Putting it all away ...

After the jollies of yesterday and the actual birthday tomorrow, much of today involved tidying. First, however, we had the return to the Pilates class, all, I think, rather aware of being rather bulkier round the middle than the last time we bent to our toes. I must have looked eccentric picking my way through the occasional slippy patches of frozen mud in our lane, in my black leggings, red fleecy hat and a massive down gilet in between. I always say I have the shape of a robin...

Which leads me neatly on to one of the photos in the collage. I couldn't bear to take down my Christmas tree before yesterday - I actually find the compulsion to get rid of it all before Epiphany is properly celebrated, and in fact there's no reason to before Candlemas in February - and felt the jolliness of the room was better left till yesterday's wee gathering was over. Today, however, three weeks after putting it up, I dismantled the tree and put it away.

Put like that it sounds much simpler than it actually is. Firstly, I had to make a first foray up the ladder to the loft, lower down the heavy cardboard box that holds the tree (I used a rope for that, belayed over the banister at the top of the ladder), and bring down the big Tesco's bag that we use for transporting smaller items up and down. I lost the elastic band for one set of branches (if you've done one of these artificial jobs you'll know what I mean), but retrieved one the post had dropped in the porch the other day instead. I realised once more that we've lost one of the small glitter balls and wondered idly where it had rolled to.

My photos show two of the originals, without which it wouldn't be my tree. The fragile glass baubles came from Woolworth's for Christmas 1970; one of the ones with the indentations in the side has broken bits rattling inside but still looks good when it's up. Their box is on its last legs; I'll need to find another one to fit its tray into. The robin was given to my boys when they were wee, and needs its feet wired onto a branch to keep it upright. I love it - it's life-size and looks much more real from a distance.

Now the boxes are back in the loft (more belaying from above) and the cards are all down from the various places I deploy them (stuck between books and CDs is a good way to display them) and piled neatly for me to see who didn't send one this year: have they died? Gone beyond card-writing? Always tricky - especially when every day brings news of some other famous person's death, usually at about ... my age. 

A last act of today was to organise - in a bit of a rush - the necessary info for visas for our forthcoming holiday. The mail containing the appication form was in Himself's spam folder ...

And then we had a lovely meal of truffle pasta with chopped peppers, mushrooms, garlic and courgette, with a paste of tomato purée and miso and olive oil, followed by more Christmas cake. And by then, all the good of the morning's exercise had gone out of the window. 

Tough.