Lucy is home.
She has had a very happy week, and has been assured that Greater Manchester Police is the very best police force in the whole world. She is inclined to believe this which is sensible given that she has signed a contract and got a new uniform. Her mortgage is agreed and progressing, and she has come home awash with contentment, pre-Christmas merriment and a sack of laundry.
It is very nice that she is home, because counter-intuitively, the immediate result is that the house is blissfully peaceful. This is because every single one of our four-legged friends has decamped to her bedroom, where they all know she will allow them to lie on her bed and possibly share any chocolate buttons that might be going spare.
I have provided her with an old scruffy quilt cover to put over the top of her new splendid quilt cover, which rather defeats the object.
We have not had a very great deal of time to talk to her because of course as usual we have been rushing about all day and this evening is taxi night. I am writing this before we set off because I still do not have a computer. This makes life very peaceful but it is tiresome when I want to write to you. Most certainly I do not want to be doing it at half past three in the morning when I have finished at work.
The pre-Christmas labours are continuing. Today I have swept and mopped and watered the conservatory. Mark went outside and sawed up firewood. He has been worried about this because we were running out, but last night the builders stacked so much wood around our dustbin that we could hardly see it, so it is a good job nobody lives next door, because I needed a dustbin after I had finished tidying my office.
It has been a happy day, and I got the chap inside the telly to play me some Christmas carols whilst I worked. He played the ones sung by King’s College Cambridge. I can put these on now with a comfortable sense of superiority because I am at Cambridge just like all of the singers. Some of them sounded a bit young to be students but perhaps that is just because I am getting elderly. Also I am not at King’s College but it didn’t sound as though Lucy Cavendish had any Christmas carols, perhaps they are too multicultural.
My friend has applied to join the team for University Challenge, talking of Cambridge, since I would rather like to. She is going to go and do a test quiz to see if she is generally knowledgeable enough. It sounds a bit like Trivial Pursuit only with more Latin. I am very impressed. I can’t imagine anything more terrible than coming up with lots of completely useless answers to relatively straightforward questions and being humiliated on national television by a smirking Bamber Gascoigne.
We have not yet put up the Christmas tree, but we are getting there slowly, probably we will get round to it some time before Christmas. I still haven’t made any mince pies, nor have I finished constructing the Christmas card, but the loft is getting tidier, and today I cleaned the skylight. This was an exciting adventure involving a plank and a stool and some thrilling wobbling about. I only did the inside, I haven’t quite managed to reach the outside yet, but I will get to it some day when it isn’t raining quite so hard.
I am going to go because I have got to be at work soon, the chai has been simmering on the top of the stove all day and is now suitably peppery to be poured into flasks, and the prawn toast is in the oven. I am going to go and dig out my boots and my scarf and my good book, since I can’t do things like Facebook on the taxi rank without a computer.
I will see you on the other side.
