Moving Furniture

Monday 17th December

Having a Christmas party with 17 grown-ups and 3 toddlers is no easy thing.  It is still a week off and is an afternoon thing so hopefully they will all be gone by six or seven.  Not that we don’t like having people you understand but we have been working on this for the last two weekends, and thank God for a break at work, every evening of next week I expect too.  We normally have two three and one two seater sofas in our front room, and for us two and the dogs to lounge about on that’s just about enough, but for seventeen it really won’t do.  Then there is the food – do we do a cold buffet, finger food, or a sit-down meal?  And where to have the table – upstairs or down?  And if down then we definitely have to move the three armchairs from that room up here.  Now comes the configuration problem, and the three-dimensional game of sliding the pieces to fit begins.  I do not know quite how many different combinations of three sofas and three armchairs you can have in a pretty large drawing room, but I do know that we have tried them all, and one or two I suspect at least twice.

Is it fun. I ask myself?  And yes in a way it is, getting ready for a big family get-together is always fun, if slightly fraught.  And of course one knows that despite the logistical planning, the meticulously laid table, the counting of and arranging of the chairs, the pre-cooking of the gammon, the food almost all prepared – on the day it will all disintegrate into chaos, as babies will need to be fed and changed, and mothers will need the loo, and someone will spill their drink, and someone will ask for pear and apricot juice or some other obscure product, and some will arrive early and some will arrive late.

But I am sure that whatever the disaster on the day it will all be a great success, and just as the last guest has left and we are clearing up we will discover that the red cabbage is still in the microwave, or someone’s presents have been left behind.  Ah, Christmas – what a relaxed time of year.