NOTHING TO DO...

"Nothing to do and all day to do it in..."

It sounds so blissful, doesn't it? And I'm sure that, given the season, there are plenty who'd look at a statement like that and think "You lucky, lucky so-and-so..." and they'd probably be right as they run around the house making frantic last-minute preparations for the millions who are descending upon them, whilst over-excited children get giddy with the anticipation of that night-time visit from his Santy-ness...

But let's look at this from another angle...

Isn't it rather sad to find ourselves at this time of the year with nothing to do...? Does that not speak volumes of a life hardly well-lived...?

"No man is a failure who has friends..."

Ah well, you see... Now I  don't seem to be very good at that these days... Perhaps this is why tales like that of Ebenezer Scrooge and George Bailey resonate so much with me as I contemplate my old age spent sipping grumpily at a bowl of gruel...

So, instead of all of the frantic giddiness that others have to get through, I'm awake at the crack of dawn, two days before Christmas, and the only thing that I can think to do with my time is rattle out a few pointless sentences in some pages few people care about.

And it's not as if there aren't things that I could do. After all there are no decorations decking our halls, and not one Christmas card had been graced by my penmanship this season, but it's not as if I could complain about a lack of available time rather than a lack of available will.

This year, o best beloved, I simply could not bring myself to be bothered with it all. It all felt too uch like hard work and I was far, far too sad to muster up such jolly thoughts and deeds...

So what, instead, did I do with my less-than-valuable time...?

I read more revelations about Rolf... (Sigh!) What a disappointment he's turning out to be... although my colleague maintains that he's likely to have a seriously lavish Christmas this year, given that he might not get another one at home.

Oh, we can be so very flippant in the office sometimes...

Then I had a sudden 6.45AM revelation and realised that I just had time to make my annual visit to Bedford Falls, which is precisely what I did. I do have to watch it alone because the Beloved tends not to want to watch things which she knows in advance will upset her. Unhappily, the after-effects of the migraine kept her in bed long after the dawn had passed, so a window opened up and once again I was able to join George Bailey and family for my annual treat.

Another excellent trip completed, and the sentimental old sod unpeeled once more from his cynical crusty coating, I returned to the keyboard and rattled out some more nonsense for a while despite having decided last week that a Christmas break might be called for. It's strange really that, having convinced myself that there were no more words left to say this year, they decided that they wanted to keep on coming anyway.

Granted, there's nothing exciting, witty or profound in what I'm churning out, in fact they seem to be little more than a list of stuff that I'm not really getting up to, but come they have and, because they have, they might as well spread their little wings (now that they've earned them) and venture forth out into the world and see where their destiny takes them.

Then the storms came and the winds howled and the rain blatted against the windows and I was suddenly rather pleased that I didn't have to go anywhere, and the day got filled with the small incidents of life that tend to fill everyone's daily lives.

There was the relatively minor tragedy of the postman not delivering a now well overdue Amazon package despite the comforting words which had appeared next to my order "Your order WILL arrive before December 25th" at the beginning of December. Sadly, now it doesn't look as if it's going to... which meant that I had to spend half an hour or so going through the massively complicated process of trying to find out how to report an overdue package. Eventually, though, they did, however, accept that it was missing and sent me out a new one but, sadly, it will now be far too late for Christmas...

And you just know that, in the end, I'll end up with two of the things, (won't I?), and have to send one back...

Meanwhile I had the curious adventure of the missing nubbit when I resurrected the laptop for the first time in a while only to find the battery to be stone flat. Plugging it in, the little protector nubbit which I'd kept for years suddenly disappeared after I carried it back upstairs. One "turning the house over" session later and it fell off the sofa where I'd been sitting which probably proves something or other about the mischievous nature of St Anthony... if you choose to believe in such things.

The afternoon drifted by with the 1978 version of "The Thirty-Nine Steps" which I expected to be awful (and it mostly was), but it kept me amused whilst the Beloved disappeared off to deal with the requirements of the Elves. After this I set about preparing our traditional pre-Christmas post-Solstice meal and boiled a ham for a couple of decades and with that, a marzipan layer being put on the cake, and a couple of quiz shows on TV, my day of having "nothing to do" drifted away into history...