It is over.
It is as over as a very finished thing.
This Christmas has ceased to be.
Oliver has gone away back to Bath, and I have taken the Christmas decorations down.
I have not taken all of them down, some things are just too difficult. I have taken all of the sparkly things down. The poor naked Christmas tree has been left standing there, bewildered, wondering where all its finery has gone. I am afraid that its next adventure is going to be a hot and smoky one.
I will have to manage that tomorrow.
Oliver finally left at about lunchtime today, having attended his online lecture and finished the last of his packing. He left his room remarkably tidy, as I discovered when I went in to strip out the sheets and towels. I was very pleased with myself for remembering these, and not accidentally ignored them for weeks because they are upstairs and completely out of sight. Today I have done it all straight away, what a virtuous housewife I am.
Somehow last night’s idleness seems to have energised and motivated me, and I have spent the day rushing about like a mad thing. I have taken the spare chairs out of the conservatory and lugged them back up the three flights of stairs back to the attic. I have taken down the decorations, wiped them all lovingly, wrapped them in tissue paper and laid them carefully in their boxes. This is a present for Future Me. They will be beautiful and lovely when I go and dig them out this year.
At the last minute Oliver remembered a new Christmas decoration he had bought in Manchester. He said that he had seen it and thought I would like it. It was a leopard skin Christmas pudding, and he was absolutely right, I was enchanted. It will have pride of place next year.
The boxes of decorations needed lugging up all of the stairs as well
There are a lot of stairs in our house, which could be described as a sort of inverse bungalow. Bungalows have all of their rooms laid out comfortably on ground level, stretching themselves and sprawling in leisurely fashion over the widest possible area they can manage to occupy, like a husband in bed.
The rooms in our house are stacked one on top of the other, in a large pile which would teeter if it were not for the presence of Mark’s house next door, and the holiday cottage on the other side, whose very convenient dustbin I have filled today with all of the accumulated Christmas clutter.
I reorganised the freezer and tidied up the fridge, both of which had become full of huge boxes and tins, most of which seemed to contain nothing more than a single forlorn biscuit or mince pie. I washed everything, and organised everything, and then I hoovered and dusted the bedrooms and put the Clean Sheets on our bed.
It is, of course, Monday again.
I mopped up gallons and gallons of poopy accidents. We keep a bucket which is full of practically neat bleach and just keep swabbing the floor clean, roughly every ten minutes. I accidentally trod on the black poopy when I was coming down the stairs, and he was peacefully asleep on one of them, snoring blissfully in the dark.
It took a lot of remorseful cuddling to put that one right.
They will be old enough to go in a few days. One of them is being kept until the twenty third because it is going to be some child’s birthday present, but apart from that, they will be drifting away over the weekend, and I am not exactly sorry. They are delightful companions, charging about joyfully and rolling around the floor in noisily fluffy tussles, but they are tiresome. We blockaded them in the kitchen last night whilst we watched our film in the living room, and we had to turn the volume up to drown out the heartbroken lonely whimpers. Four little heads poked longingly over the top of the bit of board we had used to prevent their ingress, and they sobbed, grief stricken at their exclusion.
We had no intention of letting them in because of the leaks on the carpet, so eventually we booted Rosie back out into the kitchen to keep them company. She was not at all pleased about this and had to be bribed with half a dozen chocolate Freddos from the Christmas tree.
I have tried to housetrain them to go and wee on a Puppy Pad.
The attached picture shows you what happened to it.
