Don’t even start with your complaints, at least not until you’ve heard mine and you’d better make yourself comfortable.  It’s a loooooong list.

Highlight of the week was to have been lunch with my new editor – not even an ITN old boy, just the son of one.  Happily apples don’t fall far from the tree and they certainly hadn’t in this case.  We met for lunch at 12.45 – what is it with restaurants and their 15 minute time slots? – and only stumbled out into the dark as the early-supper-before-the-theatre crowd left.  A thoroughly respectable length of time for a meal but it did make me late for the pub quiz so the team only managed a feeble third without me.

Given the need to be Ahead Of The Game at this time of the year I spent many hours writing my Christmas card envelopes, a task made considerably more difficult by the antics of the bloody cat, who has taken to living in the study, and who was determined to empty the ink bottle over me and the carpet. Having failed despite DOZENS of inventive attempts, she took her revenge the following night by knocking the neatly stacked pile to the floor and puking all over them.

Doubtless she had heard on the radio about Brexit reforms to animal protection laws and thought they would cover her. Wrong, so wrong, Miss Kitty. No turkey for you this year/ever again.

I may have mentioned my choir at Strawberry Hill.  We started off as a few people who fancied a sing-song with our very jolly choirmaster but over the years he has turned into Svengali, a merciless monster and has dragged us, kicking and screaming, into being quite good singers.  God knows why he ever thought it was possible, or why he hasn’t given up  many times along the way, but there we are, happily singing requiems and arias in Latin and German.  Sometimes in tune.

This week we were bullied into taking part in a competition of the musical variety against other choirs.  Having previously performed only in front of our nearest and dearest (A small, forgiving crowd) we were terrified, especially as we were the penultimate of the many choirs to perform so there was ample opportunity to see how much better they all sounded.  However, as we came off stage our pianist was, as they say in sporting circles, over the moon with our performance and given we were the only people to have even attempted any Mozart, we thought that the trophy for ‘Best Classic’ was in the bag which it would have been if the judges had not chosen to define ‘classic’ as a fondly remembered sixties pop song.

Pipped at the post, people.  The final group was made up of local youngsters with various disabilities.  Their singing was not of the first order but boy, was it enthusiastic and did they have fun on stage.  You have never seen people enjoying their moment in the spotlight so much and to seal the deal they ended with a break dancing display.  The audience went wild and obviously they won.  But we’ll be back, winners, and next year we’ll be ready.

So, it’s now verboten to start a sentence with ‘so’.  So, so simple to reduce John Humpries to speechless rage with a single word. So, we were taught at school, was up there in crime level terms with talking in the corridors – but there was a brief halcyon period when its use was considered acceptable, even a little edgy.  A bit Channel 4, slightly beret sporting. The dahlia is in a similar place as we speak but it faces an inevitable return to the compost heap as the moment passes and it is no longer ironic, just passe.  On the plus side  I don’t find ‘so’ remotely as irritating as the awful, thankfully ended vogue for peppering every utterance with ‘like’.

I am reminded of the man who wrote a leader in The Times hidden in  which was the name of his mistress (Was it Peter Jay?  Someone must remember) and James May who was fired for concealing something rude about his editor in a piece in a motoring magazine.  There is a temptation to do something similar with ‘so’ but don’t waste the day searching; in case you haven’t noticed it is no longer June.  We’ve stopped wondering whether it’s too early to cut back the daffodils. No time available for linguistic buggering about.  It is practically Christmas and wrapping must start NOW.

And card writing which HAS to be done with a fountain pen leaving you with indelible stains on your fingers and bleeding eyes from the hours updating your data base with all the hatches, un-matches and dispatches which have happened since last year.  (And – another no-no starter). Too late and too busy now to start a campaign to have slightly fewer, smaller trees in the house – that window of opportunity should have been opened by August.  Absolute latest.

Every shop in Britain has bedecked its windows with rusting tinsel and faltering fairy lights and even the undertakers has got a floral window display with holly and ivy.  That will be a comfort to the festively bereaved, I imagine.  Nothing worse than planning a December funeral surrounded by dusty Easter eggs.

 

You sense bitterness, reader, barely disguised hysteria.  You detect the tell-tale signs that, fingers scraping into the ice, I, like all women, have started the inevitable slide into the annual abyss of rage and despair that is the Festive season.  So even that’s started early.