I am on the taxi rank, eating the chocolate buttons that I got in my stocking at Christmas.
I have just read back through one or two of my pre-Christmas diary entries and can hardly believe how much more tranquil I am feeling than I was this time last week.
Not rushing around getting ready for Christmas is an absolute pleasure, I can tell you.
It seems as though for weeks now that my life has been filled with frantic list-making. Indeed, I got in the taxi and discovered a notebook which had been left on the dashboard for that very purpose. With a notebook to hand, whenever any new chore occurred to me during my evening musings, I could write to myself and make sure that I would not forget about it the next day.
It is full of reminders to do things like Cut Up Soap To Dry, and Add More Rum To Christmas Cake, and Wash Champagne Glasses.
I added lots of rum to the Christmas cake. It was very good indeed.
Of course in the end it was all worth it, and we had the most brilliant of Christmases, with dry soap and rum-sodden cake, although we didn’t drink any champagne in the end. Elspeth brought some, but left it in the fridge, and so I have politely stored it to take back to her at some later date. I am feeling very virtuous about this.
In fact I have spent today doing almost exactly the things that I was doing before Christmas. Not adding rum to the Christmas cake, obviously, but cleaning and organising and making the world straight and lovely again.
Lucy went home this morning, and so I started to clean in their bedrooms at the top of the house and worked my way down. Not at the very top of the house, because that would have been the loft. Frankly, the loft is just too awful to contemplate.
Lucy has not been at home for very long, and so her bedroom was not too bad. We will draw a veil over Oliver’s, which needed some reorganising due to an excess of Christmas presents. Somebody has given him a box of odd socks, which is going to drive me to distraction unless I purchase an identical box and can soothe my obsessive sock-organisation. Oliver thinks that they are splendid, and very amusing, and has kindly reassured me that nobody will be looking at his socks anyway, but I look at his socks, and I will know.
I worked my way down the stairs pretending to be a upstairs-downstairs sort of maid in a grand house. Apart from the Queen we don’t really have these any more. The closest we have is the big hotels, which work in a similar sort of way, with a flourishing little below-stairs community of vagabonds and rascals. I had a job cleaning in one of those once, years ago, which lasted just long enough for me to be sacked for my attitude problem, but which I thought was brilliantly interesting all the same.
I learned a very great deal about how to make hotel bedrooms look as though the guest is the very first person ever to walk through the door. You use the outgoing towels to polish everything, including the water glasses, so don’t say you haven’t been warned. You have to read the feedback sheets left by the departing guests, and throw away any that say something rude about the cleaning. You check every hopeful corner for leftover money, and you leave Classic FM playing quietly on the radio when you leave.
I have often thought that to have been a housekeeper in one of the great houses must have been one of the most splendid things to be in past days. Living in the house as the aristocracy sounds splendid but must have been mind-numbingly boring, imagine spending your entire life sitting with a straight back drinking tea and listening to teenagers playing the piano.
Obviously the whole junior staff thing must have been pretty rubbish as well, being a scullery maid in an icy pantry scrubbing pans out with sand must have been one of the great horrors of the time. Even being the butler must have been pretty rubbish, spending half of your life hanging around the table waiting to pass the salt if anybody wanted some, but being the housekeeper, or maybe the cook, must have been splendid.
It must have been brilliantly challenging to have been in charge of the whole complicated machine, organising laundry and firewood and dusting and table-laying. The housekeeper had a few warm little rooms of her own, and occupied her time making the huge house run perfectly, so that every occupant had everything they needed, fresh and within reach, and that every room was at its gleaming best, the whole time.
Likewise being the cook, managing the meals for the staff and the family, preserving fruits and salting meat. Or the head groom, keeping beautiful expensive horses at the peak of well-cared for fitness. Possibly the most interesting of all must have been to be the head gardener, imagine the challenge of arranging your hot compost to produce pineapples, or roses for the table at Christmas, to grow oranges and beans and to keep the gardens around the house in flower the whole time.
Probably the dullest bit of all would have been actually having to live in the house. I have enjoyed these last few days of lolling around the house drinking sherry and watching films, but I am thoroughly bored with it now and very pleased to be doing things again.
Life is looking pretty jolly good.
Have a picture of this morning’s snow.
