I am beginning to catch up with myself.
I am clearing up the debris and setting my life to rights again.
I have put Christmas presents away in drawers and fed the leftover bits of Christmas feasts to the dogs. I have filled in forms and dispatched them into the ether, along with apologies for their hopeless tardiness. I have started to pick up my college work and filed receipts and written the Important Things into the new diary for next year.
It is very peculiar to have to stop at June. Much of what I usually have to fill in to the diary is generally Term Dates, but there will be no more in a few months’ time now. That will be it. Gordonstoun will be over, and the remainder of the diary is a mysterious white void, occupied by the odd MOT date and almost nothing else.
I do not know what will be happening to us by this time next year. I have got a crystal ball, but it is wrapped up in a drawer in the loft and I have never seen anything in it except a rather distorted reflection of my fingers, despite some determinedly frowning concentration and my tongue sticking out.
Also I have written to the King to ask if you can be granted middle-classness through your children, a bit like citizenship.
I will let you know what he says.
I am beginning to heave a sigh of relief. We have almost finished with the Christmas season. There is still lots to do. Half of the living room is still occupied by an enormous Christmas tree. Shortly I expect it will come in handy for setting the chimney on fire again, but that is a problem for another day.
Mark has been cutting firewood and I have washed the towels, but that has been it. Oliver and Elise were dispatched to do the shopping, because of Oliver’s newly-achieved competence. They drove all the way to Asda and did not kill themselves, which was splendid, although they are amateurs at supermarket shopping and the results contained some moderate surprises. I did not mind this because I would rather have the wrong cream than bother trailing out to the supermarket myself, how marvellous to have some usefully resident young people.
We did not work tonight. We should have worked, because of Oliver’s car insurance still squatting on Mark’s credit card, leering and waving at me occasionally, but we didn’t, and I don’t care. I have had enough of sitting on wet taxi ranks. We are going to loaf about for a couple of days.
With this in mind we had a real cooked dinner tonight, a curry, actually, with blackcurrant rum sponge and home made ice cream for pudding. This was magnificent, washed down with some wine very kindly given to my by a grateful taxi customer. I was entirely surprised about this, because I had done nothing more deserving of gratitude than to take them home, and most people are not generally at all grateful for this, especially when it is late at night and they discover that not only is it time-and-a-half, but also that they are not allowed to bring their half-empty glass of beer with them.
We are not being drawn into the half-full-half-empty discussion. It is always half-empty. If I let them bring it in the taxi it would be entirely empty by the time we had gone round the first corner.
Anyway, we ate an enormous dinner and watched a film about Henry the Fifth, which I thought was splendid. I think we have seen it before, but the thing about films about real historical people is there are no surprises, you know what happened in the end if you listened at school, so it did not matter.
I had listened at school enough to know that somebody won the battle of Agincourt, but not enough to remember who it was, and so there was an element of suspense as well, hurrah for ignorance.
We are going to have an early night now. It is midnight, but that is still six hours earlier than we have managed to get to bed for the last few weeks.
I shall be rising and shining in the bright light of dawn, just you wait and see.
