Lucy appears to be enjoying her Door Supervisors’ course.
She rang me this evening at around eight to tell me how lovely it was.
Its loveliness might have been enhanced by several glasses of wine. Some of the gentlemen on the course were so lovely that they took her for a drink in the bar before they had dinner.
She thinks that after dinner she might have an early night.
I hasten to add that the gentlemen have gone now.
One can have too much loveliness in a day.
It seems that she is learning a lot, though. She is learning how to recognise sex workers and people traffickers as well as drug abusers and nuisances. I think this is very clever. I would not know how to recognise a people trafficker. It isn’t as if they have a special badge or a peculiar walk or anything, and I don’t suppose it is polite just to ask them.
Tomorrow she is going to learn how to search people to see if they have got any drugs.
I imagine it is similar to the things I have to do with Mark’s trousers before I put them in the washing machine, only with people still in them.
It sounded very exciting. She was interested and happy and Mark and I felt very pleased with the whole project. Apparently everybody thinks she is posh.
It is Blackpool, after all.
We have been continuing with our frantic Christmas preparations. I know that you think Christmas is still ages off, but it is not ages for us. We have got to have everything wrapped and packed and finished and completed by the day after tomorrow, when we leave, because we will be taking everybody’s Christmas presents with us.
That is not very much time at all.
We have not at all finished wrapping and packing.
I have finished the ironing, though. All of Oliver’s clothes from school are clean and pressed and folded up on the top of his suitcase. All of our smart clothes are freshly laundered after an extravagance of carol services, and hanging up next to our suitcase.
Our suitcase is on the landing, because there is no room for it anywhere else. I have stubbed my toe on it twice now. It is quite full now, and immovably heavy for this sort of misadventure. It was not too bad when it was empty.
I ironed and packed, and Mark made cardboard boxes for chocolates.
This was more difficult than it sounds. First of all he had to go and steal the cardboard from the builders across the road. They do not build things with cardboard, not even on the lowest budget, but they had been fitting a new kitchen for somebody, and the units had come in boxes.
After that he had to design the box. This was really complicated, because after a few experiments with lids, he made them like real chocolate boxes, with a hinged lid that fits over the bottom bit.
This is really difficult to get right and required some precision cutting and quite a bit of swearing.
It took ages.
Once he had made a few, I started to wrap the boxes up in Christmas paper. They were jolly clever, and it seemed a shame to hide them, but nobody wants their chocolates in a brown cardboard box that says ‘kitchen unit’ on it.
There is a reason that Cadbury’s make their chocolate boxes purple and sophisticated and not brown with staples sticking out.
We lined the boxes first just in case the kitchen units were not beautifully clean, but to be honest they were probably at least as clean as our kitchen units at home.
It is not easy to wrap a box which has got a hinged lid. When I tried with the first one I could not get the lid to close, and had to start again. Mark laughed a great deal, so I had to get it right, for the sake of honour. I had my tongue sticking out and everything, and in the end he said that probably nobody would be looking at the boxes anyway.
I got glue everywhere. There is quite a bit on the tablecloth. I hope it washes out.
Once we had made a few we started to fill them. That was difficult as well. We have got six different sorts of chocolates, and I had to keep counting and remember which ones I had already put in. I tried to arrange them so that the same sorts were not next to each other, but that turned out to be the sort of activity that could keep you busy for hours, like Sudoku, so after a while I gave up on that bit.
In the end we had got to stop and get ready for work, but we thought that we had done quite well. There were several boxes of chocolates wrapped and ready to post, some more ready to take with us, and some left over that perhaps we could just eat.
Unfortunately we still don’t want to eat chocolate.
Maybe tomorrow.
