Christmas Cracker number Seven!!

Haved just waved the children off to school with Him in charge, (laden down with badly wrapped presents for teachers, long overdue dinner money and reply slips for 47 letters from the last half term) and have now retreated back into the warm to drink tea and watch trashy TV, with the totally legitimate excuse that I'm awaiting a call from a journalist for a telephone interview. Definitely feel that I have the better deal here, which has provoked a guilty awareness that, for all my moaning about the shortcomings of the domestic male in general and my own specimen in particular, this is actually quite often the case.

I'm not just thinking about his services as spider exterminator and putter-up of shelves, but about the bigger stuff too, like the fact that he kept the faith (and-- more to the point-- kept me) during the long years when I was writing lots and earning nothing. He brings me cups of tea and glasses of wine (according to time of day/level of desperation) while I wrestle with deadlines and listens endlessly (or at least makes and effort to look like he's listening) as I try to work out plot twists and character motivation. He graciously puts up with my enthusiasm for searching out new hero material, and my unrestrained and voiciferous appreciation of certain character prototypes (James D'Arcy/Orlando) So, in view of all that, and since today is our sixteenth Wedding Anniversary I thought that today's Christmas Cracker really ought to be Him.

Us on our wedding day-- December 19th 1854 (or does it just seem that long ago?)

(...and here we are later, in a spooky foreshadowing of Things To Come, doing our very own version of a Mills & Boon cover shot...)

In other news, tonight-- right after we heft the giant Christmas tree in from the garden and watch the children decorate the bottom left hand corner of it-- I'm going to draw a winner for my half of the competition Kate Hewitt and I have been running, so if you haven't done so yet, leave a comment to be included! (If I don't do it soon I'm going to give into the temptation to keep the sweet little Hultquist necklace I bought the other day, which would be very Wrong of me.)