I am very sorry to have missed last night’s update. So many adventures have happened in the last few days in the end I just gave up and collapsed and that was the end of being a diarist.
However today is another day, I am home and happy, and have got so much to tell you.
We stayed at the Midland. It is the most splendid, civilised, perfect place to stay. When I win the lottery I will move in and live there and sleep between their crisp white sheets with huge feather pillows for the rest of my life.
We had a lot of messing about to get our luggage out of the car and in through the huge revolving doors, but suddenly there were waistcoated doormen everywhere, loading everything on to shining brass trolleys. The lobby is huge, with a glass ceiling and beautiful marble floor, and the most enormous Christmas tree in the middle, and a wafting scent of cinnamon and oranges that they must get out for Christmas every year, and Oliver sighed with happiness and said: “Now I feel like it’s Christmas,” and we all felt the same.
Outside were the Christmas markets, scented candles and jugs of beer and spiced mulled wine, and barbecued German sausages, and a whole pig roasting on a spit, and the ice rink and the red-and-cream shelter-skelter, and I looked and looked at everything until I felt as though my head was just full of glorious rich smells and amazing things to see.
Inside there were enormous squashy sofas, and scented pine cones in little glasses on the tables, and thick carpets on the corridors, and a grand piano playing: and lots of people who I love, thirty of us, all there especially for the occasion, all beautifully dressed and perfumed with shining hair and silky skirts and looking polished and lovely.
Then there was the Chinese restaurant, and the owner so excited that we were coming that he had come in on his night off to see us, and he hugged us all, and we hugged him back and cried a bit, and heard about his children, and he admired ours, and we glowed with the happiness of seeing him again: and the food was glorious, the nicest of everything, in gorgeous savoury sauces and sweet sticky meats, and fresh fruit, and the manager brought us the wine and wouldn’t hear of payment for it.
I looked round the restaurant, at all the people who had given up their night to be with us, and with one another, and felt so happy and proud and glad with it all that I could have burst.
After that the walk across the city, all of us together, grown-ups and all the children who come with us every year, all a bit taller, from six-foot tall James, slim and floppy-haired and grinning awkwardly, to the solid four-year-olds, belting along excitedly, and the pretty girls, getting surer of their own beauty every year.
Then the pantomime: the best in the world, we thought happily afterwards, having shouted our heads off and laughed at the wicked Ugly Sisters, and gasped at the white ponies and the fairy carriage, and not one of us saw how Cinderella’s magical ball dress appeared, it must have been real magic, because she twirled across the stage in rags and right in front of our very eyes she was suddenly wearing a stunning rose-pink and gold ball gown.
At the interval we drank champagne. The theatre was holding a game in the bar where volunteers got whipped-cream pies in their faces, and of course everybody in our party wanted to volunteer. Ritalin Boy got an absolute face-full of cream and had to be hastily wiped clean and ushered back to his seat just in time for the second half.
Then there was the magical ball, and Jayne Torville and Christopher Dean skating their wonderful, beautiful, heart-wrenching Bolero: and the ghost and the Ugly Sisters scared one another, and Buttons and rascally, naughty Dandini made us ache laughing. Then Prince Charming found Cinderella and everything was all right, and we sighed with the niceness of being so very full of lovely things.
At the hotel the boys charged round the corridors together and shot one another with their Nerf guns, and the girls curled up on sofas and talked about films, and the grown-ups sat in the bar and laughed and drank, and ate chocolates, until eventually exhaustion crept over us and we wandered slowly off to bed. I was the first, I think, and Mark crept in beside me hours later, and in the morning we held hands and drank coffee in bed and laughed, and told each other all about it.
Then breakfasts, and packing, and last explorations of the Christmas markets, and Mark and I walked down to the House of Fraser store, splendidly lit and solid bastion of sophistication. We tried on perfumes and gazed at fur coats in the windows, until eventually it was time to go.
We called over to my parents’ house to drop off their Christmas presents and see my brother and sister, and suddenly realised how exhausted we were, and in the end Mark and I had a bed on the floor, which was funny and giggly, and we didn’t get home until this morning.
We are home. I am wearing lovely soft Christmas clothes, and my warm sheepskin slippers, and we have eaten a whole block of lovely, runny Brie and crackers, with mince pies and satsumas and grapes, and tomorrow it will be Christmas Eve.
Life is good.
