Chaos Rules

 Christmas dinner with the Rackhams

In the run up to Christmas there is a whole bunch of extra stuff to get through and I must admit that I am not as organized and efficient as I once was. Keeping my eye on the ball is getting harder and going off on little tangents is becoming more a matter of sliding standards than anything else. I do make a list of jobs to do on the page in my diary but getting through the list is more luck than judgement these days.

Trying to get ahead of my self this week has been a total failure because I am still running round like a headless chicken. The only things that I have got done are pampering appointments in a desperate effort to make the best I possible can make of my appearance which considering the rapidly crumbling exterior requires input for other parties. Ursula, who managed to find enough surviving eyelashes and eyebrows to tint and shape. James, in Divine Nails who crammed me in to a ‘drop in’ spot for an infill of my acrylic nails and one of my usual slightly off the wall mixed colour choices and my dear saint of a friend Helen who lives literally over the road, managed to come over earlier that my original appointment. Helen is such a laugh; it always cheers me up to chatter away with her whilst she works her magic. Helen is the complete opposite of me and manages to look after her own house in a manner that I could only dream of; her home is always neat and tidy even though it has more than double the people living there and loads of visitors too. This I know because our front windows overlooks their home as their house overlooks ours, though they must raise their eyebrows at the chaos that reigns in our house.

Time flies as I submit to sitting still for a while and having either a pile of what I call toffee papers with a range of different colour crèmes stuck in my hair or a dreadful rubber cloche hat with holes in, pulled down over my head and a croquet hook used to pull strands of hair through the holes to be coloured which was the method yesterday. This was needed because the water and chemicals at the swimming pool had over the last month of four immersions a week, stripped all the darker shades from my hair, so Helen’s task was to restore a few low lights into unruly hair and have me looking quite presentable so that I would not horrify my daughter Jacqueline and her husband Martin who had invited us for an early Christmas family dinner.

It was 7 pm by the time we arrived for dinner and it was lovely to at last be able to relax and enjoy time with our loved ones including an enthusiastic greeting from Louis the black spaniel. Jacqueline had decorated the room and the dinner table to a standard of artistry and class that would have been admired were it the centre front Christmas window of Harrods in Knightsbridge. Nibbles and bubbly were all ready and both our hosts were all smiles and hugs as we stepped inside the door.

We had a splendid meal, presented beautifully with all the usual trimmings of crackers with little gifts, motto's and hats; though Helen had told me not to touch my hair that she had made look so lovely, so hats were out!

Christmas gifts were all just what each of us wanted since we are all sensible enough to drop heavy hints. Jacqueline loved her pure silk pyjamas, Martin loved yet another one of the shirts that he prefers and the book about local space man Tim Peake, Steve loved his new racing trainers and I loved my posh fur hat, and gloves in tasteful black and beautiful soft scarf and Louis was most entertaining unwrapping his gift from us making more mess with torn wrapping paper than is usual with such a well trained family pooch. Time flew by until I looked at my watch and saw that it was over an hour past our regular bedtime.