I am concentrating very hard on the Advent calendars.
Indeed, I have concentrated so hard on them today that I think this evening’s diary entry might be a trifle dull. Really, it should read: I went for a walk and after that I spent the whole day painting Advent calendars.
In the end I am actually beginning to like them. I have hated them for months and months, because I felt that I had not done a very good job, and actually I haven’t. They are not very good. All the same, now that they are reaching their creative destinies, they are quite colourful and cheerful, and they are not entrants for the Turner prize but Advent calendars to be hoofed into the dustbin along with the wrapping paper and other seasonal detritus on December twenty fifth.
Still I am cross with myself. There were all sorts of details I should have liked to have painted on them, and I have simply run out of time. They have got to be posted very soon. They have been a Rush Job this year.
Mark has spent much of the day sawing up firewood. He is very pleased indeed at the recent donation of several fallen trees, and has been cutting off the brash in order to have the long, sturdy trunks for loading on to the trailer. They have grown in amongst other trees, and hence are tall and do not have too many knotty low branches. He is going to have to spend most of next week cutting them up because his friend with the tractor and trailer haulage is coming next Friday.
I was confused about this friend, whom I have not met. Mark said that he was called Airey Stuart, and it puzzled me a little that Mark alternated between calling him both names. It seemed surprisingly old-fashioned for gentlemen still to address one another by their surnames, as if they were members of the Garrick Club having a chance encounter at the bar.
In the end I was enlightened. It turned out that his friend is not called Airey, but Hairy. He was called Hairy Stuart in his rock-and-roll days, although now he is seventy this form of address is no longer appropriate.
I was very glad that I had discovered this before I chanced to encounter him.
Sometimes I think that Mark must fit in very nicely on board a North Sea oil rig. It is not for nothing that some of their staff are called Roughnecks.
I have not even gone to work this evening. Mark has gone. You need not feel sorry for him because it is merely a guilt-free opportunity to watch Netflix and eat biscuits at this time of year, and he is doing both. If he gets disturbed half a dozen times during the evening he will be doing very well. Hence it does not need both of us, and I am better occupied frantically trying to meet my calendary deadline.
The poopies are doing well. They are fat and squeaky, one can ask no more of poopies. Also the dogs are finally cured of their digestive malfunction. I am not sure what cured them unless it was Mark’s furiously livid outburst last night, when he showed naughty Roger what he had done and bellowed as if he were a farmer outside Eleven Downing Street. Since then they could not have been better behaved, indeed, their angelic demeanour lasted all the way around our walk this morning, and a chap with a brainless setter cross said how much he envied me their instant obedience. I did not tell him that they had been brutalised into it, obviously, and allowed him to believe that my dogs always line up quietly behind me at the merest whisper of the instruction to Heel.
It will not last long. Even Rosie is beginning to forget her gentle maternal tranquillity, and charged up and down the frozen fell side barking her head off as soon as I was sure that nobody was watching.
I am going to leave you and return to my calendars.
I regret that tomorrow’s diary entry is likely to be very similar to this one.
Perhaps I should just make something up.
