This year, celebration of the midwinter feast of Yule
shrewdly hooked to the birth of the Christ (Christian administrators were very good at making use of what was there already to advance their cause, given how important they thought it was) has been wonderful.
One of my oldest and dearest friends arrived first, tiny in a black trousers suit, splendid jewellery, her arms full of flowers, homemade soup, cheese, fresh bread, “do try this” in lots of small cartons – and it’s her way. She’d do it if it were May. And you feel like a small child given run of a delicatessen Santa’s grotto.
The elves arrive every week – masquerading as rubbish collectors,
in that killer orange and because I have socially invested in them ie I go out , I say thank you to whoever is handy – I don’t care if they don’t get it, they will eventually understand – and two of them did. Before I could speak, they waved and grinned – “’Morning, miss !” In London. In 2025. And the moral of this story is – somebody has to make the first move. I will.
My son came up with something for my granddaughter. Thank heaven because I was stuck. And then volunteered a Christmas list of what he really wanted – graphic novels named and spelled out, or Manuka vodka. Giving him something is usually like offering him physical harm.
I went to get the second bus – and at the back of a short queue was a tall whitehaired man with a walking stick in the most enviable double breasted black cashmere greatcoat,
worn just enough to his shape, and I said into his face with a grin “Sir, you look wonderful!” He looked at me for a moment, then smiled and said “Thank you. I am 91!” So I said I was 81 “and I have impeccable taste!”
He made the next conversational move and we went on effortlessly. He was a Dutch engineer, he was going to their embassy. He talked about working all over the Middle and Far East, about Jews living in every country, he talked about half the Palestinians being Christian. His partner was Palestinian. He has a religiously inclined daughter and an utterly disbelieving son. “I am with him” he said.
He told me about a museum in Taiwan which has great Chinese treasure, collected by Chiang Kai-Shek, including a crystal ball – really a ball and really crystal.
like this
“I can’t imagine how long it took to make” he said “but I go back to it, my wife and I go back to it – and within a few minutes of seeing it, I am emotional, very moved.”
We had spoken briefly of the importance of using formal language to make bridges, not walls and when he got up to go he said “This was lovely, madam” and I said “Indeed sir.”
Then coming down the bus stairs, came a couple who smiled at me as if they saw me a week ago. We all got out and I asked my inevitable question – and they are Iranian. They moved here five months ago. She is a pharmacist, he an architect who has become a painter. They have a young son. And I told them (being aware how fractionalized politics is) that I saw a man with the Israeli flag and another I didn’t recognize which turned out to be from Iran. The man said “But we have Jews in Iran, we like Israel. We are waiting for our regime to fall…” I have read that phrase but have never heard it said. I looked at him. “Oh yes” said his wife. “we came for our son, sure, better school, better opportunities and so on. But we came for water, for electricity, for air .. we are sitting in an 8,000 year old culture and watching it be denied and destroyed by people who are not from there … Their Iran is not ours”
I wrote recently about the impact of seeing it with your own eyes, hearing it with your own ears (see annalog/ as others see us) and I did.
Christmas came early for me this year.
Annalog 