I have had the worst New Year’s news. My husband has decided that I should become his Book Lady. We should sack the proper Book Lady, who is very good, but a little inconsistent, and get me to do her work. That will entail:

Counting

Filing

Typing invoices

Doing maths

Using excel

Thinking about things IN ADVANCE

Not being scared of the tax department

Liasing with the accountant

Not losing bank statements, internet passwords, wads of cash, or entire files off the Mac, at any point.

The reasoning is that I am an intelligent person, mostly, and we could get a babysitter while the work was done and we could do it together. It would be cheaper than hiring another proper Book Keeper. So, the Mighty New Year Plan is to make me Keeper Of The Books, to add to my patchy, overstretched and inelegant portfolio of part-time Secret Genius Projecting, mother of four, cooker of 2x dinner meals a day, infrequent book-club attendee, filthy Angry Birds addict, social media harlot and vegetable baker extraordinaire.

I croaked a little, when he suggested that, because I am Not Skilled In That Kind Of Area. Making me Keeper of the Books would be as fruitful as making me Chief Mechanic, or the House Plumber, or the Default Emergency Heart Surgeon up at St Mary’s. People would die, lose their fortunes, and certainly there would be some serious flooding.

Dear Reader, if this plan comes to fruition, I shall surely accidentally ruin us. I know my weaknesses.

Eeek. Well, if I may change the subject before I break out in panic-induced hives and have to have an emergency lie-down, we had a very quiet holiday, with very little actually happening at all. New Year’s Eve was a little on the sad side, and aside from the whole burnt-lamb-chops-resulting-in-smoke-and-the arrival-of-two-fire-engines-thing, there was very little in the way of highlights. The rest of the evening was champagne-soaked TV watching and then off to bed at about 10:30pm. I had told the children that tonight was going to be very special, and bought the bloody lamb chops for a TREAT, but then the dishwasher broke and started spewing out water and in the resulting ransacking of the flat for towels, the lamb chops started burning and producing so much smoke that the communal fire alarms went off, and then the engines arrived. We pretended it wasn’t us, although the ashen-faced coughing children and the blackened walls may have tipped them off.

Anyway, after that, the night was already a bit ‘special’ and so we bundled them off to bed and ate their ‘special’ dessert ourselves. And I know that you are supposed to stay up when you are grown-up, and you should probably even go out and interact with people who are not your husband and sons, and we blamed our lack of NYE spirit on the fact that all of the babysitters  have fled London for Eastern Europe, but the Universal Parental Truth is that staying up past 11pm is a horrible, horrible idea. Those pesky children misunderstand the ‘holiday’ thing to mean that getting up at 5:40am is appropriate, right and good. Which it is most definitely not.

In Box Set DVD news, we have finished Arrested Development. It was so good I could weep. We have now started Sons of Anarchy, which seems to be the Californian biker-gang version of The Wire. So far, so violent. It gets you through the cold nights, though, eh? What, pray tell, do you fellas do?