Snowballs

I turned the tap on this afternoon, only to discover the water pressure had dropped a lot. Online, I discovered that the rapid increase in temperature had caused a mains pipe to burst. It would be fixed by ten o’clock tonight. I filled a couple of jugs with water just in case.

With most of the clutter now on the Billy Bookcases, there’s space to put the Christmas tree up.

To put myself in the mood, I put on some Christmas carols and started fluffing up the branches. But I was thirsty.

To save water, I didn’t make a cup of tea. Mr Pandammonium came in the kitchen just as I was adding a cocktail cherry to my glass of goop. He remarked that I was looking very pleased with myself.

My Christmas tipple used to be a snowball, made from advocaat and lemonade. Advocaat is made with eggs, so I don’t want it any more. I’d recently looked up how to make eggnog, so I concocted my version from sugar, brandy, Crackd, a bit of soya milk and a grating of nutmeg, all shaken in my cocktail shaker. I poured some into a soda glass and topped it up with lemonade, with the aforementioned cherry. It wasn’t bad; possibly nicer than the egg stuff.

The tree was slow progress. The thirty-six lower and middle branches all want fluffing up individually, then there’s the upper section to pull out and fluff up as well. I’m experimenting with where I put the lights, and I had to redo them once or twice. Three snowballs later, and the tree was nowhere near done.

Mr Pandammonium showed me a message he’d got from the water company that the leak was fixed, but it wouldn’t be back to normal till two in the morning. We could go to the leisure centre to collect free bottled water.

One litre of water weighs one kilogram. I didn’t know how much water they’d give us, but it would be heavy. Alas, we couldn’t drive there because the driver had been drinking brandy-based beverages all afternoon. We set off on foot in the dark.

At the end of next door’s drive, we returned home. Then we set off again, and got two houses away before we returned. We lingered for longer before we set off properly.

‘What’s going on?’ you ask.

Mr Perkins. He started following us when we tried to leave; we ended up unlocking the door and tricking him back inside. Poor beast.

As we approached the road approaching the entrance to the leisure centre, we saw cars queuing up, no doubt to collect water from the water company. When we got to the approach road, the queue of cars wasn’t moving, but more were joining it. We walked on; how much money fuel were all these cars burning?

The leisure centre car park is massive, and the layout is pretty good for this sort of thing. No wonder they picked it as the distribution centre.

The queue for the people on foot wasn’t very long. They asked our name and postcode, and did we want two packs. We said yes. One pack is six two-litre bottles. That’s twelve kilograms – each.

A van that we’d seen queuing outside a house hadn’t moved very far in the time it had taken us to walk past it, get our water and go past it again. I was glad we hadn’t driven: we wouldn’t have reached the house by then.

There was a downside to walking, however. My arms aren’t built to carry this sort of load. I struggled along, then gave my pack of water to Mr Pandammonium, who carried both for a while till the twenty-four kilograms became too much. I took mine back to give him a break, but after a bit I had to give it back. I took it back a final time when one unwieldy pack tried to slither away.

Mr Perkins was waiting for us under the car when we got back. He seemed displeased at having been tricked into abandonment, yet pleased to see us.

The tree is still incomplete.

The black Bic biro count has increased to nineteen.