The snow kept my parents in Eastbourne for Christmas, so while they enjoyed a brisk stomp along a snow-free seafront, Dave and I shut the doors on the subzero weather, lit the fire and settled in for a quiet, candlelit, Christmas on our own. Dave eschewed turkey for one and joined me in the vegetarian option of mushrooms and chestnuts in filo pastry parcels. I made Gordon Ramsey’s deceptively tricky cranberry and apple sauce and all was lovely. We got our slice of festive mayhem at Dave’s parents in the evening and so Christmas was done.
Boxing Day (or Thumping Box as my once-small baby brother used to call it, gleefully convinced it was a day devoted to bashing people), is a kind of delayed solstice for me: Christmas is over and the year has pivoted delicately, but so far invisibly on its icy heel. So with that sense that we are not quite in the old year or the new, clarity is out and idle meandering is in. So, some idle thoughts for you.
On life and age: My oldest friend’s mother is 90 this year. When we were about nine, she was fifty, greying, floury and wise and I adored her. But at that tender age I felt sorry for my friend that her mum was so old, compared to mine, and would therefore clearly not be around when she was a grown up. But here are, heading towards 50 ourselves. My friend’s children, the grandchildren I thought she would never see, are young adults themselves, and she is still very much a part of their lives. Some people – too many – die too young. But for the increasing number who make it with their mental health intact into their hundredth decade and beyond, life is long. So many days, so many thoughts, so many experiences, so much time to spend as you wish, or to find ways to fill. If only we knew how long we had, how differently we might live.
On apples and survival:
Back in October we harvested the apples, carefully arranged them in crates and stacked them inside the tea room. But all of the outside buildings have been well below zero inside for the past two weeks. A bottle of antifreeze froze in its container in the garage. So when Dave went to get apples for the aforementioned cranberry sauce, they were frozen solid and blackened to the core. How our ancestors survived winter after winter to produce us is quite astonishing. All those skills, all those strong genes passed down through all those centuries of survival. All that, to produce a generation that flop about on the sofa, flicking a switch to keep warm, writing about losing the entire apple store to frost while eating an imported clementine and worrying not one jot about where lunch will come from.
On snow and light:
For the past week the sun has pierced the house deeply and etched the back walls in moving squares of light as it traces its low trajectory across the winter sky. Like the inside of a Pharaoh’s tomb, there are parts of this house which see the rays of the sun for just a few hours a year. It’s one of the more pleasing aspects of our latitude that the sun offers the house the most penetrating light when daylight is most scarce. This lightening effect has been enhanced by the snow and frost, the sparse sunlight bouncing off every surface in a glittering display of colour, making the near-white house walls change hue every hour. Pinks and oranges in the morning, purples and turquoise in the late afternoon. Today’s slow thaw will turn the outside world black and grey. It will be thankfully less lethal, but so much less soul-brightening too.
On Derren Brown: I don’t believe I have much in common with Derren Brown – although he is apparently related to my father’s best man. But it is always a pleasurable surprise to read someone else’s eloquent expression of something akin to your own feelings, but which you have never quite been able to express in words. He has pinned it down for me on:
– vertigo
– ‘I love you’
– repeatedly imagining doing something unbelievably stupid that you know you aren’t going to do
– actually doing/saying something very stupid when faced with someone you admire too much
– the futility of strategies for avoiding losing things.
Thank you Dave for Derren’s insightful if mistitled ‘Confessions of a Conjuror’. As he says, people are either bemused and shocked by his mental revelations or, like me, relieved to find that knowing you are but an accidental muscle twitch away from diving off Beachy Head is wholly ordinary.
Finally, I have tried daytime TV, but I still prefer this – and so do the cats…..
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