Today R and I (together or variously):
Received the final Ocado order before Christmas;
Checked the master food plan;
Made a new shopping list;
Unpacked the fridge;
Cleaned the fridge;
Repacked the fridge;
Took the new shopping list to Waitrose;
Got right in the face of the man who flicked a dismissive hand when politely asked if he could let us (me) through the gap he was blocking;
Found and bought everything on the Waitrose list;
Drank coffee and shared an almond croissant;
Went to the Alscot Estate to pick up an order from Monsoon Estates Coffee;
Gratefully accepted a complimentary coffee from them;
Came home vibrating gently, and repacked the fridge again;
Put a crate of beer in the garage to chill;
Dug all the spare bedding out of its hiding places;
Cleaned two bedrooms and a bathroom for the weekend visitors;
Put up the Boy Wonder’s camp bed;
Moved everything extraneous to Christmas that we couldn’t find a better home for into my study;
Macheted a path from the door to my desk through all the extraneous stuff;
Made a lamb biryani for dinner;
Walked off the lamb biryani;
Processed some owl photos from late November;
Collapsed in front of rubbish TV** with a small bucket of red wine.
In nine hours time R will be off to deepest Warwickshire to collect the turkey, and I’ll be packing hampers. There’s still a lot to do, but I’m feeling a kind of liberation in having reached the point at which all the buying that can happen has happened, and all we can do now is work with what we’ve got.
* I photographed these Jacob sheep on the Alscot Estate, where they appeared to be posing for a publicity still for a crime drama. Either that, or they’d taken severe exception to my cheery greeting – “Looking good for Christmas, guys!” – and were busy trying to think up a snippy retort.
** There are many different shades of rubbish TV. Today the Radio Times recommended The Madame Blanc Mysteries Christmas Special – a programme neither of us had ever seen before, but as I said to R, “How bad can it be if the RT recommends it?” Fifteen minutes in we knew the answer to that, and were scrabbling desperately among the sofa cushions for the remote control. We leapt on a More4 re-run of Astrid in Paris as if it were Chekhov, and it’s highly unlikely we’ll ever accept a Radio Times endorsement again.
