Absences

I am very pleased to announce that my father is out of hospital and sounds to be recovering splendidly.

I appreciate that this will come as a surprise to you since I had not actually mentioned that he was in there in the first place. This is because I am always a bit concerned about broadcasting all of the interesting details of other people’s lives. I do not like to read salacious gossip in the newspapers, and therefore feel it to be my duty not to write it.

This is easy to do when nobody ever tells you any.

Nevertheless, in the interests of sophistication and middle-classness, there will be no bikini pictures or shocking headlines on this site. If somebody is having a rascally adventure with their milkman you will not read about it here, not least because it is most unlikely that I would ever know about it.

Anyway, my father has been in hospital, has had his knee sawn off and replaced by a tin one, and is now recuperating at home, presumably with a can of WD40 to help bed it in.

We are all very pleased about this. He does not seem to have contracted bat flu, because everywhere was clean, and said that the food was excellent. There can be no higher praise for a hospital.

Our food has not been excellent today. We had run to the very end of the end of everything as we approached the much-anticipated trip to Asda today. By very great good fortune I found a jar of home made mushroom and hazelnut pate, trapped in the giant ice cube in the bottom of the freezer the other day, which made it possible for Mark to have sandwiches for work this morning.

Of course there were still a few tomatoes and a clump of celery in the conservatory as well, which have been the sandwich staple all summer. I have started to think that is a jolly good job that we have been growing some of our own stuff, because the shelves in Asda were not very full.

Oliver came with me. I was very glad that he did, because Asda was every bit as horrible as usual.

They did not have soap powder or flour or loo roll, at least unless you wanted the sort of loo roll which comes impregnated with coconut oil. I did not want that, and was a bit mystified at the idea that anybody might.

We will not enter into speculation about wiping oil all over oneself when one visits the bathroom. This is not that sort of publication.

They did not have condensed milk or dried tomatoes or fenugreek or cling film. They try and make you not notice all of these shocking absences  by having lots and lots of one thing, and filling two or three shelves with it. There were two shelves of paprika but no other spices. There was white sugar but no brown. The really dense chocolate with the high cocoa content was down to the very last few bars, and a man said they would not be getting any more. I was sad about this, because I use it a lot.

We needed lots and lots of things, and it was a weary trudge. There were several exciting moments when the very last something needed to be captured and dragged forward from the very back of an unreachable high shelf, and I had to boost Oliver up so that he could balance and flail a bit. In this way we managed to acquire some non-oily loo roll, and some olives, which were not the ones that we wanted, but which were better than no olives at all.

I could plant an olive tree. I will have to consider it.

We cheered ourselves up by a visit to a new shop in Kendal which seems to be selling nothing apart from Christmas decorations. I was most taken by a tree decoration which looked like a tomato sauce bottle, and I loved the mechanical things, the little steam trains and roundabouts and the houses with lit windows that sing Christmas carols.

Oliver looked at these a bit sniffily and said that he could make one better. Sometimes he is his father’s son.

I have attached a picture of the star attraction. You had to press a button, with suitably sanitised hands, of course, and it sang to you.

Despite everything I am very much looking forward to Christmas. We will have our new living room, and we might even have a television. It will be a very quiet one, Christmas, not television, obviously, I am hoping the television will have enough sound so that we could make the neighbours complain.

I think we are going to be a very small family. Lucy has explained that she is going to be too busy enforcing the law in Northampton to come home, probably arresting wicked people who have gone to visit relatives with too many children.

We probably won’t even need a goose. At this rate a chicken would be loads.

We will be inadvertently law abiding.