Monthly Archives: December 2022

every year is special and I don’t want to

frighten the good omen by talking about it

so  – thank heaven for every good and beautiful thing in 2022

no matter how tiny –

and may there be more in 2023

annalog will be back on 3 January.

Because I can’t send cards to everybody,

I wanted to list all the people who have been in touch with annalog – just to acknowledge them and let them know what their contact meant to me.  Then I thought, it was a bit of a cheat and not really writing.  I thought about the Christmas list, who I give what, and what I’d like – all much abbreviated this year.   Wal makes Christmas for his long term partner who loves everything about it – tree, decorations, rich food – while Wal, born a Jew and really not interested, can’t wait to get through it.  And I must say this year, I could very easily write a negative Christmas list of things I never wish to hear about again, before going on to wishing for  world peace in your Christmas stocking

– just people and events and behaviours that bore me to screaming pitch.   It’s much harder to pin down what really matters about Christmas in a secular state.

There’s time off.  But what we have learned with force this year is that what is one person’s time off is another person’s work.  If I don’t list all the strikes, it is not out of disrespect but because I would like to hear more about what is being done to resolve them.  I opted long ago for reading a daily paper but the assistants at the convenience store make its purchase possible.  Of course I could go elsewhere  – but it would be less convenient.

There’s warmth and comfort.  Not everybody has them,  or access to them.   The podiatrist, the nicest lay preacher,  said her husband had said to her “Let’s be warm this winter – hang a few days in the sun next year.  If we can’t do it, we can’t do it.  Let’s not come home from work to a cold house.”  It’s called “paying for your pleasures”

– they were affordable if not free for so long.

There’s special food  – but food becomes very special if you’re short of it.  And we had so much so available for so long.

There are favourite television programmes, streamed or otherwise.  Good luck with that.   One person’s pleasure is another’s anathema and  there is endless repetition.  I usually find something but the pickings are slim.

There’s company –  but they’ve got to get to you and it’s harder this year than it has been for some time.  And they have to get back.  People will make the effort and it will be lovely and good luck to them – but I am used to plans being changed,

other demands having to be met.  As long as you’re well, you don’t have to be with me. 

If Christmas is to survive as more than just a public holiday, we shall have to look at it anew.  None of us can escape from memory, good or bad, but the maniacal focus on the bigger, the richer, the noisier, the more resplendent can’t go on growing and as the couturiere Chanel famously remarked “less is always more.”  

So the Christmas list is  – half a dozen presents for half a dozen people:  a meal with Pam the Painter – she chose a chicken dish I have already tried on her, which she absolutely loves.  Wal makes a meal for me and Howard.   My son (cross fingers) comes to bring me a book and a card – the card is much more important.  And I give him a gift and card.  And I get to feed him. 

There were candles in my house most evenings long before energy became the Chanel Five of the twenty first century.   And I will be warm and pay for it.  There will be candles in every room, one of my favourite symbols

and like many of us, I need all the help I can get.  

There will be flowers or plants, yet to be chosen  and in the quiet  I will remember my family, my dogs, people I have loved, still love, the good times ringed with light like candles in the mind – to get us through the darkest days, to the light that follows.

“I just want to share with you that childish moment of excitement when the snow begins”

wrote  SR from the West Country.   I loved the fact that she shared it and I know exactly what she means.   Before we have to go back for a scarf or the train doesn’t come  or the  streets are sloppy and grey, there is this moment of  softness, a strange yellow light in the sky, everything looks more symmetrical, less rough edged and the sound is no sound –  as hushed as swans’ wings look.

Perhaps this year more than ever snow is emblematic of where we are up to.  It looks lovely until it doesn’t,

it looks benign but gets in the way.   It’s just enough to remind us of how punishingly cold the weather will be through Europe where people are living in what’s left of houses, without heat, without light.  And you don’t have to go very far to hear about that.   They have their war zone, we have ours.  Theirs is acknowledged as one, ours is just the worst kind of fudge and mess.  Snow is the weather blanket which comes down unbidden, to make everything look better for a bit.

I have wonderful memories of Christmases past and I recall easily and often, but I don’t try to revisit.  Once I was alone and my son had gone into his life, I began to reinvent the trappings of Christmas.  I love the Christmas story and I am perfectly prepared to believe that it is an archtype, dating from thousands of years before the birth of the Christian Baby.  I don’t care where it comes from.  It is a story about love and hope and a few hours when – like the snow – everything is united, momentarily peaceful, better looking than you could believe and thus , joyful.   And I believe in joy. 

Never mind “joy cometh in the morning”, I will mark it whenever it comes.

Christmas is as personal as anything else important.   For some people , you must eat this, wear that, do something else, deck the halls with banners and buy a Christmas tree.   Promoting it starts earlier every year, because of the numbers involved and the cost of it.  I think because of my mother, I only ever put up cards or decorations on Christmas Eve – and they all come down and go out on Twelfth Night.  Christmas is a season which deserves better than endless marketing and money.

People flee Christmas, to the light, to the warmth, no turkey, no plum pudding, no Christmas cake  –

to have a few days away, to see family or friends who feel the same.  My favourite Christmas treat is pannetone which a beloved friend sends me every year.  I eat the first piece on Christmas morning, with my coffee and the last piece, probably toasted (with butter and bitter marmalade) the same way. 

I love cards but the sending and receiving of them is uncertain this year.  More importantly, why hasn’t the Post Office settled with the subpostmasters it defrauded and drove to divorce, debt and death ?  

And on the other hand, this year, in spite of a list of all too familiar horrors, I have had gifts to rival those of the Magi

who brought gold, frankincense and myrrh.  

In the 20 years plus I have l lived here, I have one neighbour who is ace.  Sarah is a single professional woman nearing retirement and everybody deserves a Sarah – sensible, kind, private, reliable.   Beyond Sarah, she and I have had some gruesome experiences with neighbours.  But for the last year and more, you could truly say Christmas came to stay.

On one side, there are The Boys (early 20s), occasionally noisy, always helpful, cheerful and polite.     One the other side are The Girls – one is an art teacher, one a journalist and I haven’t met the third because she travels constantly.  But Phoebe the teacher rang from Cornwall when we had flooding to make sure I was all right.  They offer to do things, they smile.  And after Italian Annie moved out from upstairs, I was second time lucky in Amy Able, a Northern Irish farmer’s daughter for whom everything is possible.  

Surrounded by positives,  I’ll light candles as I do most nights.  And count my blessings which I do with monotonous regularity.

better days to come!

People get across each other. 

They feel with instant animal sense that this man or this woman is against me, will mishear whatever I say.  And there are people you just don’t like.  They say good morning and your hackles go up like an angry animal.   Race, class and age are part of this – any one of which will make matters more difficult – but the bottom line is animal mistrust. 

One of the most important components of rage is fear. 

And fear is hard to face, whether it is fear of losing your job, your temper, your hold in a risky situation. Fear has no colour.   Perfect love may cast out fear (so the Bible says)  but I lack perfect.  I am not perfect anything. 

After months of formulaic miscommunication, I want to scream at the energy company.   I loathe the  exchanges which are guaranteed to go nowhere.  I look at the rubbish on the website and know that “chat” is a newly offensive four letter word.   And I have news for those among us who take a position like  my own in which they prefer to write.  Write by all means – at least that way you have a record – but do not expect to be read.   That makes me stone in the chest scared

and engenders rage.  Not helpful. 

The language of race is more difficult because it is more visible.  That question you’re not supposed to ask “ where are you from ?”   is immensely more acceptable prefaced by “Please tell me –  where etc.”  I use it often.  It engenders conversation.  I am extremely aware of offence, sensitivity, interpretation –  but I know we can do it.  I have spent my whole life, private and public, seen and unseen, devoted to communication. 

There is a way.  Find it.  The fall short is ugly.  It leads nowhere good.

There are people for whom I am the wrong colour, not many thank heaven, but you have negotiate them.  What was called in immediately post apartheid South Africa “a white liberal grin” is still not what some want to see.  You could argue, and I do,  that crossing that divide is not always possible.  It requires mutual intent and depending on that is an act of faith if ever I heard one.  But it can be done.

A couple of weeks ago, at the bus stand I saw a woman of colour some years my junior with a wheeled support cum cart, looking a bit bewildered.  I said “Where do you want to go ?”  You will have to trust all those years of talking to people for my received pronunciation to sound agreeable. She told me,  I suggested and we got the same bus where she sat  in front of me, beside a lower middle class professional man in his fifties, saying to him with a real smile, nothing to do with a flirt or a simper,  “I am sorry, it’s a big body.”  So she has communication skills.  He grinned and I put both my hands forward on his shoulders and said between the two of them “Now, you be careful – next thing is, she’ll make a pass at you !”  And we all laughed. 

he isn’t like any of us but it’s a wonderful laugh

She kissed her hand to me when she got off the bus.

This is how we get on.   It fascinates me in the hospital waiting room that I am so far the only person who acknowledges when her name is called out – “Yes ma’am !” , or “That’s me”.  I suppose you could read it as egotism  but I thought of it as acknowledgement.

In a store yesterday  a girl with skin as fine as brown eggshell asked if she could help me.  I said “Yes.  Tell me which bank to rob .”  She asked what I meant, we started to talk about what was on sale, what it cost  and the state of the world, she asked where I was from and got very excited because her background was a slightly more exotic version of mine.  “ I don’t tell people these things” she said.  “Why am I telling you ?”  “Because people tell me things” I offered and she flung her arms round me –  “Oh I am so glad you came in”.   There are words and there is tone – it’s the way you say it.