually are, I can tell you. You write something, and suddenly the picture has jumped off the screen. You put it back and the writing you have already got dissolves into the ether. You try and write something in a text box, but all that it will say is Insert Text Here, until you delete it in frustration and then the picture disappears as well.
I faffed about with it for ages, and I had just about assembled something which was roughly card-shaped when Mark shouted up the stairs that the fondant would not set and that he was just going to leave it.
It was getting late by then.
He abandoned the fondant and came to help me with printing and folding and glueing.
We made a glittery mess.
He took the dogs out whilst I belted round to the post office, and then we dived in the shower.
Today, of course, was the day of the glorious Macmillan Carol Concert.
This is a seasonally flavoured extravaganza at Ripon Cathedral, in which Oliver appears with his school as a chorister. It is smart, and expensive, and attended by all of Yorkshire’s nobility and array of celebrities.
We do not live anywhere near Ripon.
We flung our smart clothes on and chucked some mince pies into a tub for a sort of travelling dinner, and dived into the car.
We almost turned round and came back before Kendal, because the car was making a scarily awful noise, but in the end decided that the usual taxi driver ploy of turning the radio up would probably fix it. This turned out to be correct.
Ripon is two hours away.
When we got there we were so hungry, even despite the mince pies, we dived into the restaurant opposite the cathedral and rinsed Mark’s credit card for wine and pizza. We wolfed the pizza and glugged the wine, with the inevitable result that I was mildly intoxicated when I got into the cathedral.
Of course it was brilliant.
The cathedral was packed, filled to the edges with tweed jackets and Burberry scarves.
We knew this would happen because we go every year, and so Mark was wearing his tweed jacket and we both had our Burberry scarves. These are an important fashion accessory if you have got children in expensive schools. Basically you can turn up being as scruffy as you like, but if you are wearing a Burberry scarf then everybody forgives you, because they know that you are the sort of person who can spend a hundred and fifty quid on a scarf. This works less well in August.
We bought our Burberry scarves on eBay for a tenner. They are jolly warm. We wear them in the taxis where nobody knows that they are a badge of successful middle-classness, apart from the occasional middle class customer, who is politely surprised and thinks that you have got it because somebody left it on the seat.
You are not supposed to think about fashion accessories in church.
I kept my coat on and leaned against Mark, because despite the presence of about six hundred fashion accessories, it was still cold.
It was truly magnificent.
I love the splendid clear ring of the choristers. There was a superb chamber orchestra, and a sports commentator who did the introductions. Actual Head Boy sang a solo, which we applauded loudly, and the BBC’s Young Chorister Of The Year sang another. There was a counter tenor and a girl who played the harp.
We liked the harp playing very much, although discovered afterwards that Oliver had thought her boring, and kept thinking that she had finished when she suddenly started up all over again.
The Dean encouraged us to donate cash to Macmillan, and added that we might consider leaving some for the cathedral whilst we were in the mood. Somebody read bits from a book that they had written, and the speaker turned out to be rather worthier than last year’s.
She was a pathologist who spoke earnestly about people who were not dying of cancer because of noble and laudable efforts made on their behalf. I admired her very much, because it is jolly good that people are not dying from hideous painful diseases. All the same I thought that I had secretly preferred last year’s, who was a horse racing pundit and who gave us several useful tips from the pulpit.
We all sang loudly and enthusiastically, and then suddenly it was over, and the boys came tumbling excitedly down the spiral staircase at the back of the cathedral, where we were waiting for them.
We found a quiet space to sit on some stone steps, and had ten minutes together. We had brought some tuck from home, which Oliver ate whilst we talked, although the cathedral had thoughtfully provided biscuits and mince pies and apple juice and damson gin.
In the end we all had to dash off, Oliver to school and us back home.
It is not for very long. He will be finished on Wednesday.
When we got home we discovered that the fondant had set properly after all.
We made a flask of tea and went to work.
