Herself suggested I put up the Christmas Tree yesterday.

A “suggestion” from Herself is roughly equivalent to a decree signed by God, so for the sake of a quiet life I acquiesced. I suppose there is a remote possibility we might see the Grandkids over the next few days, but they have a long way to travel [about four hundred yards] so we play by ear. It would be nice though for them to see a tree if they ever do turn up.

Yes, I have an artificial tree. I have loads of proper trees and I could fell one of those, but none of our ceilings are sixty feet high so it would be a daft exercise trying to erect the tree indoors.

I hauled out the tree and assembled it. No sweat.

I hauled out the box of lights. There were a three or four plugs in the box so I plugged them all in. The box lit up. Great! At least some of them are still working. So I emptied the box on the floor and sort of separated the various strings of lights and found that two indeed were in fine shape. I wound one set around the tree and started on the second [and better] set. The only problem was that it had knotted itself.

I got out the bottle of whiskey and set to work.

It was one of those sets that’s a sort of zig-zag with stiffish wires and the bulbs kept poking themselves into loops. Every time I reckoned I had it sorted I discovered I had just moved the tangle further down the line. And the further down the line I got, the worse the tangle. It was like a Rubik’s Cube – you think you have it solved and the discover one corner out of kilter.

I then had a brainwave [the whiskey bottle was beginning to empty quite a bit]. I decided to unscrew one end of the loop from the plug and it would them become a simple act to untie all the knots.

So I searched the house and found a couple of screwdrivers. Back to the knot. I then discovered that the plug was sealed!

I now had two options. I could search the garage in the vain hope of finding a spare plug so I could cut the old one off and replace it, or I could just continue fiddling with the knot. I decided on the latter as the garage is too bloody cold to be messing around in. Anyways the whiskey bottle was nearing the bottom and I was losing the will to live.

A strange thing then happened.

In a moment of frustration I downed the last of the whiskey and poked at one of the bulbs. The last knot untangled itself and there on the floor was a pristine loop of lights waiting to be put on the tree!

I obviously work better with a belly full of whiskey?