Today is the first day back at work and even though my commute is only down the corridor I’m having trouble re-adjusting. We had a lovely Christmas. We went to Dublin on the ferry which was totally fine despite my memory of traumatic over-crowded crossings in the past, especially since we splashed out and booked a cabin where we could actually stretch out and sleep during the journey. Recommended. And Dublin was lovely and full of family and friends though in retrospect we maybe tried to pack too many things in, all while racing around trying to buy crackers. Oh, the crackers. My sister in law made Christmas dinner and our only job was to bring crackers. We carefully and lovingly chose some ages ago to take to Dublin, and then left them under the bed in London. You’d be surprised at how many places sell out of crackers by 24 December (or maybe you wouldn’t, in fact if you were the man in Dunnes Stores you’d be positively smug about it). In retrospect we probably needn’t have spent a morning looking for crackers but it seemed Very Important at the time especially since I didn’t want to be the flaky youngest child and have people say ‘You had one job‘. I was saying to a friend that if some anthropologist saw us all racing around looking for these important totem items without which the feast cannot take place they would say we’ve barely moved on from cavemen times. But she responded that really all of Christmas is like that: we all fear that if we take away one thing the whole edifice will collapse. Anyway, we got some in the end. Phew.

And then we came back to London and we had cats! Not forever cats: we had two cats staying with us for a few days while their owners went away. I really, really want a cat and was looking forward to having these as trial cats to see how it went. Unfortunately it was a bit of a disaster – for the cats, not us. I’ll do a separate post on them but anyway the main thing is the cats are fine now. Thank God.

In more cheerful news I got some lovely presents – cat slippers, and two perfumes from the Library of Fragrance (Rain and Gin and Tonic).  And I bought myself a few Barbara Pym books and have spent the last week mainly on the sofa, watching The Americans (so good), The Borgias (OK, but it’s no Game of Thrones) and the end of Mad Men Season 7 Part One or whatever it is (picks up after a slow start) and Pitch Perfect (it’s aca-pretty good). And now it’s all dark and cold and we’ve put the Cadbury’s Heroes away and I’ve signed up for a half marathon and I don’t like it. Oh well, only eleven months and 20 days and it’ll be time for Christmas again.