Twelfth Night, three gifts

The last red candle is burned, the cards come down, we eat the last piece of Christmas cake with the last glass of very delicious aged port. We skip breaking our teeth on the fève in the stodgy galette des rois, but I'm a stickler for the decorations, such as they are, coming down in time; not for us moulting Christmas trees, sad bits of tinsel and other tawdriness hanging about into February thank you very much.

To end the season, here are some lovely things made by others. I had these cozy and beautiful booties and bonnet for Christmas:

In fact I bought them myself early in December from Soize's stall at the marché de Noël at Ploeuc-sur-Lié near here. It was a lovely stall, loaded down with beautiful things she and BN had made, and in fact the whole market was really very good - I've seen some truly dismal marchés de Noël round here it must be said, but this one made me think perhaps they really might be getting the hang of it: it was cosy and bright with Christmassy music, hot food and drink and a good variety of nice merchandise. However, as she related, the trade was pitiful, not really worth the hours of time and work the stallholders put it, and poor Father Christmas sat sadly up on the stage with no one to talk to. Obviously they don't quite have the hang of it after all, at least not on the customers' side. But Soize was typically cheerful and not disheartened. I bought the hat and slippers (for a fairly derisory price but at least I appreciate the skill and effort that went into them) thinking I'd give them away as presents, but liked them so much I put them back in their pretty bag, and passed them to Tom telling him to give them to me on Christmas morning. Soize told me to pretend to be surprised when this happened. 

We didn't do much gift giving this year, but as always there were parcels in the post from Tom's kids; M always sends us DVDs, which is a kind of interesting lucky dip; sometimes they're turkeys we've no taste for at all, often, as with Sherlock and Broadchurch, they're revelations which we'd never have thought to choose for ourselves, this year there were three films (they're more often tv series), which we've yet to sample. A always sends her dad marzipan in various shapes and forms which is a safe bet and very kind as it weighs a ton. K is more unpredictable; her parcel this year was very heavy, and turned out to include this little turned olive wood pot: 

I've always loved olive wood, I hanker for a big lumpy unique pestle and mortar made from it, but desist from getting one because it would really only be for its visual beauty, we have a good working ceramic one, plus a mezzalune and board and an electric spice grinder, so it would simply be clutter. Olive wood also seems to have an emotional resonance, a memory I can't quite pin down, perhaps of objects shown by our kindly, churchy primary school teachers as being from 'the Holy Land', perhaps from the Mount of Olives itself, handled and spoken of with reverence, but fascinating to me then as now for their exotic, rich grain and figuring. This is perhaps Palestinian olive wood too. The base of the pot looks like a strange bird's head.

The loveliest thing about her parcel though, and the reason for its weightiness, was that it contained two substantial bags of whole cumin seeds. She knew, for Tom spoke about it when the family visited while we were in lodgings in the summer, that the stores of cumin and other spices, many of which she had sought out and brought over previously, were among the principal casualties of the house fire (their interesting savoury aroma mixing with the vile fumes of burning plastics, I remember noticing on waking) and that he had felt their loss keenly. K teaches English in England to people from all over the world, and likes nothing more than trying new flavours and learning about how they are created, and the finer and more obscure points of Asian cooking are an area where she and her dad have often bonded. The cumin seeds were an encouragement to him to start afresh.

And finally, Colin and Li Yi's Christmas video for 2016. I've still not ever met these two but feel as though I have, as they've been around in an exceptionally vivid way in the lives and conversations of my family for a while now. They've been sending me the videos ever since my niece forwarded me the first one, and I've posted them ever since I've been getting them (with the exception of last year's which I missed because we were in Iceland, I think, and one year they didn't make one because they were getting married or something). This one came a bit early because Colin went off to Malaysia, where he and Li Yi came from originally, and she came to my sister's for Christmas, much to everyone's delight there, I gather. Now in London, they live, work, volunteer at a soup kitchen, and endlessly make endlessly beautiful things, for a living, to share and give away, to do good in the world and simply for the love of doing so. Colin's website is here; though clearly very digitally savvy, he uses all kinds of very hands-on, low-tech media: architectural paintings done in coffee, an earlier Christmas video was made mostly using bits of pastry dough an other kitchen bits and pieces, and a lot of these layered paper-cut-out montage things, all done freehand with scalpels and a lot of loving patience. 

I challenge you to watch this without getting a lump in the throat and without applauding its conclusion, delivered without preaching but with typical humour, gentleness and sincerity. Here's to 2017.

Christmas Day in the evening

The rather jaded stage. But it's been a perfectly good one, as it usually is.

Quiet, of course. We've got the card sending, and commensurate receiving, down to about half what it once was (I don't quite know how, only a few people on the list have actually departed this life), but, lazy and phone averse as I am, I actually picked up the device and made a couple of calls, and received a couple more and felt happy to connect with the people on the other end in all cases.

In my somewhat frenzied bonfire of the vanities back on the summer, I threw out all of our Christmas decorations (except maybe I kept a small painted bell K sent us one year, if so but I can't remember where I put it). This is something I find I don't regret at all, we didn't have many but they had become a rather scruffy and slightly disheartening obligation. I strung up the cards we did receive, and bought a bundle of pretty red hand made candles when in England, we roasted a pintade and various stuffing-type things, including the the last packet of chipolatas from the freezer, and there was still a Christmas pud in the cupboard from last year, and we were festive enough.

I got a pair of socks for Tom finished in time, and best of all, it being Elfie's first Christmas with us, she was made much of, with very classy new piece of kit, a Julius K9 Powerharness in silver, no less. Nothing but the best for our girl:

We've always had a harness for her for walking and travelling; we brought an SPA one, with their logo on it, back with her from the refuge. It was quite well-designed but I always felt it gave her rather too much of the look of a charity child.

The legend 'best friend' was an optional extra, you can order velcro-on labels to go over the brand ones, they glow in the dark. We had to choose from a list, so we went for that on one side, and 'treat monster' on the other:

She also had a juicy bone, which I imagine was her preferred present, though she seemed happy to go out in the harness.

Happy Christmas all.

Speakers, 'phones, swifts and winders: in praise of stuff

In Jan Krul's Werel-Hatende Nootsaackelijke (On the Necessity of Other Worldliness) the poet wrote that "an overflow of treasures afflicts the heart and buries the soul in the deepest travail"... The playwright Vondel, no Calvinist, warned in similar terms that Amsterdam was "smothered and softened from such an overflow of goods [stof]"

The Embarrassment of Riches, Simon Schama.

I've been thinking about stuff. Interesting that almost the same word was used the Dutch at that time (early 17th century) with much the same sense as it is now: things you didn't need, worldly clutter, unnecessary material overload. And people had the same ambivalent relationship with it, seeking to acquire it and feeling guilty about it, or claiming to. Sometimes the guilt is about it being to one's spiritual detriment, sometimes that it will get in the way of our human relationships, or that it will soften up our collective moral fibre. It was ever thus, as the above quotes, and many more, way back to scripture and the Roman Empire at least, show; dualism may have been condemned as heresy but there has always been a tension for human beings between matter and spirit, it seems to me, with a fear that the former is the enemy of the latter.

I tend to think I'm someone who neither has, needs or wants too much stuff, but then don't we all? Yet I'm always somewhat wary when I hear tirades about the rampant materialism and consumerism the world is apparently sinking under, partly because I can't quite believe it, though I dare say it's true, that people are really so obsessively greedy and materialist and wastefully acquisitive, spending (like all the Athenians and strangers which were there) their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear - or to acquire - some new thing. Also though, I often feel such tirades to be a rather knee-jerk, glib unsatisfactory reaction to our relationship with stuff. 

One of the most frequent truisms, and good money has been spent, I've heard, on studies to establish it, is that happiness is not to be found in the acquisition of goods, of the latest toy or piece of technology, but in joyful interaction with our fellow humans, and in enjoyable experiences. I'm a bit sceptical about the two things being necessarily related, but that aside, what's most of the stuff people acquire for, in fact? Communication, contact, furthering their relations with their friends and relations - indeed the problem often seems to be not that people are becoming remote and alienated from each other that they have too much unremitting connection and availability demanded of them. Otherwise, though, the stuff we acquire serves to help us enjoy the experience of music, film, reading etc, or to research and get closer to all the obscure and wonderful and fascinating things the world contains. Surely these things can be food for the soul? I know there are people who love and hoard useless trinklements, but I think mostly, as we get older anyway, that what we want is to pursue, experience and hold in the mind or the hand for a moment, our idea of beauty, whatever form that takes. I know this is the ideal, and that technology can also be used to further hatred and abuse and all things toxic and ugly, but either way, matter is no more or less than the means to the spirit. 

So I'm quite in favour of stuff I think, within reason. Among that which I personally acquired this Christmas (I order it then give the parcels to Tom to give to me at the appropriate time), was a small Bluetooth speaker - (it's only taken me about fifteen years to know what Bluetooth means)

(black object on the left)

This was in order to listen to podcasts, music and other audio from the small computer anywhere, usually while sitting on my backside making more stuff to fill the world, as can be seen. It's rather bothersome, and I'm a little embarrassed to admit it, but I find now that simply reading alone is becoming quite difficult; I grow restless and find it hard to concentrate, I need something in my hands, knitting of course, but it's not really so easy to do both. I don't know why this is, I fear too much knitting is quite literally scattering my wits (if wits can be literal, being an abstract concept...); I've grown too used to sitting and allowing my thoughts to wander. On the other hand, knitting alone, long tracts of time with just wool and my meandering, often repetitive and inconsequential, sometimes troubling, thoughts, can become heavy or just boring; improving listening is the answer, mind and hands being put to work at once.

The speaker was OK, good to be without the wires so I didn't end up tangled up in yarn and cable like a woolly-minded suicide bomber, or a knitting version of those telepathic people the Shadows put in their space ships in Babylon 5, or something, though the range isn't great. However, part of the point was for Tom and I to be able to retire to our own little bubbles of conciousness sometimes without disturbing each other, and having the speaker chuntering away didn't really serve this end. I found I could stick the cabled headphones into it, but that rather defeated the purpose, and anyway, doing so caused the speaker itself to pack up altogether, so I sent it all back and replaced it with a set of wireless headphones, which are so far so good, and a very cheap, supposedly waterproof, speaker for the odd occasion when it might be useful.

Our on-line retail haul of electronic-related stuff

In fact it seems to me that technology, rather than increasing it, is tending towards reducing the physical stuff, simplifying and minimising the volume of the hardware, aiming towards smaller and smaller units performing more and more functions, and more of these taking place directly on-line. I don't go in for very much of this myself; my 'phone is a 'phone, with an extra mobile one to be mobile, my camera is a camera, with a card which I stick in the big computer to download and edit the photos there, my e-reader is pale grey with buttons. This is because I don't care to replace things till I have to, am rather lazy about learning new operating skills till I have to, and while all these things are getting cheaper all the time too, I think I can still save more money by making do and mending and bolting on extra bits if I have to, which was how I saw the Bluetooth stuff. After all the excitement with that, as a gesture of frugality, I thought it would be a good idea to prolong the life of our fourteen year old dumbphones, which were needing to be kept almost continually on charge, so that I frequently forgot to take mine out with me, by getting them new batteries. Unfortunately, while the batteries were apparently unused, with their stickers still in place, I imagine they may be nearly as old as the mobiles, and don't seem to hold the charge much better than the old ones. Never mind, they cost little, and it puts off decisions about replacement a little longer. 

In fact I am wilfully reluctant about phones, or about vocal telephonic interaction anyway, as I may have said before, though I know a smartphone would allow me to avoid it by being able to text and e-mail anywhere, as well as other benefits. It turns out the main use of the wireless speaker is to use it in conjunction with one's 'phone, so one needn't can't under any pretext curtail a 'phone conversation. Awful idea, a kind of telephonic Sartrian huit clos, IMO. 

Or else people use them for Skype. 

'Skype's marvellous!', asserts my 80+ year old friend J, 'I can be on it with so-and-so for an hour, it's free, and you can see the person!'.

'I'm sure,' I reply 'but I don't want anything to do with it'. 

I've been dragged into Skype conversations with her family, I feel horribly trapped, self-conscious, intruding and intruded on, and everyone looks weird. I'm sure it's just me, and I'd probably get used to it if I had to. Most of the people I know who really love it are grandmothers. Pace Skype users, I know you're the normal sensible ones and I'm not.

~

Stuff, of course also has the old sense of fabric, cloth, which I suppose has always been one of the ways in which conspicuous consumption could manifest itself. I like stuff like that, too; though I really don't trouble with or spend much on clothes per se, I certainly accumulate more than I can ever use of the stuff that makes stuff. Some of this comes in skeins (or hanks, maybe there's a Brit/US divergence there), which are lovely and solid and feel like something very ancient in their design. Problem is you can't knit from wool in the skein, so it needs to be wound. Tom has always been very good about taking on the traditional tamed man's role of holding and moving the skein for me to wind, but he's not always available, and also, hand wound balls are round, the wool being pulled from the outside, so they bounce around and get dirty, and are a nuisance, even if you don't have a kitten around to do the archetypal kitten thing.

So, I treated myself to a swift and a winder.

The swift is the thing you stretch the wool onto, which takes the place of Tom. This one is an Amish design, very simple with just a stand, arms and moveable pegs, but remarkably smooth and fast in its action, and I do believe a thing of beauty.

The winder, well it winds. But it does it in such a way that instead of a bouncy round ball you have a delightful little cylindrical cake of wool, which remains stable while you draw the thread from the centre. This is formed in such a way that the wool is layered in a kind of honeycomb construction:

Boxing Day afternoon was spent in a blissful whirl, swift and winder spinning in hypnotic wise, winter sun through the window, colour and feel of yarn through my fingers. It took me back to childhood Christmases, when one had toys and things to make things with to set up and play with and put to work; till one put away childish things and only had books and records and such like, things where the interaction was, if not more passive, more within the mind. I had forgotten the pleasure. 

Sadly, I very quickly wound up most of the yarn I have in skeins, even resorting to turning the tapestry wool into tiny cakes, and have no more to play with. It's tempting to go out and buy more, or go internet shopping for it, just for the fun of winding it, but I'll have to knit some up to make room for it first. 

Enough's enough when it comes to stuff.

'Turn it off and KNIT something!'

~

Home again

Well, we've been back from Iceland five days, having spent a couple of days in between with my lovely sister, niece and sparkly nephew-out-law, and our house sitters have just this morning left.

Peggie, Sidney and Millie waiting to go

They provided us not only with that service, and lifts to and from the airport, and canine cuddles for the dog-deprived, but also, as ever, overwhelmed us with all kinds of generosity too abundant to list in detail, from the piles of delicious food, such as this Christmas cake:

Yes, those marzipan plums do look rather suggestive

 to these floral beauties just opening as we arrived home, and now filling the entire space with their luxuriant perfume:

to gifts of stunning art pottery, a passion of theirs which they can't resist sharing:

mince pies and hot chocolate in salt glazed mugs for supper tonight

Also, dismayed at our culinary shabbiness and with typical practical thoughtfulness, a new oven seal ordered on-line so we can actually use our proper oven for Christmas dinner rather than managing with the table top one until we get around to buying a whole new cooker.


So now, having had a couple of weeks filled with gorgeous gifts - pools of steaming blue water, swirls and ribbons of light, rides in the snow, walks on the ice, ravishing crystalline cold and wonderful human and animal warmth - the approach of actual Christmas threatens to be something of an anti-climax, and I find it is almost upon me with little time left to buy stamps, write cards, catch posts, put up decos etc etc and generally do all the things accomplished effortlessly by people with far more demanding demands on them than travelling to fabulous places and being looked after and spoiled by kind family and friends. So if we owe you a card and it's a no-show please forgive, but know you are surely in our hearts*.

However, I am looking forward to taking some time now to go over the enormous number of pictures from the trip, getting rid of the many blurry and duplicate ones, and sharing them here or elsewhere, as well as searching for the perfect Icelandic yoke jumper pattern to best show off the really very cheap Lett Lopi wool I got at the Handknitting Association of Iceland shop and had posted on since there was no way I could fit it all in budget airline hand luggage and maybe even knitting it, or indeed just eating our way through a small fraction of the delicious food left by our house sitters.

So, more anon.

~

*Though of course much of the essence of the votive pieces of printed cardboard exchanged at the Feast of the Mutual Obligation is that they exist to placate the spirits of connection and acquaintance so old and atrophied that there is usually no possibility of reaching their recipients by the normal means of communication practised and followed by actual, still active friends and loved ones. In other words, if you read here you're not likely to miss getting a Christmas card and draw the conclusion that we're probably dead. I know, I snark about it every year, without justification or good grace.

Happy Christmas...

... one and all, and thanks for everything.

xxx

Cheerful things on winter days

Over the coffee cups:

There are worse ways to linger over the breakfast table. I'm currently rather taken with toning stripes; those two blues are somewhat more different than they appear. They're more fingerless mittens for Jantien's partner Jessie (here are Jantien's finished carmine pink mitts).

And then it's that time of year again, bickering our way through the Christmas card list. It's all right really, we got Lifeboat ones when we were in Jersey, and we keep it sensible, are seldom able to reduce the number much but it's perfectly manageable, we aren't such excessively friended people as to have hundreds to remind that we're still alive every year. 

I broke the back of it today and got the overseas ones off all save the few that go in parcels. I intended to go out and do a bit of shopping for these and other things, but then decided against, since insomnia struck at 4 am, and the sofa downstairs, my big blue blanket, a glass of warm milk with a dash of orgeat and Aubrey and Maturin were beckoning. Life and hours are so leisured these workless winter days, I can easily afford this kind of broken sleep, and in truth rather enjoy it, as it's more or less the only time I allow myself to read and only to read, but it does leave me a bit bleary and disordered and out of sync. Also I thought the O'Brian would lull me into somnolence, lapped by the waves and lost in the impenetrably rich texture of detail and terminology and nothing much happening but exercises, with the men's characters drawn bit by bit in bold yet elliptical strokes, as it has gone on for nearly a third of the book. But then all of a sudden it got exciting with an Algerine galley attacking a Norwegian cat, and quite a bit of blood and thunder and the promise and disappointment of prize money, so it kept me awake longer than I meant it to. 

~

Talking of cats, I got out of the car in the drive the other day and perceived I was being watched.

A little face looking from the thuja hedge.

Possibly birding but more likely just exploring. I called Tom round and he enquired if she were stuck,

but she said she was OK, and gave his hand a quick pat and a rub with her head before climbing down. Don't know whose she is, she's friendly and seems happy and cared for, but we agreed we shouldn't invite her in.

~

Lastly, they showed this again in full on telly today, I do like it so much, be it ever so kitsch and camp and tacky and I'll probably be raided by the Taste Squad:

As well as to mark the launch of BBC Music, it's a Children in Need fundraiser thing, it seems, though I didn't know and don't actually follow that. And I'm so far from au courant I don't have a clue who many of the musicians are in any of the genres, but it's nice to see some familiar faces and there's a list of all of them as they appear here.

~

Tom's ophthalmology appointment tomorrow, so must needs find out where we're actually going.

Late marigolds at Christmas

Last from the summer wildflower patch, scarce, scruffy and storm-battered, but I'm too lazy/softhearted/busy-with-other-things/fairweather-a-gardener to mow them.

The wind and weather finally blew out the internet, and the phone, last night, and they've not that long been back.  Now the lull between storms, and we dry out and try not to worry about what the next lot might bring. But we are so blessed, really, and have so much.

So love and best wishes my dears, hugs and hands outstretched to the friends I make and have made here, thank you for coming, for coming back, for all the things you have brought me; I wish you the very best of Christmases, and peace, love and hope for the coming year.

A Christmas treat I've been meaning to share...

This time last year I was sent a link to a beautiful, charming video made by Li Yi and Colin, who are friends of my niece, the other significant Tom in my life (she is in full Tamsin but has been Tom since she was a little thing).  This year they e-mailed me themselves with a new one they've made which I think is just as delightful, and perhaps even cleverer with more detail.  They really should be winning prizes for these.  I understand they're getting married in the coming year so it's congratulations all round to them.  Thanks Colin and Li Yi!

Christmas Day

Well, I've done my bit so far, which is the Brussels sprouts, though Tom started these while I was in the shower, so at one point I was standing in said shower while he stood in the pool of water I am incapable of not making holding out a Brussels sprout and asking exactly to what extent this wee brassica needed to be undressed.  I noticed, strangely perhaps for the first time, that Brussels have a kind of fractal growth habit: emerging as they do from a central stem, when you start to take the outer leaves off one, there are tiny, embryonic sprouts already forming on its own central stem.  Brussels sprouts have smaller sprouts upon their stems beside'em...

My other duties involve putting the Christmas pudding to steam in the slow cooker (hope this works), functioning as sous-chef and lab technician ('I need a measuring cylinder...' was one instant this morning, I kid you not. But I can forgive this in the knowledge that I live with a man who for a brief time worked under Jacob Bronowsky), and mixing and drinking generous quantities of fizzy cherry kir.  

I have not yet had much opportunity to sink myself in Noma, Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine, which Father Christmas brought me, a book so beautiful and so preposterous it makes your eyes water, mad Nordic food.   Something about it takes me back to the copy of All in French (can't find anything on-line so far about this book, perhaps I'll have to post about it sometime)  that appeared under the Christmas tree when I was five, or Emil Schulthess' Africa, that did likewise when I was nine ( I still have both of them).  Books which are   vivid and awesome and so huge you can hardly lift them, their bindings heavy and solid and formidable, and containing words and images of worlds beyond the imagination, which one day I might transcend to an acquaintance with, or perhaps not.  I can't yet decide whether the Noma thing is decadent, bizarre, precious and deeply ironic, or whether it is art in its highest and as yet not fully-grasped form, with something profound to say about our end-time state, our relationship with nature, land, time, place, beauty and one another, of how we came to and continue to be human, or whether perhaps it is both. I don't even know whether it's really got much to do with food as we generally understand it. I just know that when I knew about the book I had to get my hands on it for the photos alone, and once I did I almost shook with excitement, as I did all those years ago with All in French and Africa.  So far I can tell you that old-fashioned, pale, elegant cloth binding draws black cocker spaniel hairs as the sparks fly upwards. I might get around to finding more to say later. 

Anyway,  here is a wee snipper-snapper collage of stuff around the idolatry of hearth and home, as befits the season. 

Straw decorations, figs and rosemary (the former foraged from a tree near a car-park in Lamballe.  They are small and green, but the last ones I picked ripened quite well inside), holly from real wild trees, cards, walnuts and poinsettia.  Plenty of red, which is good for the heart at this time, I find.

And as promised, a stocking full of small stones.  No clear rules about what's small enough, three lines maximum seems about right.  One or two I collected earlier in the year, kept in a drawer, sort of.

~

An abandoned pumpkin in the long wet grass of a potager, its pale, collapsing state and decaying cavities are much more eerie than any Halloween Jack 'o' Lanterns.

The wind's eyelid of a white shutter batted against the sunlight.

The walls are flaking and saltpetered, shaded with mould. I work my way around them clearing cobwebs and dead woodlice, and throwing old bits of disused living into bin bags, washing and saving others, burning some.

Viscous raindrops slick on the paving slabs, a headlight from across the road lights the top branches of the sycamore like white paint.

I spill ink then coffee.  The boys deal with it sympathetically and competently with lots of kitchen roll.

She tells me about Wittgenstein and Claude Simon, and then the new television her son has just bought them, to replace the very old broken one. 'It's absolutely beautiful!  I've been watching Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman.'

Five red bowls, five white ones, in two stacks of alternating colours, one predominantly red, one white.

The morning is measured out in small clipped chunks of time.  There are ten tumble-dryer minutes free for coffee, a small white cup, roasted on the premises, they say, enjoyed alone with an almond covered in powdery chocolate.

He announces an extra something, despite her protests, and comes in with two mauve plates and a stollen cake he has found in town to eat with our tea.

The sausages are really rather Rabelaisian, hard and meaty and pungent and mis-shapen.  I buy four different flavours, including a Christmas' one, then buy slabs of salty, aged Swiss cheese. It's Christmas, and market traders work so hard, get up so early.

The thick murmuration of starlings is coming from the monkey puzzle tree behind the square. To the right a blackbird is singing.  Mild.

At first I feel resentful of the phone call's intrusion, but then I relax and listen to her envisioning of a life of variety and purpose, far away from here.

These straw angels, stars, bells and baubles, strung with red cotton glow and cheer, delicate and without a shred or speck of plastic.  Yet I feel worried and compomised by them, they could only have been made by small fingers in factories far away.

Getting on the downward travelator from the supermarket's upstairs car park, the trolley's wheels lock fast, so you are carried passively, no one can pass, and the wall opposite is an expanse of featureless matt anthracite.  It is a moment of complete repose amid the noise and bustle.

Both sister and brother call to pick my brains, about chestnuts for stuffing and health insurance. And maybe other things.

~

 I'll try to visit y'all in the next few days.  Once again, happy Christmas.

Christmas Eve

So I just sent out the last e-mail Christmas 'cards', half a dozen or so to those we reckon might not see a virtual one as unacceptable insouciance or cheap-skating or who never send us a card anyway.  I used one of today's photos, added text and made a coloured background, then set about personalising and adapting them, only to find that, having sent one in French to a French friend, I had erased the text I'd sent to her but forgotten to change Lucy et Tom to 'Lucy and Tom' in all the subsequent ones to anglophone recipients. An ampersand would have been a better idea.  What bothers me about this is not that I have exposed myself as absent-minded and inept, or even a copy-and-paste correspondent, but that it might conceivably look as though I was attempting some kind of pretentious affected Franglais to prove how jolly cosmopolitan I am and how effortlessly I move between languages etc which is a thing I can't abide and which reflects no kind of truth about the situation.  So if you got one, my apologies and please take it from me it's the ineptitude option.

I like to get a post done to wish you all well on Christmas Eve, but often find I've run out of steam somewhat by the time I get here.  In fact I have been filling a stocking with small stones over the last week or two, to get in practice and also to have something to hang up here tonight if all else failed.  But then Mol and I went for a walk and took some pictures leaving Tom to play with chicken stock in the kitchen, so you can perhaps have the stocking tomorrow morning, and look at some landscape for now.

We seem to have had all kinds of weather lately, most of it dreary, though none of it intemperate, so a day of sun in and out of the house was most welcome.  As you can see, there are still flashes and sheens of gold to be seen in the countryside, and we have all manner of confused spring and summer flowers still blooming in fits and starts. As a friend said the other day, it seems as if it will go from autumn to spring with nothing in between this time.  But I wouldn't be sure, it can still have something up its sleeve, no doubt, and I do feel we need a touch of ice for our health's sake.

Mol has been going a bit short of exercise one way and another, the last time we tried to walk it was cold and she suddenly went all poorly and pathetic, holding up her paw and wouldn't walk any further, though she was chirpy enough when she got home, after being carried much of the way, hmm. Then the other morning she got up and seemed to be afflicted with cramp, squealed horribly for a few moments, limped  downstairs, then by the time she came in from the garden she was fine again - none of this looked as though it was ear-related, but seemed to be around her forequarters.

So it's time for her to wear her neck-warmer!  This is an old one of mine, a bit small for me but fine for her, and rather a fetching colour on her, we think.  She wears it happily and walked very well for an hour today.

We came home in time for tea and the last of the mince pies and Nine Lessons and Carols on Radio 4.  A nice one, I hadn't heard 'The First Tree in the Greenwood' for a long time.  We pottered in the kitchen for a while - I'm very appreciative that the level of busy-ness I experience at Christmas is largely of my own choosing, as much or as little as I wish, and I enjoy it.  We considered the telly but decided to skip it, anything we might have watched we'd either seen before or it wasn't that compelling, and then Tom surprised and pleased me by putting on The Messiah, which is still going.  Just us tomorrow and Boxing Day, dinner with friends the next day, then dear step-daughter is coming over, on her own and just for a couple of days at the beginning of the New Year, which was another lovely surprise.  'Step-daughter' always sounds very inappropriate in terms of our relationship for all sorts of reasons, yet I find I now want a way of placing her which involves 'my' rather than referring to as her 'Tom's daughter' all the time.  I hope, of course, that she is my friend, but that doesn't explain how we came to be here. I have an inclination to say 'daughter-in-law', and in French of course the distinction would not be made, but then, while she would be the rather nice-sounding belle-fille I would be a belle-mère which brings us back to Snow White, Cinderella et al.

Well now Mister Händel is just winding up with the big Amen, and it only remains for me to wish you all the very best of the season and the holiday, whatever it means and brings to you, and a fond goodnight.

Logs, shoots, cards, stones...

The amount of wood due for the rental of the field, which has always been rather a moot amount, plus a cord we paid for.  A cord also seems a moot amount, as we always understood it's three cubic metres, but in fact it turns out it should be a little more than that, strictly it doesn't exist in this metric country, and who gets out the tape measure when the wood tractor arrives anyway?  Whatever, it seemed like a lot when it came to stacking it, not that we're complaining, a well-stocked woodpile gives the same sense of riches, security and comfort that I imagine squirrels get when they make a good stash of filberts, only we're not likely to forget where we put the woodpile or to have it all eaten by field voles.  Dropped in front of the house mid-afternoon on Wednesday, we ferried it round  to the back and stacked it there until rain, darkness and exhaustion defeated us, but we got it all under cover anyway.  We've been thrifty with the fire until now, which with the mild and sunny autumn we've had hasn't been a hardship really, but now we feel we can be generous with ourselves for a bit.

~

More evidence of the mild autumn and early winter, the narcissus bulbs poking their noses up to see what's going on.

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Christmas cards.  Oh I've moaned and cogitated about this plenty before, then last year I made really quite nice cards, then this year even though I should have been less busy I didn't really get properly organised with them, and there isn't really the possibility here of just nipping out to the charity shop and picking up a couple of packets.  So I ended up doodling some stuff with pastels ans scanning them.  This coincided with the arrival of a new Canon printer. 

 We got this because the old Dell one which came with the last computer seemed to have compatibilty issues with Windows 7.  As it turned out these could have been resolved by wiggling through the preferences dialogue boxes and finding 'fit to page'.  Still, the print quality even for black and white was becoming dreadful and there didn't seem to be an evident way to service it, and I was fed up with having to send away for exorbitantly priced ink in obscure cartridges which couldn't be flogged back for recycling.  The print quality on the Canon one is very good, and the cartridges are cheaper and available from the supermarket.


So, the doodles.  Not too keen to put my name on them really - the holly's all right but the baubles look like nothing so much as radishes and turnips.        
I made some from the contact sheet and lots of fiddly snipping and pasting, but ended up putting the better designs in collages and adding text; which is always quite fun as Picasa's choice of fonts seems to get larger by the day,

They still look like boring wrapping paper though. I'll try to do better next year.

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I've taken the plunge and put the small stones badge on my sidebar, thereby committing myself to daily blogging again in January.  Just one very brief item of observational writing every day seems like it might be a good idea, and I do admire Fiona and Kaspa for their energy and talent and consistency and all-round general good-eggness - click on the badge to find out more.  I still try to keep up Out with Mol form time to time, but the constraint, not of sticking to 30 words, which is good discipline and enjoyable, but of finding something new to observe in walking the same routes, and then remembering them, is often more than I manage.  So I'll try small stones for a month.     Then I'll probably slip back into irregular meandering posts again, but it won't do me any harm to change the pattern.

Haiku, some orange things I made, looking up in St Brieuc...

~
Tending to curse darkness,
it takes two matches, then
the beeswax kindles.
~

The clementine marmalade potted up last night still looked runny, but when I opened a jar, it had a reasonable soft set on it. No need to pour it all back into the pan.

And to match the marmalade, I finally sewed all the corners and the ends in on this rather quaint garment, knitted in one piece on a circular needle from a pack of yarn from a cheap supermarket of German origin which will remain nameless.

Not the most elegant or flattering item of clothing, but I worked the pattern out myself on squared paper, and it is very chunky yarn, so that's hardly surprising.  The big old Bakelite buttons which I found in the button tin, came, I think, from an old coat of my mum's.  I do like wearing warm sleeveless things in winter, down the back seems to be the coldest part.

~

First Sunday in Advent, time for the first mince pie of the season and to listening to the Advent service on Radio 3, perhaps the moment I feel happiest about Christmas. 

~ 

I went into St Brieuc the other day where they were putting the Christmas lights in the trees with a crane vehicle thing.  

A number of people, like the woman on the bike with the child on the back, and me, stopped to watch and remark on this, which may indicate a lack of sophistication or much else going on, but I prefer to think it shows a curiosity and pleasure in life.

~

I'd taken the camera because of late I've got out of the habit rather, and then now and then I see something I'd like to snap and regret not having it, and there are also certain things I've meant to record for a long time.  One of them is this frieze on the pediment of the post office in St Brieuc.  It features a topless classical kind of god and goddess, of benign rather than fearsome aspect, but the god has a quill pen in one hand and an old-fashioned telegraph machine, like the one in 'Lark Rise to Candleford', in the other, and the goddess, naked breasts akimbo, is chatting on the phone and leaning on a mail box, with a telegraph pole and wires in the background.  I've long loved this bit of municipal sculpture, which I now notice is signed 'Le Goff'  and probably I ought to find out more about it; I can't quite work out how much conscious humour it contains.

Twelfth Night

There isn't much to take down on Twelfth Night.  We only really decorate one room.  Some years there's ivy and other greenery - holly if I can find it, but this year the birds had had all the berries everywhere of it, and I didn't begrudge them - which is thrown on the fire as it comes down, and makes a crackle and a green smoke smell.


There's the funny red raffia garland I bought in an Oxfam shop years ago; it's breaking up in pieces now but not to worry, the pieces drape around in a versatile way, and there's the little artificial tree which we've had since the first Christmas we were together, which folds up, I'm afraid to say, with the baubles and other accumulated jewjaws still on it and goes into a carrier bag.


Then there are the cardboard cut-out angels I painted sometime since we've been here, I can't remember what the models for them were, something a bit Byzantine I think, and there are the walnut shell three ships, which I think I've photographed before but not this time,

and there are the two peg-doll angels my lovely sister made, because she's like that.  Oh, and that odd little painted bell with a perplexed Father Christmas face on which Tom's daughter K, (Benj's and Emily's mum) sent last year.  She quite often sends some Christmassy thing like that, it's rather nice, more lasting and healthier than chocolate; you get it out the following year and remember. 

And there are the cards.

We light the candles in the wooden tree (which came from B the German doctor another year) once more, put on a cd of carols, drink the last half glass each of the 1997 Loupiac which the village gave to Tom on his last big birthday, and which we started with the pudding on Christmas Day, and pack Christmas away for another year.

Happy Twelfth Night, Fête des Rois, Epiphany.  Onward towards the light now.

Though there's still a bit of Christmas cake left...