I can’t find the post where I first mentioned it but I’m sure I did.

I certainly told a lot of people.

And then, yesterday, finally, it happened.  It starts off like a normal day except that it isn’t a normal day at all.  Firstly, I am on holiday.  Secondly, I have found a recipe for mince pies – which includes making your own mincemeat.  I’ve never done it before and finding all the ingredients was, shall we say, a bit of a challenge.  In the end I didn’t find everything but I did, eventually, find stem ginger which for me was the most important part.  Mixed spice doesn’t have to be mixed spice (but can be a mixture of spices I can find) – suet can be replaced by butter, special sugar can be replaced by other sugar, etc.  But stem ginger couldn’t really be replaced.  I found some and so it was a green light.

So, I start the mincemeat.

I had promised to go visit FfC, picking up FfI (who is now living, not in Isola but in V’s flat) so I could pick up my cushions for the sofa.  I was late.  When I got there, as usual, she huffed and puffed about the fact that it was too late and she didn’t think she would go now.  I’m like ‘whatever’.  It’s the cutting off the nose to spite the face thing and it annoys me a lot.  I don’t bite.  I don’t say ‘Oh. please come’.  I really don’t care.  If she comes she comes and it will be nice and if she doesn’t then it will be nice too.

She decides to come.  I think ‘Don’t try these games on me lady – I lived with V for over 20 years!’

She tells me that FfC has done lunch!  I wasn’t expecting that.  We go.  FfC’s mother is there, over from Canada.  FfC now has a baby.  It is lovely (the time, not the baby).  I have a nice time and I really love FfC.  Her baby is a baby.  Her Mum keeps trying to give it to me.  I decline.  Several times.  She asks me who I think it looks like.  I explain that I don’t do that.  Babies look like babies and I can never see any parent in them.  They all look, more or less, the same – like a baby.  I’m not really a baby person.

I agree to take FfC to the butchers so she can get her turkey.  F calls and suggests that I call by at his office to collect boxes, as I have the car.  I then drop FfI off at a bank and make my way to his office.

He has shoe boxes.  A lot of them.  We fill up the space in the car that remains after the cushions had been put in (they are BIG).  We drive home to my place. He helps me with carrying stuff up and decides to stay rather than go home.  In itself, this is unusual.  But I like it.

He starts suggesting that, perhaps he should do a bit of sorting out of the lounge.  Or the kitchen.  This thing that he has been threatening to do for a while now (and for which I can’t find the post).  I am nervous.  We would have done it last Sunday but An couldn’t get back to the UK. But I’m not really prepared for it now. However, if he wants to do it ………..

It seems he does.  He starts.  I am supposed to ‘throw things away’.  Hmmmm.  He is shocked by my collection of carrier bags.  I collect them to line the rubbish bin.  We find so many I will never need to have another bag for a year, probably!

Things get put into shoe boxes with the contents written on the outside.  Boxes get stacked in cupboards.  He is going to be here next time my cleaner is here, he says, to explain to him how to clean properly.  He is like a mad man.  Every surface has to be cleaned.  It is quite scary..

The kitchen is slowly re-ordered.  Everywhere is cleaned.  It seems he is in his element.  All the items on the top of the kitchen cupboards get put somewhere else (inside a cupboard).  All the bottles and things on top of the fridge get put inside cupboards.  It is hard work and, mostly, I am watching!

I would have stopped after about 1 hour.  He is going to finish it because ‘I won’t sleep if anything is left to do’, he says.

At half past ten, I take the dogs out.  At midnight I go to bed.  At 2 a.m., or thereabouts, he comes to bed.  The kitchen is the same and yet changed.

‘I will check it once a week’, he says.  I laugh.  ‘I am serious’, he says.  ‘I know you are’, I reply, laughing still – laughing because I know he will.

This morning, it being Christmas Eve, I must go to the supermarket and get the veg.  He tells me I must also get some things for the bathroom.  He is going to ‘do’ the bathroom.  Maybe later today.

Tomorrow, he will do the lounge as I am doing the cooking and as he is preparing the dining table.  He will too.  He says he enjoys it.  He is, in fact, quite crazy.

But, I wonder?  What if this is the start of us living together?  Maybe he has this idea, now that we spend most of our time here, that he might as well make the house more as he would like it.  And if I can keep it more or less the same (i.e. perfectly neat and tidy), he will be happier to stay here.  And then, his house becomes more like ‘a room’ that is his?

And, so, gradually, he moves in without there being a definite move, if you see what I mean?  No point at which we are ‘living together, officially’ just a point at which he doesn’t really go to his home much any more?

Maybe?  We shall see.  In the meantime, the kitchen is better and I do, quite like it.

But now I must get on and make the Lemon Meringue Pie (for a birthday party tonight) and finish off my mincemeat and make the mince pies.  The mincemeat, after being left overnight does actually smell like mincemeat now, too!  I am very happy about that.

Have a good Christmas everyone.

And lots of love from me, F, Rufus and Dino.