Goodness me, it is chilly.
It is not good for virtue-signalling to sit on the taxi rank with the engine running and the heater on, but that is what I am doing. There are worse things than being wicked, and being really cold is one of them.
I have been so cold that I have eaten my entire taxi picnic in about half an hour flat. This is supposed to last me until two in the morning but I ate it in order to generate either some immediate heat or a layer of protective fat cells, either would do. It is not nice being cold.
It has been a weekend of deathly taxi-rank quiet. It is exactly the time of year when everybody is frantically raiding the dregs of their credit cards to purchase the last cardigan in Marks and Spencer for Aunty Hilda, no, I thought you’d bought her one, well when I have I had time to go to the shops? I asked you two weeks ago if you’d do it and you said you would, I knew you weren’t listening, you never are. You forgot the Christmas cards until the last minute, it’s a good job I reminded you. I suppose I’ll just have to do it myself as usual, and she’s your aunty anyway.
Any household that has not had that conversation during the last couple of weeks is probably Muslim.
Anyway, the upshot of it is that nobody has got any money left, certainly not for disappearing up to the frozen north for romantic drinking weekends, and so the taxi rank is very peaceful. I have hardly been disturbed all night so far.
I am not sorry that it has been quiet, because the days have been filled with so much frantic running around that it is nice to come out to work for an evening’s rest.
I had somehow thought that post-Manchester the whole Christmas adventure would just gently peter out, but rather to my horror, somehow it hasn’t, and I have been drowning in a flurry of forgotten tasks. I am still ignoring most of them, like the ironing, which has been carted off to the attic and dumped, but the rest of it, like poopy-care, is demanding my attention.
Also we have got guests coming.
Of course this is not a nuisance, we like having visitors, but it involves some logistical complications and they have had to be resolved.
The first was that if we are going to have ten people come and join us for an evening of drink and revelry, we are going to have to expand out into the conservatory, because there is not room in the house, not even if somebody sits on the cooker.
The conservatory, we realised, had been so thoroughly left to its own devices that it had actually become a jungle. We had become used to fighting our way in through the back door, and then again to reach the kitchen, but there was most certainly no room for visitors.
There wasn’t really room for us.
To give you some perspective, one massive leaf on the Swiss Cheese plant stretched out at six feet long, overhanging the table and blocking off a whole corner of the room. There were lots of these leaves.
We considered it this morning, and Mark said that he was going to Do Something whilst I was faffing about upstairs with wrapping paper and scissors.
It has taken him most of the day, but he has hacked it all back. The Biggest Geranium In The World is now massively reduced, he has left the trunk and a few branches, but you can now see the washing machine underneath it.
The conservatory is suddenly very much bigger. You can see all of the vileness in corners where we have not been able to reach to clean for a couple of years. We are going to have to do something about that before our visitors turn up on Christmas Eve. It is not pretty.
We have also got to address the planning issue of there being a large, booby-trapped poopy corral in between the kitchen and the living room. This can’t be left there because there are Unpleasantnesses regularly appearing to upset the unwary.
We will all be Unwary after an evening of wine-quaffing, and I am found of our living room carpet.
We have not quite decided what to do about that. Mark’s suggestion involved the creation of four new large Christmas tree ornaments out of gaffer tape and anything we could find biting our toes.
I am very tempted.
It is tomorrow’s job
