Monthly Archives: December 2020

For years worship was anywhere I could play Aretha Franklin singing Amazing Grace in which (happy blend of cultural ideas) her voice makes shapes in the air

as beautiful as the finest European cathedrals. Which takes me to the flagstones of an old church in South Africa (Tulbagh) for the low notes… and the stave church – all wood in Norway, nine hundred years old … free association is a wonderful thing.

Now I walk and pray in the street between my home and the convenience store where I buy my papers, and home again.   I love it in the dark of winter, because I love winter but it works just as well in soft light of summer. Or any other season and weather.  I commend silently to God’s care those I love, including family, friends and neighbours, the known and the unknown, the young who fear to be forgotten in Hong Kong, the stateless Rohinga, the ravaged poor round the corner and across the world, the creatures,

the land, the water and the sky.   

I don’t pray very formally remembering with affectionate laughter the late great Margaret Rutherford falling to her knees in Farewell Farewell Eugene to announce: “Now dear God, this is urgent … !”  Laughter is irreplaceable.

Pam the Painter has a saying “Put that in your bucket !”  meaning save the memory of that kindness, that compliment, that shining moment …. The bucket is year round.  But seasonally, I feel I might extend the metaphor and talk about the stocking.

Wal has recently found, through one of those Google in your neighbourhood schemes, a gifted Armenian seamstress called Sarah and he wanted to buy trouser material which meant a trip to a dream of a fabric shop, a family business called Joel’s. Wal and I haven’t seen each other for ages, so masks to the fore, we went together. I was just there to dress the set.

He knew what he wanted, it was all accomplished with minimum fuss and maximum efficiency, and then we went to the counter behind which was a woman I knew from years ago when I used to shop there too, and a pretty woman in her fifties whom I did not recognise, with earrings I admired.  “My mother gave them to me” she explained.  “God bless your mother” I replied.  And when everything was settled, the younger woman came round the counter, stood opposite me and said” You used to have short dark hair.”   I did.  She said some lovely things and her husband murmured deprecatingly “I’m afraid I don’t keep up with the television.”  I said beaming “You wouldn’t have seen me in the last fifteen years !”  So, having exchanged goodhearted pleasantries,

we left.  It was moving to be remembered so generously and it’s going straight in my stocking.

I tend to tell these stories as they happen on the basis that, as they sustain me, they are good to share.   The world

is hard, it always was, and you don’t need a special occasion to share joy. “Joy cometh in the morning” – untaxed, unfattening, a thing of wonder and this year, my joys include –

My grand daughter who sent me (with her father’s help) a drawing of the world and in thanking her I sent a line of kisses (xxxxx right across the screen) which apparently she loved.  Stocking.

Katherine who arrived with long stemmed red coral roses in a beautiful vase (she’s a potter) and a book and a card – Raeburn gold medal – ie I was speechless.

The hound and helicopter unit (K9) in the Kruger game park which is having success at catching poachers and saving black rhino calves.   Black rhino and bloodhounds – definitely stocking

– while Declan ended his letter telling me how his parents approved of me with the unheard of exhortation “Stay awesome.”    And Mehmet declined my fare in his taxi.  All stocking.

The stocking may develop a hole, it may wear out or go missing in some dusty corner but the idea of it doesn’t change.  Remember the good and the beautiful – they lift the heart. 

*Next week is the transition over the bridge from the Old Year into the New.

Let’s not promise each other anything but hope for health and peace and better days.  I drink to you, you drink to me.

Annalog will be back the week of 4 January 2021….

Christmas is a bit like a raft.

  First of all you don’t think you can get it to stick together.  Which wood   should you use ? (Of course, I want to say pine trees)  What about the crosspieces and how will you secure them ?   Will you need a sail ?  And most importantly will it float ?

By the time it gets to ten days before Christmas, it doesn’t matter whether your festivities are elaborate or simple, traditional or innovative, a seven day blow out or 24 hours to catch your breath – you are committed to them. 

And if you are not determined to make the best of them , please don’t start. 

Years ago a young woman rang me to moan about Christmas, what she didn’t like about it, how boring it was, could she get out of travelling home ?  She could of course, I said, but not ten days before.   It’s rude.  People have hopes and they make plans, even boring old parents.   If you are going to go home, do it graciously.  And if you are not going to do it with grace, don’t do it at all – and then you have to step back with grace

and you should have negotiated that six to eight weeks ago, minimum.  Still, I doubt if there is very much in  life that you couldn’t do with pleasant good manners for two or three days. Lie in your teeth if you must about extra work or a friend you’re really worried about so that you are around for the minimum time, but make sure you are charm personified for that minimum.  A course on politeness as a method of social control and survival seems like a very good idea.

I have been fretting about Christmas because I am an inveterate old fashioned see for myself shopper and most of the places I want to investigate are small shops, fairs, sales of work and markets, all of which have taken a beating at the hands of the bug, the lockdown and so on.  And this has all been made worse by surrounding indeed ubiquitous uncertainty.  To use an old fashioned phrase, we really don’t know whether we are coming or going.

And time out from that sense of confusion is particularly hard to arrange because it affects so many aspects of our daily lives.

 And I don’t feel safe outside, not in any seriously phobic way.  Just unsure, unsettled: so I go out, do things and come back sooner rather than later, the very opposite of the committed Christmas shopper.

Came Saturday and I made a decision.  I went to an area where I like to shop, out from the centre of London rather than further in, got on a tube instead of a raft and got on with it.  I prepared myself for disappointment – and didn’t have any.  The places I value are still open, hooray !  Of course I regret the ones that haven’t survived but even so …  I found presents I had given up being able to conceptualise, I bought marmalade from a Frenchman who made my day by speaking French back to me

(full marks for flattery and salesmanship – we beamed at each other round our masks).   I picked up this and purchased that, up to and including some moody Zen based balm for my aching knee, and wonderfully inexpensive pretty cards from two girls who smiled, cheerfully and agreeably.  They run a card shop – it should flourish.     

I got the giggles in the fourth Waitrose in which I have tried to buy the tailored inexpensive candles I like – where you can have every kind of perfume, shape, container and variant of candles , but not  plain cream ones. They are not in my local because it is running down stock, and anyway they’re just not Christmassy.  So I shan’t see them again till the New Year has been and gone and we’re back to “normal life”  – a phrase the meaning of which remains increasingly unclear to me.  And I don’t think I am alone.

The imaginary Christmas raft has by now vanished into thin air, I know what remains for me to do and then the time will be upon us.

I was really excited to see two things I liked in Saturday’s paper – a seriously overpriced but utterly beautiful rose

gold bracelet and some equally impressive Scottish textiles, for mouthwatering sums.    I don’t need either of them – just as well, because I couldn’t afford either of them – but that isn’t the point.  And it’s not just champagne taste and beer money.  The point is that they pleased me.  

Always interested in clothes and fashion, the shape and the colour of things from cups to shoes, recent photographic spreads I have looked at were just horrid, charmless, self conscious, and bank breaking. And barring a large sweater which certainly should be warm at those prices, I was beginning to think that I had finally turned into the Granny Grim Natasha made a small statue of, all those years ago. Because I could make lists of what I don’t need or want for Christmas.

I want health for people, I want lungs, I want them to be able to catch their breath literally and figuratively. 

And you can’t buy health, retail or wholesale, giftwrapped or plain. I want kindness and peace and a bit of imagination – like the Fire Fairy (to do with the colour of her hair) actress, director and teacher, now librettist and published poet, speaker of five languages and owner of a dicky knee (Signora Patella) – who simply said “My turn to buy the calendars” and we shall be meeting on Monday to share them.

Last year I sent her a Christmas card with an Inuit image – I very much admire Inuit art and own two small pieces, the carved vertebra of a sperm whale and a ptarmigan made of the handhewn tip of a narwhal’s tooth – and when she whooped with joy, bought her the calendar. 

So perhaps we founded a tradition.

Years ago I parted company from stollen, mince pies, Christmas cake (although in its time, I loved my mother’s) and Christmas pudding. Boxes of sweets and chocolates, and biscuits do nothing to me.  But panettone does, and when it arrives,  I swan around eating it for breakfast on Christmas morning, trying not to gollop it because I like it toasted too.  Buns –  so named because he does have a sweet tooth – calls me Pans for short.  None of this sugar foresworn is to do with dieting because I put weight in the winter like an old bear, but it is to do with taste and sugar for the sake of it has no great appeal to me.

Enjoy your turkey if it’s what you like, I shall enjoy something else – probably a chicken or a bit of duck with lots of vegetables and lots of fruit, and enough nuts to turn me into a (red) squirrel.   

I’ve kept few decorations but pine cones fascinate me.  I have some carefully silvered which I put about in a large glass bowl or across the sash windows.  The doorknocker is a pine cone from Wal and I have two pine seeds in my wallet.   In Jack London you hear about “roaring fires of pinecones” and apparently that’s OK out there in wolf world

but not clever for a domestic chimney.  And last year I bought a Scandinavian straw wreath  and I am so glad I did because the shop is no more.  It reminds me of the ox and the ass, in the stable with the Baby.

I always have an angel shape, usually hanging on the shutters.  I always have mistletoe , a much older tradition and I look yearningly at the rowan at the street  corner  which is covered with swathes of red berries (druids again).   My attempt to grow a sorbis failed ( a regrettable combination of purple fingers and  dubious soil) and I wanted it even more badly when I had learned that in the Celtic calendar it is my natal tree. 

All the Christmas decorations I collected for my son when he was small are, like his books, waiting for my grand daughter to be just that bit older, beyond finger and discard.   I look at them lovingly,  I remember his shining eyes. “The nature of all exile” writes Alberto Manguel “ is that it affirms the perseverance of memory”, even if the only exile we’re talking about comes through age and time.    

A change

is supposed to be as good as a rest but I’m guessing that’s a small change like seeing your mother every fourth Tuesday instead of every third Saturday.  The change currently around us – whether we progress it or react against it or try to think about something else – is enormous. You can block out what may be happening until it is under your nose, like Carol (not her real name), 27 years down the line of full time work  from being a Saturday girl, and made redundant at the end of December.  Happy New Year.  And sadly she is far from alone.

It is fine to say (and I hope it is so) that as one door closes,

so another opens but you might like to reflect on the number of fingers that get trapped in between the one and the other.  Figuratively speaking, trapped fingers – actually, jobs lost.  Because if you can’t earn the money, you can’t spend it.  Never mind consumerist Christmas with its tinsel hams and fairylit mince pies.  You can’t spend what you haven’t got –  on groceries, on rent or mortgage, on utilities or putting petrol in the car – and while I too long for the day when the cars are rechargeable, you’ll still have to pay to make them run.  And if you haven’t got, you can’t spend and the money won’t go round to anybody else.

Back at the beginning of the year, a friend with often impeccable intuition said she thought things were going to change, meaning in the sense of less greed , more kindness and a more responsible attitude in the world (see The Ellen MacArthur Foundation – it made me cheer.)   As a fully paid up member of the Cassandra Club, I knew that the route we were embarked on was fraught with pain, muttering up my sleeve “Be careful what you wish for.”   She is more hopeful than I can afford to be for change is not accomplished with the whisk of a wand. (re Ellen MacArthur, the work of the foundation is ten years on).  Minor alteration is one thing, social upheaval is something else.   Change is OK if you have resource – money, clothes and shoes, places to stay and ruggedly good health, better still if you are on your own  – but if you don’t have something to fall back on and others depend on you, the winds of change blow chilly and the upheaval is less of adventure than a sore trial.

Like a lot of other people I just get used to things, the things I like being in the place that I am used to find them and it is a shock when that pattern changes.  Carol told me what was happening to her because she knows I’ll miss her.  I shall also miss Andy and Liz, neighbours from heaven with a boy and a girl and a rough haired dach.  They are off abroad, he’s a linguist and neither of them want to stay through this stage of the Covid fallout.  They’ve found a house, rented theirs, put books out on the garden wall and they’re off on December 13.    It’s not as if I was round there every day for a cup of sugar, it’s just that we talked easily and well and widely, and that is sufficiently rare to be cherished. 

My son usually works through Christmas and we don’t know whether we shall see each other or not yet.    We talked about presents and cards, giving each other the freedom to choose or not choose without obligation:  money’s tight.  Best hang on to what you have.   I don’t know the first thing about economics  (there have only ever been three public economists I could understand – David Smith, Faisal Islam and Peter Jay) but I do know that the country is in the cart financially.  

  The dream of what government can and can’t do is filtered through what it will and won’t do, which depends in turn on who it wants to influence for the best.  

My change is to give fewer gifts: make modest contributions to five charities : send cards (I bought them reduced in January): prepare to light candles, use the telephone and get on with it.  I am not cancelling Christmas and it is not cancelling me.