Mistletoe and Mayhem: A cosy, chaotic Christmas read!. Catherine Ferguson

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СКАЧАТЬ memory of the fizz we drank the night before to celebrate Nathan completing his personal trainer course.

      It’s not just the alcohol making me feel a tad gross this morning. There’s also the small matter of waking at four with a raging dose of the munchies.

      I tiptoed downstairs and opened the fridge. (More as habit than anything. With Nathan a strict vegetarian, verging on vegan, I’ve learned not to get overly excited.)

      Once when I was rooting around in there (Nathan had popped to the shops to replenish his stock of mung beans), I managed to find an ancient packet of yogurt-covered raisins right at the back behind the alfalfa sprouts and his home-whizzed sheep’s curd spread.

      Last night, no such luck.

      There wasn’t any point hijacking the bread bin, either.

      Nathan’s ‘bread’ tends to be full of random ingredients that really have no place at all in a nice, decent loaf – things like dried berries, wood shavings, bits of pan scourer, that kind of thing.

      But then – rummaging through his cupboards, I struck lucky.

      Pushed to the back was a lovely big box of Belgian chocolates.

      Unopened.

      I got them out, nodding approval at whoever gave Nathan those because they clearly had very good taste. I turned the box over to examine the pictorial contents.

      Then I remembered it was me.

      I bought them the very first time he cooked me dinner at his place – not realising, of course, that anything apart from ninety-nine per cent cocoa solids weren’t generally permitted across the threshold.

      Belgian chocolates aren’t the usual food I go for to satisfy night-time cravings.

      But hey ho, I thought, any port in a storm.

      I ate most of the top layer then hid the rest in my bag to take home. (They’d already been there three months and would soon start turning an odd colour. It would be a shame to waste them.)

      I stifle a yawn as I brush my teeth.

      There was a real nip in the air before the heating clicked on at seven, and an hour later, it’s still dark outside. It feels unnatural rising before the birds on a Sunday, especially on a shivery morning in mid-October.

      But there’s a definite upside to all this activity: I’ve never been so fit in my life.

      With Nathan’s constant encouragement, I’ve climbed mountains, swum in freezing lakes and run thousands of miles (well, okay, probably hundreds, but it’s still more in the last three months than I have in my entire twenty-seven years on this planet).

      There are days I stagger back to my own flat, collapse onto the sofa and remain in the position in which I landed until bedtime. Barb, my flatmate, thinks it’s hilarious. She says I look like a doomed beetle on its back. (Except I can’t wave my legs about. No energy left.) She’s good about bringing me food and tea top-ups during the reviving process, though.

      I’m not quite sure what Nathan and I are tackling this morning, but it will undoubtedly be good for me.

      What is it Nathan always says?

       Variety is the spice of fitness!

      And he should know.

      Nathan is quite simply the sportiest, most energetic person I’ve ever met.

      The man himself raps once more on the door and shouts, ‘Eight minutes.’

      ‘No problem,’ I call back, turning on the cold tap and splashing my face with icy water in an effort to wake up. ‘What is a climbing ball challenge, anyway?’

      But he’s gone. Even over the hum of the bathroom extractor fan, I can hear him singing in a rich baritone as he gets into his workout gear.

      Nathan’s great. We’ve been seeing each other since July and I continue to be amazed by his reserves of stamina and his sheer enthusiasm for life.

      He’ll make a fantastic personal trainer. He’s got this knack of boosting my confidence and making me realise I can achieve far more than I ever thought I could.

      I’m an admin assistant at Premier Furnishings in Pottersdale. The town is only a five-mile bus ride from Scarsby, the village in the Lake District where I live, so it’s really very handy. And the salary is okay.

      I’ve been there almost two years now and, to be honest, I’ve never really had any ambitions to rise up the ranks – although Marla, my boss, keeps trying to nudge me in that direction.

      But to get ahead in the workplace, you need self-confidence and the conviction that you’re worthy of success. And not everyone has that inner belief.

      I’ve always felt like the plodder in the family. The very opposite of my younger brother, Rob, who heads up his own financial consultancy business and is brilliant at everything he does. His wife, Justine, is similarly driven and, until recently, was chief marketing executive of a small luxury hotel chain, based in Scotland, where she and Rob live.

      And I’m nowhere near as brave as my older sister, Rosie, who flaunted convention at the age of nineteen by chucking in her university course and going to live in Spain. With a waiter called Romeo who she’d met while on holiday.

      Sadly, Romeo failed to live up to his name; Rosie was his Juliet for no more than a year before he shagged an accounts clerk from Wigan (and possibly her mother too, although this was never confirmed) and declared himself far too young to settle down.

      But luckily for us, by then my lovely nephew, Josh, was already on his way.

      Now, Rosie and Josh live in a tiny, white-washed apartment near Malaga, where Rosie runs a water-front café with her friend, Jo, who’s also an ex-pat. She has a new man in her life now called Alejandro, but she insists it isn’t serious. They’re just having fun.

      I am totally in awe of the way Rosie launches herself on life. She couldn’t give two hoots about what anyone thinks. She just goes out there and grabs it.

      And me?

      There are times I don’t even have the confidence to brave a communal changing room, never mind anything else. Which is probably why I still live in the Lake District, five miles from the old family home, telling myself I’m fairly content with life.

      Nathan keeps saying I’m wasted where I am.

      And lately, I’ve begun to think that maybe I could fly a little higher without falling flat on my face.

      Sandra, our office manager, is retiring at Easter. And Marla has hinted on several occasions that if I were to apply for the post, I’d be in with a good chance of landing the job. At first, I didn’t really take her seriously. But I mentioned it to Barb and then Nathan, and I was quite surprised at their reaction. Barb told me very firmly that I could do Sandra’s job standing on my head, juggling print cartridges with one hand, while on the phone to stationery suppliers with the other. (She has great faith in my ability to organise and multi-task.)

      So then I started СКАЧАТЬ