Impending Doom........

Or how I can be awake at 5.25 and having to get up as I've already run through all the nightmare scenarios that I can cope with for one morning! Let's see the oven isn't working properly and in my nightmare version of events the best case scenario is that the engineer doesn't turn up to fix it as the landlady is swiss and therefore ineffectual, and so the whole family has to eat out on Christmas day, which means McDonalds as nothing else is open...worst case, we're all suffering from e-coli/salmonella on boxing day because I trusted the oven to cook the goose and it failed me, despite trying its best for over 6 hours....

I just know that something is going to go dreadfully wrong, I considered demarcating a line on the kitchen floor this morning and setting the "don't cross the line" rule early so as to avoid a banshee like response when someone gets in my way once to often when retrieving themselves a beer from the fridge.

The only really decent restaurant in this hellhole is shut on Christmas Eve, so now it looks like another battle with the oven and potential botulism or should that be "botchulism" or a trek into Geneva taking in mass there instead of in the strangely pyramid-like structure that passes for a catholic church in Nyon. (One can only think that faced with a plot of land between a chateau and a roman ampitheatre the architect thought - "Aha! I know...I'm going to do something Egyptian..It'll fit perfectly!")

I've lost all sense of Christmas cheer this year and would happily run away somewhere, only knowing my luck it'd be shut! Instead I am plotting how to give the best impression of being a domestic godess without ending up a gibbering wreck in the corner....hence the cunning plan of baking biscuits (pre-mixed dough and no need for rolling pins, just chuck a little flour about the place for effect) before I pick them up from the airport. Perhaps the "do not cross" line isn't the best approach if this is my goal??

My lists are no longer a source of comfort to me, instead they travel through my mind in the early hours of the morning, suggesting disaster, after catastophe, after major emergency.....some involving medical attention, others just on the scale of a diplomatic incident. And to add insult to injury my bloody christmas crackers haven't arrived yet, prompting images of a new christmas tradition having to be created just to get shot of the tat I was going to put in them, maybe a table based basket-ball themed game? Points for hitting the bin and not each other?

Or may be I should just admit defeat early, not clean the house, ignore the ironing, cancel the washing, and in so doing, confirm to myself that hosting Christmas was the worst idea and possibly most stupid idea I have ever had. Why didn't we just book flights home and if need be eat two dinners in one day to avoid any preferential treatment of either set of parents?
There is no simple answer. The only things worth bearing in mind at this late date is that rain is Jesus's wee-wee and that snowman you made won't go walking in the air with you because you're a stupid benny.