On a roll

The constant slight keening noise issuing from R over the past couple of days has finally registered strongly enough to convince me that it might be sensible to at least pay lip service to some Christmas preparations. So this morning we whisked round Broadway and bought most of the contents of the Cotswold Trading store. I assume we did, anyway, unless the credit card receipt was written in pesos or Japanese yen.

After a highly necessary refuelling stop at Leaf & Bean, we came home and cleared and cleaned the conservatory - which would have been a quicker process if it hadn't involved me needing to clean a large graphite stain out of the pale rug (HG Grease Away is your friend there, should you ever need to know - or murdering the family sketch artist before the damage happens, which would definitely be quicker). Then we put up the Christmas tree. "You're going to decorate it now??" said R, who by this point was clearly regretting having engaged my attention. Yes, I was. Because now I was on a roll.

Applying two sets of lights to the tree almost reduced me to tears, and very nearly brought us to divorce, but after that things improved: R made dinner while I hid the deficiencies in the lighting behind several lengths of gold ribbon, and after we'd eaten I hung the baubles. Back in the day, bauble hanging was always accompanied by a Christmas music and a large quantity of celebratory fizz, but these days I'm too old and cross to be dancing around the tree with a Champagne flute in one hand and a bauble in the other - which is probably as well, given that I'm also extremely clumsy. Luckily, the only bauble I actually dropped this evening turned out - to my great surprise, because I'd always thought it was a glass one - to be made of plastic; and even more luckily, when it bounced off the wooden floor of the conservatory I caught it, before its trajectory could bring it into violent confrontation with the tree. I'm sad that no-one else was there at the time to witness the catch, but happy to think that somewhere up in the ether my Dad, who had a brilliant eye and could play almost any ball game, might have been grinning in approval at my belated flowering as a slip fielder.