Comfort and Joy Read Online Free PDF

of the amazing, blazing fire in all its glory. That is my problem. I don’t want my children to
     die of hypothermia, so I’m grateful for the central heating. But.
    Sam was a dancer when I met him, though now he’s a much-esteemed, manageably famous choreographer. He’s fit, in both
senses. He is extremely attractive. But you see, even with that – I lie in bed and watch him getting dressed and I think,
     ‘He’s extremely attractive,’ but I think it like one might think, ‘What a sweet dog,’ or, ‘I really like what the Browns have
     done to their spare room.’ It’s become objective. I would prefer it if I had the thought and then felt compelled to remove
     his pants with my teeth.
    Do I sound sex-obsessed? It’s to do with my age. Eleven years ago, when my older children were small, it was pretty far removed
     from my mind. Everything was removed from my mind, really, and not only because when you have young children you basically
     lose a decade – a large part of the nineties, in my case. I existed in them, obviously, but I’d have a hard time telling you
     much about them beyond the basics – Britpop, Blair, opaque tights, my discovery that avocado houmous existed. And then my
     marriage to Robert was breaking up, though Sam and I got together pretty quickly afterwards. And then Maisy came along, and
     the children grew up, and I hit forty and realized that my prime was pretty much behind me. I mean, I’m okay, I’m in good
     nick, I look all right, but I’m never going to see twenty-one again, obviously. And what I really don’t fancy very much at
     all is spending the next twenty or thirty – or forty – years pootling about all filled with
companionship
, like an old lady, like a bloody
nan
. To tell you the absolute truth, the idea of it kind of freaks me out. I repeat: what’s wrong with me?
    Anyway. Sam’s annoyed because I said we couldn’t have his entire family to stay for Christmas. There are so many of them:
     he has four brothers, who all have wives and children. We have one spare room, which Pat, his mother, is in this week. He
     said that his family didn’t mind, that they could all bunk down on the floor (kids) and sofas (adults), but the idea filled
     me with distress. I don’t want to be stepping over bodies on Christmas
morning, you know? I don’t want my painstakingly decorated tree to be surrounded by teenagers’ worn socks and the debris of
     their lives – crisp packets, cans of fizzy drinks, general crap. I just don’t. Not at any time, really, unless someone wants
     to buy me a twelve-bedroomed mansion, but especially not at Christmas. I suggested we put them up in a nice B&B I know locally,
     but that was like suggesting we round them up and slaughter them like pigs. I’m still not quite sure why it was like that,
     but it was. Something to do with the Celtic concept of families, I’m guessing – Sam’s Irish. I said they could come to our
     house from breakfast to bedtime, but sleep elsewhere. No go. Apparently they have to do their actual snoring under our roof,
     otherwise it doesn’t count as hospitality. I used to think this kind of thing was charming – amusing cultural differences
     and all that. Now I’m not so sure: it just seems stupid, and a stupid thing to be arguing over. But it’s okay. I’m going to
     fix it. It’s Christmas.
    All of this works, I must tell you. My marriage works. There is nothing the matter with it. I just wish that marriage wasn’t
     predicated on everything being perfectly balanced, positioned just so. It’s like a stack of tins in a supermarket: it only
     works if every tin is in the right place. And we both, consciously or not, work very hard at moving the tins back into place
     when they start to slip out of position and threaten the structure of the whole edifice: it’s become second nature. It’s just
     what you do, when you’re in a long-term relationship – keep shoving the tins back into place, like a