Dearie me, I am very sorry to announce that I have encountered a very tiresome Christmas card-related difficulty.
Last night, at around two in the morning, when I was slowly chugging my way through Christmas cards and beginning to feel wearily gritty-eyed, the printer packed up.
It was a problem we have had before. It announced, smugly and infuriatingly, in flashing letters on its little screen, that the ink tray was full.
The ink tray is a reservoir into which printers tip vast quantities of their colossally expensive ink in order for it to be thrown away at some hugely inconvenient moment. When the ink tray is full, the printer switches itself off and refuses to work. Then the frustrated printer-user has two options: either to send the whole lot off back to Epsom for three weeks to be cleaned and repaired at some massive cost which is almost as much as the cost of the printer in the first place, or alternatively you can download some software for twenty quid which tells the printer that the ink tray is empty, and then you can clean the ink tray out yourself, which is a shocking messy job and which left Mark with black hands for the whole of one Christmas.
The problem is that you can only do the last one once, and we have done it. It is a one-hit fix.
Hence I was left with one very undesirable option, and eventually, after a late-night dog-emptying and a yawning sort of shower, I decided that I would just bite the bullet and order a new one, which I did.
It will not arrive until tomorrow. Probably not until late tomorrow.
This meant that no more Christmas cards could be printed today.
Fortunately some were finished, and when I say finished, I mean printed. There was a lot of fastening together and glue and glitter still to be done, not to mention the whole business of actually writing on them, shoving them in envelopes and then posting them.
In the end I managed to get the first few done, which was the important thing because some are going abroad, although I would be very surprised if they reach abroad before Christmas, but I am getting past caring. The rest are drying on the desk, spread out all over the place.
You’ve got glitter all over your face, did you know? said the lady in the Post Office, helpfully, when I went in to post the foreign ones.
This did not surprise me.
Since the cards could not be done I dashed off to turn my energies to some other urgently pressing Christmas shenanigans. There is no shortage of these. I made some biscuits, rather guiltily, because I haven’t made biscuits for ages, and cooked some pigs in blankets, and turned my hand to the first batch of the Christmas chocolates.
Fortunately, Jack was at home, because chocolates have got to be done quickly before they start to set. There is a window of a very few minutes to get eighty chocolates scooped into their chocolate cases and carefully patted down before you are left with a pile of dried-up crumbly chocolate.
Jack washed up and spread out sweet cases and patted chocolate very helpfully.
I don’t mind saying that I was massively relieved to have made a start on the chocolates. I need to have them ready to post by Monday morning.
I dashed round, wiping chocolate and icing sugar off everything, and hastily hurling things into my bag ready for work.
Oliver and Emily turned up just after I had left.
At that moment the taxi rank suddenly became busy. It if half past five in the morning, and I have just walked in at home. I can’t now remember what sage observations I was about to make about Oliver and Emily, they are lost for ever.
I am going to bed.
