I am feeling very virtuous.
Well, I am feeling moderately virtuous. We didn’t get up until lunchtime, and Mark took the dogs with him so I didn’t go on my walk, but apart from that abject failure of responsible fitness I am not doing too badly.
I have ironed everything that we wore in Manchester.
I mean every single thing, down to the last handkerchief. Obviously I don’t mean socks and knickers and all that sort of thing, nobody in their right mind irons those, what a waste of a life that would be.
I mean every shirt, every pair of trousers, everything. The whole lot is newly flattened. Ours and Oliver’s. There was a very lot of it all. We have all been very dressed up this week.
I speeded the process up by hauling the iron downstairs and doing it in the kitchen, where I dragged the enormous rotary iron out of the cupboard and fed the trouser legs through that.
You can only feed the trouser legs through it, you have got to stop once you get to the top bit of trouser, because otherwise you just finish up with more creases than you started off with, but just making the legs flat first helped things to go a jolly lot faster.
I was listening to a book written by a therapist and pondering about the function of the amygdala and in the end I got a bit of a production line going whilst I was thus occupied, and it all went quite smoothly, filling the drying rack with neatly-pressed flat clothes to be taken upstairs and neatly hung back in their places.
It still took me all afternoon, though.
I had the house to myself. Oliver was at work, and Mark had gone off to the shed to bring back firewood. We are going to have to heat the house hard over the next week. Every bedroom needs to be warm, right through to the attic, and so does the conservatory. I have left all of the doors open so that the heat spreads, and it all feels warm and comfortable, except I know that I am wearing my warm winter vests and also am frantically busy. I hope that nobody wants to sit around reading books in their underwear.
I would like to sit around reading books, although probably not in my underwear.
My dressing gown, perhaps.
Biscuit tin
I had only just finished ironing, and was just carrying everything upstairs to put it away, when Oliver and Mark reappeared, and we all had cups of tea before Mark buzzed off to the taxi rank.
I have been given some splendid Christmas presents, by the way, the taxi was quite weighed down last night. There is a hamper filled with all sorts of treasure, and some chocolates. A farmer gave me some sausages and some beef burgers, and Abdul excelled himself with a magnificent tin of biscuits with a rotating, lit-up lid, covered in galloping reindeer, that plays We Wish You A Merry Christmas.
I have played it a lot, it makes me smile every single time.
Once Mark had buzzed off, Oliver came up to help tidy the attic.
It was a shocking mess.
We folded things and hung things and tidied everything away neatly.
It is a dreadful glory-hole, stuffed full of things that I ought to throw away but can’t in case they come in handy. I am going to have some Ruthless Days next year, and put it all on eBay.
I was very pleased with myself when it was all done. Jack’s dad will be staying in it next week, so it needed to be tidy. It looks a bit like an old-fashioned housemaid’s bedroom as it is, I am going to have to try and make it look a bit more luxurious, although I don’t quite know how. The bed is comfortable, and it is warm, but it looks vaguely spartan.
Once it was done there was still a bit of time before Mark finished work, so we came downstairs to start wrapping Christmas presents.
We are a big family. It is going to take ages. So far we have done about a dozen, and realised, to our horror, that several things that we ordered have not yet turned up.
It is now two in the morning, and so that is going to be tomorrow’s problem.
I am going to go to bed.
