It is too exciting when people bring Christmas presents for me and my mistress won’t let me have them until Christmas Day. Mackensey has sent me a present, it isn’t wrapped so I know what it is. It’s a fleecy furry blanket that promises to be all snugly and warm. I really wanted my mistress to let me have it yesterday when the temperature was minus 8 degrees and the central heating went off. We are optimistic that the heating will keep going and that is was just the pilot light that had gone out, but given how often it happens we are not very sure. At this rate, we will all be sat round the fire singing “In the bleak midwinter”.
The game of ‘wrap the present’ was slightly marred by the Christmas gremlins. They seem to strike more often at this time of year and my mistress has a theory that they get paid double time around bank holidays. They cause all sorts of odd memory warps, which either mean you end up with a cupboard full of something, or an absence of something that someone is going to regard as important to their Christmas. The year before last, my mistress bought a lot of wrapping paper in the sales to save buying any last Christmas. Unfortunately, she forgot and last Christmas she bought a whole load of wrapping paper to ‘keep her going’. When she came to put the second lot away, she found the first lot, all ready and waiting. So we have plenty of Christmas wrapping paper, except it’s all in England and all the presents and my mistress are here in Belgium, so she has to go to buy some more. She hasn’t discovered yet which crucial ingredient she is out of stock of that it will be too late to replace but there is bound to be one.