December was busy.  So busy, in fact, that on the rare occasion that I’ve found time to sit down and write I’ve struggled to know where to start and found myself opting to vacuum instead (to the complete astonishment of me and my family). 

The ‘fun’ actually started mid-November when the puppy ate some grapes. Having mentioned it to a few friends since, it turns out my son isn’t the only person who didn’t know grapes can cause kidney failure in dogs.  Of course, it had to happen on a Sunday night, requiring a 45 minute drive to the emergency vet and an out-of-hours consultation charge which bumped the bill up to £250, but disaster was averted and the pup (and son who fed them to her) lived to fight another day.  A few days later puppy got her own back; she fought me to get out of the car and I lost.  Two hospital visits later I was the lucky owner of strong pain relief, a wrist-strapping and mangled wedding and engagement rings in a specimen jar.  My temporary disability (the wrist strapping made driving, cooking and cleaning tricky) meant I had to rely on the children to help a bit more, and the biggest surprise to me has been how much easier it is to lower your expectations and learn to live with dust and cobwebs than have daily debates over whose turn it is to help! 

At the beginning of November my husband finally convinced me we needed to replace our 12-year-old TV.  The new streamlined TV was duly installed and I have to admit that it’s been lovely having the teens sitting with me in the evenings instead of rushing off to their rooms straight after dinner.  Unfortunately, exactly a month after we bought it, we switched the TV on one day and discovered it had developed a fault, with a wide black line running top to bottom in the middle of the screen.  The TV company was very helpful and diagnosed the problem remotely, then pulled out all the stops and arranged an engineer appointment for early the following week.  The only important provision was that they’d need to use the wifi during the repair.  No problem, you’d think, except that the previous evening as the puppy had been nosing around in the corner of the sitting room she’d got tangled in the telephone lead.  As my son went to move her out of the way she ran in the opposite direction, taking with her the telephone, modem and most importantly ripping the wifi box off the wall!  Normally at the beginning of December I’d be rushing around Christmas- and birthday-present shopping but Black Friday had come and gone in a blur of online payments and Amazon deliveries, after which I foolishly believed all I had left to do was await the repairmen and deal with Christmas wrapping.  Hahaha, what a fool I am.  Our TV and wifi were quickly restored but the electronic disasters didn’t stop there – a week later my phone died, taking with it all memory of the children we’d invited to youngest daughters’ birthday party and their parents’ contact details.   December’s a popular birthday month so a few days later a whatsapp’ed invitation helped me restore the lost contact details, which gave me a mini respite before my computer died.  By this point I was losing my sense of humour – although I knew everything was backed up, once I’d reset my laptop I still couldn’t open any files and 17 years of photos seemed to have vanished!  No matter what I tried, it wasn’t working and my children were convinced I was either having a breakdown or an affair with someone at Apple.  For four consecutive days I was glued to the phone, with a series of super-helpful technical support people trying to work out what I’d done wrong.  Finally, after one seven-hour phone call, it transpired I’d confused the system with a hyphen instead of an underscore!  The devil’s in the detail apparently. 

Deep breaths; all’s well that ends well… and then the two eldest got impetigo and one of the girls brought headlice home from a school trip.  It was still a week until Christmas but I thought maybe we’d be able to relax at last.  With husband home safely and the children still at school we decided to take a long walk with the pup one morning.  Running across the common, she found a stick and a game of fetch swiftly followed.  My throwing’s a bit ‘girly’ so husband took charge and he and the pup had great fun, until the stick landed badly, pup chased with an open mouth and did herself an injury requiring another trip to the vet.  5 days of antibiotics took us up to Christmas, during which time we miraculously managed to avoid accident or injury.  Christmas Day was lovely and passed without incident but our good fortune couldn’t last.  On Boxing Day we awoke to a freezer swimming in melted ice cream and all the meat, cheese and other lovely food we’d bought to feed our visitors slowly decomposing.  It’s amazing how fast a fridge and freezer warm up when they stop working!  Obviously no-one was available on any emergency helpline and the next day John Lewis and Hotpoint couldn’t agree who was responsible for the warranty or whether it even had one; apparently a system typo meant our fridge warranty wasn’t registered to start until January 2037.

Last night was New Year’s Eve.  I had thought we would chance a drive into London to watch the fireworks (park up somewhere and have a wander along the Thames with the kids).  Someone mentioned it was ‘ticket only’ but I wasn’t easily dissuaded.  Then we went for a walk, I tried to cross a stream, got stuck in the mud and fell in (that’s a whole other story).  On the way home the car dashboard lit up like a Christmas tree, several warning lights and messages appeared telling me the engine management system had failed and the car went into limp-home-mode.  We came home, put our PJs on and saw 2020 in with a movie!  I don’t want to tempt fate but I hope this year is a little quieter than last.