Today I should be cleaning up after a party before my children come home to watch The Muppet Christmas Carol
By rights, this should be my most hungover day of the year. If life were as it should be, I would be getting a lie-in until about noon, which is seven hours later than my children usually grant me. I would slump to the kitchen, fall back into bed with some toast and Marmite, followed shortly thereafter by a Sali Hughes-approved jacket potato with cheese and Marmite (see potato-based musings passim), which is – and you might have already spotted this genius detail – basically the same meal twice but with different carbohydrates.
Then I would scramble to clear away all the debris in the kitchen, in the manner of the young man in the seminal 1990s Yellow Pages advert about the heroism of French polishers, still the most powerful storyline ever committed to celluloid. But, unlike him, instead of cleaning up after the party before my parents come home, I’d be cleaning up after the party before my children come home, which they would at around mid-afternoon. We’d then watch The Muppet Christmas Carol, the kids exhausted from the excitement of spending the night at their grandparents’, my partner and me just exhausted. And then we would go to bed at 7pm, just as the Good Lord intends for us all.