I have booked Christmas.
Obviously I do not mean to say that I have telephoned Father Christmas and spent ten minutes listening to his taped list of choices, Press One for advance Christmas Present Ordering, Two for questions about Reindeer Care, Three to notify us of any sleigh-parking issues at your property, Four for Customer Complaints relating to last year’s presents, and Five to tell us you don’t have a chimney. To return to the main menu and listen to some taped chortling please press Zero.
I did not do that, although it might have been quicker and mildly less tiresome if I had done.
In fact what I have done is booked the pantomime tickets and the hotel.
The credit card is not only limping now, it has taken such a savage battering it could barely drag itself back into my purse.
I have not looked at the bill. It would only upset me.
Nevertheless I am feeling light of heart. All that we need to do is to work our socks off between now and Christmas, and a jolly time will be able to be had by one and all.
I am going to have to start painting the Advent Calendars soon. I should have started ages ago, but I haven’t, which I am going to regret in the panic of November. Instead I occupied all of yesterday afternoon becoming contentedly sticky with a lump of clay and a Barbie doll.
Barbie has now developed a large nose and chin, a normal sized waistline and some huge flappy ears. She is going to be an Ugly Fairy.
I spent a very entertained hour on the taxi rank the other night, examining other people’s pictures of Ugly Fairies, and contemplating my own thoughts on the subject. I confess to being a very inexpert clay modeller, so they might be a bit rough and ready, but I will enjoy doing them. Also I thought that it might be a good idea to decide that they are meant to be ugly, since that was likely to be the inevitable outcome.
I do wish I could send you a photograph.
In other news, I did not do any ugly fairy-creation today because my friends Kate and Kevin dropped in for an afternoon of tea-drinking and chat. I was very pleased about this, it was the most joyous shirk. We talked so long that I was late for work, which was entirely my own fault since they kept saying We Must Be Going and I kept saying Oh, By The Way Did You Know, and kept them talking for another half an hour.
It is all very well having a life packed to the seams with interesting things to do, like building arches and fairies, but it is also very happy just to loaf about and talk sometimes.
We are doing a lot of talking on the taxi rank at the moment, because everybody is still very grumpy about the rascally Uber drivers who have invaded Windermere. I think I told you that I have been delegated to represent everybody at a meeting with our twerp of an MP next week. I am not especially enthralled at the prospect of this, not least because I am entirely certain that it will be the most ghastly waste of time. Still, I have promised my presence, and at least it gives me a chance to go to Marks and Spencer.
In the meantime I am busily listening to everybody’s opinions in order to ensure that I explain them to the MP in sufficient detail. Actually it would be rather wiser to omit most of the detail, because a very great deal of it would be most unfit for anybody else’s ears, taxi drivers not being the most scrupulously woke in their opinions.
The endless talking has meant that it has got rather late. I have been writing in hasty snatches in between prolonged outbursts of rabbiting, of which I am as guilty as everybody else, and so I am going to draw this to a close.
I am all talked out.
