T'was The Night Before Christmas

Yes, I know it's Christmas Day.
I know that real people with real lives are, as I write, busy celebrating countries of the world by gathering around illuminated bits of Norway while frantically ripping off processed off-cuts of Canada from Taiwanese-designed packaging to reveal "things" made in China, powered by batteries from Japan, which are all destined, once they are fucked, to be parcelled up in rolled and pressed pieces of South American rain forest and sent to starving children in Africa. Yes, I know all of these things but......................

Christmas had already been cancelled round here at The Towers before Mrs Pither proverbially urinated on any remaining festive chips by going out yesterday evening to deliver presents to friends and their spawn.
The local deliveries I could get my mind around but when, at 6pm, she phoned to say she was driving up to the home of two friends and their 34,567 children just south of Reykjavic (actually, it's in Staffordshire) I thought she was stretching the Dickensian spirit a little too far.
She then rang at 7pm to say she had a flat tyre!!
"We're no longer in the AA," she wailed.
"Are so!"
"Not too!"
"It's now through Lloyds Bank," I said. "Just give them my account number."

Mrs P phoned again two hours later:
"The AA have been and put on the spare."
"Oh, deep joy. So you're coming home now?"
"No, I'll carry on to their house. I won't be long."

Mrs P phoned again at 11pm:
"Right, I've dropped off all the presents so I'm about to set off for home."
"I am moist in anticipation."

Mrs P phoned again at midnight (you won't believe this, but I swear it is true):
"I'm stuck in mud."
"What?!!?! Where the 'eck are you?"
"In a farm track."
"Any particular reason why the urge overtook you to go down a farm track?"
"I took a wrong turning. Don't worry, I'm not far from N and J's house and so J's coming out to tow me out."

Mrs P phoned again at 1am:
"He can't pull me out so I've phoned the AA again. They're sending a truck from a local garage."
"Has Brian Rix appeared yet? Turn away when the vicar drops his trousers!"
"What?"
"Ne'er mind. Ring me to let me know when the man arrives."

Mrs P phoned at 2.30am:
"The guy from the garage has been and his truck is too wide to get down the path."
"Spiffing!"
"Also, he hasn't got a towbar or towrope long enough to reach me."
"Mentally, I know how he feels."
"He says he will have to come back on Thursday but it will cost a couple of hundred pounds to get the car out."
"Well done. And that would take the spending on the Christmas we're NOT having to what, exactly?"
"J says he will drive me home."

The phone rang again at 3am. It was "N", my wife's neurotic, poisonous, baby-dropping friend who was clearly inebriated.
"You pig!!"
"Mr Pig, please."
"Why didn't you come to collect her?"
"As I've already explained to my darling wife, I have had three-quarters of a bottle of wine and so am over the limit to drive."
"You could have come in a taxi!"
"So, let me get this straight. I should have chartered a taxi to take me the 345 miles to where YOU are so that she could get in it to come the 345 miles back with me instead of her simply getting in a taxi where YOU are and coming back by herself?"
"We couldn't get a taxi!! It's Christmas Eve, you know!!"
"You mean it WAS. Look, if she can't get a taxi there, what makes you think I could get one here?"
"You pig!!"
"We've covered that."

Anyway, Mrs P arrived home in the extremely tiny-wee small hours and woke me up on her return hence I began today, like a four-year-old should do on Christmas Day, at 4am!
I have since tried to explain to Mrs P why we will now have to report to Reykjavic police that the car has been temporarily abandoned if we are not to get an unexpected, 2ft-square present weighing 3cwts from the constabulary.
Happy days. Christmas Eve 2007 can go to Grantham.