Happy New Year

Before I make any resolutions, I have to deal with the same old problems – washing in the machine – clothes in the tumble dryer and hanging on the line in my utility room – all to be dealt with. Papers all over my office desk, ditto. And the last banana sitting miserably in the fruit bowl while a scrap of mousetrap remains in the fridge. And so the domestic goddess has to do her stuff before doing anything interesting.

It has been a hectic week with almost non-stop comings and goings. We have been to M’s brother on Christmas Day – mentioned already; M’s sister on 29th December, with the other siblings, for lunch and the evening. Always good fun; I’m sure I would have enjoyed having brothers and sisters, though at the time, I might have thought it nicer to have all the benefits of being an only child. We have had daughter, son-in-law and 5 year old, from midnight on 27th till post breakfast on 29th, and son and daughter-out-law with children 5 and 8 from 30th December until yesterday. We also went, together with kids, to neighbours, for drinks on New Year’s Eve.

The kids (mine, not theirs) got pressed into service to sort out technical matters in the household. My broadband activation was due to take place on 28th and by good luck (after a glitch in the ordering) the filters arrived on the right day. After our turkey and nut roast lunch (recipe available on request) my daughter, K, who has also used Virgin for her own connection, supervised the connections of filters and modem and did the necessary to the software. Amazingly, we were on line the same day. However there were intermittent interruptions, and I’m still not getting a 100 per cent service. My son carried out similar supervisory operations while M tidied up the connections underneath my desk. As par for the course, a fair amount of mess was created when M took out the giant drill, to make bigger holes in my worktop for the filters, etc. to pass through. Before creating a second turkey and nut roast meal (most of the younger generation in our two families are semi-vegetarian), I had to vacuum up a great deal of sawdust, and, up to now, my discs and small tools haven’t been put back in the right places.

My son also set up the digital radio for us and programmed in One Word. I listened to it briefly before the household descended, one morning, and after a couple of minutes decided it was the most unutterable tosh, filled with such stuff as ‘she looked at him entreatingly …’ and ‘his lips thrust down on hers violently …’and so on. However, I had to carry on listening just to find out what it was. Could it be Barbara Cartland or similar? Turned out to be a Mills and Boon creation. I feel reassured that I made the right decision in never, never approaching them with my stuff.

Unfortunately, daughter has grumbled at me for having 10,000 emails in my in-box. Dutifully, I started to erase them, working backwards from 2003 and stopping to read them, which slowed things down. Things improved when I attacked emailers such as Friends Reunited and erased them in one stroke. However, while son was looking at something else in my office (and possibly distracting me) I managed to erase the last four months' worth of emails. I'm not yet sure how much this matters, but no doubt I'll find out. The other irritation is that I have to get back into sites that require my ID in order to access them. So far, I've got Irene (Irene: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/blacks.house/) to re-invite me to Guildford Writers, and I've managed to change the ID on this blog. I wanted my other Clara connecti0n left, so that I had an alternative means of going on line (for the time being) but M removed the other connection in an excess of zeal. He's going to get a splitter (is that the right word?) to reinstate Clara pro tem, after I did a fair bit of grumbling.

Today, it’s cold out, but the sun’s streaming through the trees. It seems a good way to start the new year. New Year resolutions will take place in a few days.