In the end I spent most of my birthday tidying up.
I do not know how we had made such a mess, but we had. We have been busily doing repairs and rebuilds and creative things. As things have been moved around during all of this activity, they have been piled up in teetering slidey piles, where mostly they stayed, so today I tidied them all up again.
This does not sound especially splendid as birthdays go, but I have had lots and lots of them now, and do not feel any need to make them remarkable. In any case it was nice to organise and sort and make things feel less cluttered.
Besides which, all of the children rang me up to say nice things, and I had had some rather splendid birthday cards and presents, some of which are pictured.
There was a bottle of my current favourite lovely, lovely Penhaligon’s perfume, and an utterly magnificent kettle. This is blue to go with our new kitchen, when Mark eventually puts the tiles up. It is solid and dignified and you do not burn your hand on the handle when you pick it up. It is of the sort that you always flick past on Amazon because of your credit card limit, and it will make our visitors think that we are middle class after all really.
Regular readers will recall that we bought our last kettle from a gypsy at Appleby Fair. It turned out to be of a quality which anybody could have predicted without needing to consult a gypsy, and eventually it just went black and all of the paint fell off.
I was impressed with the kettle, which came from Mr & Mrs Number One Daughter, but I was enchanted with the unexpected smaller present that was inside it. This was from Ritalin Boy, and chosen by himself.
It was a shiny brass door knocker, shaped like a peacock.
I liked this so much that I have got absolutely no intention whatsoever of putting it on the front door. It is beautiful and heavy, and would be completely wasted on the postman. I think that it needs to be somewhere I can see it, and use it myself.
I discussed this with Ritalin Boy on the telephone this afternoon. He suggested that perhaps I put it on the bathroom door, so I could bang on it when Grandad stayed in the bathroom for too long.
I was very tempted indeed by this idea.
Number One Son-In-Law thought perhaps what was needed was a small gong, so that I could attach the door knocker to it and use it to summon Oliver downstairs from his bedroom, because our four-storey house intercom is not working and bawling up the stairs is tiresome.
I liked this idea as well.
He also suggested a buzzer switch which could be installed and knocked on by the door knocker, which seemed a bit complicated.
I looked on eBay for gongs, but there weren’t any that I especially liked. I will have to have a think about it.
It also appeared that the kettle might be adjusted to make the whistling bit on the lid of the spout very stiff to take off. Ritalin Boy and I thought that some amusement value might be had from this if we did not tell Grandad, and I could always do it easily and he got it stuck. I liked this idea and spent ages experimenting with it to see how you did it. I have not yet mastered it, but I will.
After that, feeling contented with a tidy world full of nice things and the potential for humour, I decided that since it was my birthday I would do something lovely for myself, and I went back to bed.
This was possibly the nicest thing I could have done with my day.
We have been both busy and exceptionally social just lately. We have been getting up early and going to bed later than we should. This is because Mark has been at work all day, and when he gets home it takes ages to get in a proper evening of eating dinner and emptying dogs and drinking wine and chatting.
I slept dreamlessly and exhaustedly until the alarm went off an hour later, and I was so tired that I set the alarm for another hour and passed out again.
I know that this is wickedly idle, but I think that since it was my birthday probably it was all right. I felt hugely cheerful when I woke up, so I have told myself that Mark will be pleased as well.
He is not home from work yet.
I think he is probably feeling very tired as well
I suppose I had better suggest an early night.
