I am not on the taxi rank.
I am sitting at home under the Christmas tree, eating Christmas chocolates from its branches. I should not be doing this because of getting fat, but at this stage of Christmas I do not care any more, not about anything. Mark has gone off to sit on the taxi rank and watch a film, and Oliver has commandeered my office for wrapping his Christmas presents.
I have wrapped all of mine.
I am feeling very virtuous and relieved.
I am also absolutely desperate to go to bed. This should be an especially lovely experience tonight because in the middle of everything else, it was also Clean Sheets Day.
I do not know how we have managed to organise clean sheets and hoovering in the middle of everything else, but we have.
We have cleaned the conservatory. Mark did it mostly. He brought in his car washing kit, which is an huge brush on a stick, although he just dipped it in a bucket rather than attaching the power washer to the other end, which might have made a bit of a mess, and washed the windows.
It looks quite astonishingly better, letting in tons of daylight, although I do not think the poor massacred plants are liking it very much, I can practically feel them sulking and glaring every time I walk through the door. I do not think they would hesitate to eat me if I sat down and went to sleep.
I went to Booths. This was horrid, the plants have got nothing to grumble about, they were just hanging about the conservatory having bits hacked off them. They were not battling their way through an exhausted throng of bad-tempered old ladies and trolley-wielding lunatics to seize the last cucumber.
It is a dangerous undertaking. I had several narrow escapes when I snatched my fingers away just in time before some other trolley cannoned into them. There was a little boy bawling by the till. He was trying to do something with his coat, and his mother, who looked as though she would like to parcel him up in it and post him home by second-class mail, was trying to ignore him. In the end he dropped his coat on the floor and sat on it and sobbed, and I could cheerfully have joined him.
I do not know if I got everything that we needed, and frankly by the end I really did not care. I know that I only went in to get some ethical salad for tomorrow night’s dinner and it cost me a hundred and twenty quid, so either I was not concentrating properly or the cost of importing things from Spain has really gone up.
I staggered home with several bags of shopping and a headache.
Mark was unloading firewood out of the car. He had been at the farm hauling firewood in the rain, so I did not really feel that he would be a good audience for a long whinge about the difficulties of choosing olives.
There were some things that we needed from Marks and Spencer, but I sent Oliver for those, and in the end they had sold out of practically everything anyway. A weary shop assistant informed him that they don’t stock smoked salmon,
Elspeth and her family are coming for dinner tomorrow night. They come every Christmas Eve, so it is not at all a surprise. Number One Daughter and her family are coming as well. I am looking forward to it very much but of course can’t now think about anything except the best timings for putting meat in the oven, and whether or not we have got puddings that everybody will like. Fortunately I made my Christmas cake ages ago, and have been sloshing brandy over it ever since, and saved myself a lot of decorational faffing about when somebody on the mighty Internet suggested that if you soak cherries in brandy and shove them on the top with drifts of icing sugar they look very middle class and it takes about two minutes, so we have now got a jug full of brandy-drenched cherries awaiting the moment.
I think we are ready to start cooking tomorrow. The conservatory is clean and tidy, the poopies are going to be imprisoned upstairs, it is all going to be fine.
Mark is just coming home. I am going to go and talk to him.
It is almost upon us.
I will see you tomorrow…
