a domestic aside...

"She shook her head; her hair, still wet from the shower she had taken once the bathroom was spotless, slid against the back of her neck.  'You’re a sick, sick man.

'True. But I brought dinner, so I’m forgiven.'

She had heard him messing about in the kitchen just after he came in. 'And do we have a Christmas goose resting in the oven?'

She looked up at him again as she said it, and did a classic doubletake at the crestfallen look of ‘surprise ruined’ on his face.

'A goose?' She did not squeal – she never squealed – but the noise was apparently enough to restore some of Sergei’s self-satisfaction, even as she launched herself onto him in an exuberant hug. 'Goose!'

The world, apparently, could go to hell in a snow-covered handbasket, so long as one had goose for dinner."


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Today I have holed myself up on the sofa, Pandora curled at my hip as usual, to crank out as many words as can be cranked.  There is a 2--liter bottle of diet coke by my side, and dvds in the machine ("Howl's Moving Castle" this morning, the Ehle/Firth "Pride and Prejudice" this afternoon,), and nothing else to be done that cannot be put off until Monday.  I shall resurface at some point in the future..