Mon, 2 Jan

I mean, don’t worry, I probably won’t keep it up.

Today’s the first day of our holiday where I have not been required to be up very early—where I have not been required to be somewhere midday to be of assistance—where I have been left in total solitude. Today is, rather unfortunately, also the last day of our holiday, since tomorrow is a travelling day. Ah.

My hands are betraying me. They’re dry and crepey and wrinkled; they’re cold; they’re plagued by occasional water retention and eczema and hangnails; I can feel the shadow of a dull, nagging pain in the joint of my right thumb. This seems hardly fair. I see other people’s hands—women my age, who wash their hands just as much as I do, I assume—and they look perfectly normal. I wonder what I’ve done to deserve these stumpy horrors. No amount of hand cream can fix what’s happened here.

My son went to a craft making class one rainy evening with a friend who also happens to be on holiday in the same place as we are. He came home with a present for me, which he was so worried I wouldn’t like. He presented me with a candle holder made of a large piece of bark, filled in with moss and miniature pine cones, topped with two candles he made by himself, rolling up sheets of beeswax around wicks. It is beyond beautiful. It’s the kind of thing you’d see on sale for £85 in a Stoke Newington knickknack shop. And I have no idea how I’m going to get it home. But if I don’t take it home, he will be devastated.