Yet again I am not at work.
I can hardly credit this shocking slacking.
It is very pleasant indeed.
We did not go to the Indian restaurant tonight. This evening we loafed about at home, watching a film on Netflix that had good reviews but Mark had worked out the end before it was even halfway through, and so after that we just watched incredulously, hardly able to believe that it had such a predictable outcome.
It was called The Secret Scripture and was about an old lady and a psychiatrist in Ireland.
Ireland is a Hot Topic at the moment, because I am about to become Irish.
Actually I am not becoming Irish. It would appear that I have always been Irish, a bit, anyway, but it turns out that I have the right to claim Irish citizenship if I want to, and so I have. This is because my mother’s father, whom I never met, unless you count an exceedingly un-nerving encounter with a startlingly credible spiritualist about twenty years ago, was from County Longford.
I do not want to go and live in Ireland but you never know when things might go badly wrong here and the current government does not exactly fill me with confidence. Also if you are on an aeroplane, apparently hijackers the world over release Irish citizens first, presumably out of sympathy for the potato famine or something. I am not planning to go on any aeroplanes either, but since there can be all sorts of surprising twists and turns to life I am not assuming that I never will, terrifying machines as they are, and it is as well to keep one’s options open.
In any case if ever we go to Europe it will get me through Passport Control quickly.
Not that we are going to go to Europe either.
I looked up my long-deceased grandfather’s place of residence on a map this afternoon. It looks like a splendid sort of place to be a sheep, but a little limited for any other kind of appeal.
Also, according to his birth certificate, his mother’s maiden name was Bojs, which is a rather depressing indicator of the levels of literacy amongst Irish civil servants at the time, which was 1898 so perhaps it is excusable. I turned the certificate upside down and squinted at it, but there was no other conceivable interpretation, so I wrote that.
With all of this in mind we watched the film about Ireland this evening. It looked a bit like North Cumbria, and all the nurses looked the way real nurses looked when I was a child, none of this blue pyjamas rubbish that they all seem to wear now, and they all seemed to live on porridge, so I thought it seemed all right, maybe when I eventually brave an aeroplane it will be to go and visit.
Apart from that it has been a busy day. I have rushed about from the minute all of the menfolk departed this morning, which felt like first thing but was eleven o’clock really, because we don’t do mornings in here. I fed them all on an assortment of sausages, packed them pork pies for their lunches, and waved them off. Then I took the dogs out for an exceedingly chilly and blustery walk, there is snow on the fells and everywhere was frozen, and came home to be what the Cambridge dictionary is allowing to be called a Tradwife. I am cross with Cambridge about this, you should not let all of these made up words be written down as if they really meant something, the English language should be preserved in its sanctified purity and I think they are letting the side down.
A Tradwife appears to be a person who goes shopping, prepares dinners and cleans up, which was what I did, as well as sawing up a pile of firewood, because we have burned the whole of the massive pile in the conservatory. I am going to have to think hard about firewood again, because Mark is leaving on Sunday.
I will have to work something out.
It is getting jolly cold.
