My Mistress had a choice of people that she could call out to sweep our chimneys. She had planned to call ‘Pete the Sweep’ because she likes his van, which has a chimney with a brush sticking out of it on the roof. However, when it came down to it, she was delighted to find a lady chimney sweep. Basically, my Mistress was so impressed by her choice of occupation that that swung her choice and she was duly called in to do the job. At least it means that when the man comes to replace the fireplace he isn’t going to have all the accumulated dirt and bird’s nests falling down on top of him. The fireplace company, by contrast, have got off on a bad foot by addressing the paperwork to my Master when it has been my Mistress dealing with it all. They didn’t even put ‘Mr & Mrs’. A point she will be commenting on!
The temperature has dropped and I now have a lot of sympathy with all the birds that were lining up a little while ago to fly south for the winter. They probably missed the worst of the wet weather too. I can just picture them now on their little sun loungers somewhere near the equator, being served cocktails by a rainbow lorikeet. It’s times like this you have to wonder why they didn’t ask their friends to go with them. Although it may have something to do with Shadow chasing them in search of the odd tail feather.
My Mistress has posted all her Christmas cards for overseas. There will be the one she hand delivers to Switzerland, but that doesn’t need to rely on the vagaries of the international postal service. I did read my Mistress’s Christmas letter before she sent it out and was pleased to find I do get at least a couple of mentions, sadly one of those was because of my obsession with the pet rabbits that we had for twenty-four hours.