I don’t know why they call them spoilers really.
My opinion is that it improves a story very much if I already know what is going to happen in the end. When this is the case I can just enjoy the telling of it without worrying about the outcome, which is the way I greatly prefer it.
I started writing this and then realised that there are some people will not hear The Archers until the omnibus edition on Sunday morning, and thus felt that I had better put the warning at the beginning, so if you are one of those people you had better skip this bit, because in the next paragraph I am going to share some good news.
I was just going to remark how very pleased I was that things had come out all right for the Grundy family after all. I had been sad for poor old Joe Grundy, and it was a small happiness in my afternoon to discover, just before the Afternoon Play that the scriptwriters had not decided to condemn him to a sad homeless Christmas, and Eddie and Clarrie to the horrors of a one bedroom flat without turkeys.
I am up-to-date with the goings-on in Ambridge because I have had a very pleasant day listening to Radio Four and doing house things. Mark went off this morning to rescue the youth hostel from its watery misfortune, and I stayed at home.
I got our things ready to drive to York tonight, and then I made cakes and mayonnaise and Christmas chocolates and listened to The Archers, and the news, and to an Indian doctor on Desert Island Discs who wanted to be a rock star, and an programme about dying and the Afternoon Play.
My favourite, apart from The Archers, obviously, was the programme about dying, which was another doctor, not the rock star one, talking about what it was like to die. Obviously she was not talking from exact personal experience, because she had not died herself, but she had watched lots of people dying and therefore probably knew what she was talking about.
It was very interesting, because it was just like the way our old dog died, who waited until Lucy got home, because she was his favourite person, and then instantly died on her knee. Anyway, it sounds as though people do the same, we decide when we are going to die, and quite often we die when the person who has been patiently sitting with us goes out of the room to the loo, and then they feel guilty for ever afterwards but it is not their fault because this is what we do. The doctor did not know why, because obviously it was not something she could ever ask anybody about.
I felt a bit regretful afterwards, because it was the sort of programme I would have liked to talk about with Mark, but of course he was at work so I could not even ring him up and interrupt to tell him.
I have stopped making a Christmas cake, because it always hangs around uneaten until halfway through February, but I have discovered that if I soak fruit in cognac all year round and then make it into cupcakes with cinnamon and ginger and black treacle, they vanish out of the tin and into Mark at enormous speed. So far this Christmas I have made fifty of them and they are going down nicely. They are best if you spoon a little bit of the fruity cognac into each one after they have come out of the oven. We eat them at work, but perhaps we shouldn’t.
I had an early start at doing them because we had got to get up in the middle of the night so that Mark could go and help with the flood clean up. The clean up organiser rang us up at eight o’ clock to see if he had set off, which made me very cross, because of course he hadn’t, we were still drinking coffee in bed. He sent a text with the same question ten minutes later, which made me so cross I wanted to phone him up and tell him to get lost, but Mark wouldn’t let me, so I made some sandwiches for him, and he hiked off into the grey morning, which upset his dog, who had to stay at home, very much.
It upset me quite a bit as well, because apart from not having him around to talk to, I had got to manage on my own all day, doing things like bringing logs in and washing up after myself. Quite often when I am cooking Mark keeps me company and does the washing up as I go along, but today he wasn’t there, and I had got to do it myself.
In fact I didn’t do it all, because I remembered at three o’ clock that I was supposed to go for a haircut, so I piled the last of the dishes up in a stack on the side of the sink and dashed off to Kendal in a hurry, and when I got back Mark was home and helpfully washed them for me.
It was nice to have him home, and he said that that he would go and help with flood mopping up again on Monday and then stop, because it will mostly be done by then. This was a happy thought, because we will be able to get on with our real lives again.
We went to work after that, where we were supposed to be staying until four, but at nine o’ clock the Fates intervened and the fan belt snapped on my taxi. We had known it was on the way out, but not done anything about it because of Autoparts being flooded, apart from just hoping it would last, but it didn’t.
I couldn’t work any more after that, so we decided that we would both stop, and went home and collected our smart clothes and set off in the camper van for York and Lucy. We are secretly very pleased about this, because now we will be there in plenty of time to have some sleep before the carol service starts, so we will not have gritty eyes and short tempers. Anyway, it would have been horrible to have had to drive all night after a busy day, so perhaps the Gods are still looking after us.
Us and Joe Grundy.
