“Sunset” – also known as “Retreat” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
(A post about one of the virtues of dark winter nights – the excuse for the family to play board games and cards.)
Make the most of any late autumn sunshine, because now the clocks have gone back, we’re on the slippery slope towards the dark nights of the festive season.
“Sunshine – what sunshine?” I hear you cry. Optimist that I am, even I’ve given up on it this year. With uncharacteristic pessimism, I put my summer clothes into hibernation before the end of September. My cotton Union Jack maxi-dress, an investment in 2012’s patriotic occasions, never even made it out of the wardrobe over the summer. It was just too cold.
But I’m not letting our disappointing summer weather get me down. I know a way to ensure that no matter how sunless and cold the winter is, it will be a happy one in our household: I’ll hit the games cupboard.
A “whimsy” from a wooden puzzle by Wentworth Wooden Jigsaws (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Situated next to the wood-burner in the middle of our living room is a huge stash of old-fashioned board games, playing cards and jigsaws. I have fond memories of learning such games from my beloved grandmother, so just the thought of a round of Scrabble gives me a warm glow, even if the wood-burner’s not alight. I love losing myself in a jigsaw (preferably a children’s one so it’s not too hard). I’m always astonished how, mid-puzzle, my subconscious takes over and I find myself slotting a piece into place before I’ve consciously realised that I’ve found the right place for it. Weird, but magical ly meditative.
My playing card collection is also a source of happy memories. I bring back packs with scenic views from places I’ve been on holiday, so sitting by my fireside, a game of Patience transports me to New York or Greece or Hong Kong. And sun.
So forget the wonders of the Wii . Never mind the excitement of the X-Box. Give me old –fashioned game technology any day and I’m happy. Cosy winter evenings, here I come!
This post was originally written for the Hawkesbury Parish News, October 2012.
(A new blog post about autumn, my father, my daughter and family relationships that bridge generations)
On my way to a routine hospital appointment, I’m strolling down a suburban street when I spot a perfect pine cone lying on a grass verge. Now, I cannot pass a nice pine cone any more easily than I can ignore a conker, freshly dispensed in all its shiny glory from the spiky lime-green case in which it’s been lying, fattening, since Spring. I slip the pine cone into my pocket, glad to be distracted from my imminent arthritis check-up. I’ve been a bit creaky lately and I’m not looking forward to my consultant’s review.
Pine cones, in contrast, are full of the promise of good things. Promise of cosy, autumn firesides; of sustenance for small birds in winter; of nourishment for squirrels as they bulk up for hibernation. Pine cones are a forerunner of Christmas, but in a more subtle way than the charity gift catalogues that have been landing on my doormat since July.
I always plan to collect and decorate pine cones and string them on the Christmas tree with tartan ribbon. If my daughter gets her way, they’ll be adorned with fake snow and glitter too. Or else we’ll douse them in melted fat, roll them in seeds and crumbs, and suspend them with string from trees outside our living room window. They provide an oasis for hungry birds on short, dark winter days and it’s a pleasure to watch from inside a warm house.
There’s an unnatural neatness about the shape of a pine cone. They’re reminiscent of the children’s drawings of Christmas trees that subdue nature’s disorder into a more manageable form. But even so, a pine cone is a pine cone is a pine cone.
Or so I thought until last weekend, when, on a walk in a Penzance park with my father, I learned to appreciate the pine cone in a different way. Just turned 80, he is a long-time lover of trees and their diversity. Stooping to collect a pine cone from the ground, he gives my nine-year-old daughter a spontaneous lesson in the identification of the originating tree, based on the arrangement and distribution of its spikes.
Unlike me, my father has an artist’s eye, full of wonder at the natural architecture of the world about us. An accomplished watercolourist, woodturner, carpenter and calligrapher, he has a keen understanding of the complexity of the tree’s task in creating what it has so casually dropped in our path. No matter what your religious beliefs, when you’ve heard my father hold forth about trees, you can’t help but be in awe of nature. His childlike sense of wonder is not restricted to trees. He’s ready to detect a miracle in everything he sees in the natural world.
Laura’s garden by Grandpa and Grandpa’s garden by Laura
I believe this attitude is one of many reasons why, at the age of 80, he remains so youthful in spirit and outlook – and why my small daughter relates so readily to his world view. She is as close to him as his shadow. They spend many happy hours together. Lately he’s taught her to paint in watercolours. We have a pair of paintings, one by him, the other by her, hanging in our living room, natural companion pieces. This summer, each of them took first prize in their respective age groups in the “original painting” category of our local village show. I see echoed in their relationship the closeness of my connection with my own Grandma, my father’s mother. It seems the baton of the bond is being handed down the generations.
Having fun with Grandpa
So, with my pine cone resting snugly in my pocket, I settle down in the hospital waiting room, beginning to feel a little more optimistic about my appointment. I know I can depend upon my lovely consultant to be supportive, and I’m sure she’ll have some sound advice for keeping me young by nature, as well as young by name. I want to make sure that when my turn comes to connect with my grandchildren, I’ll be ready to rise to the challenge. Goodness knows, I’ve got a hard act to follow.
This post originally appeared in the Tetbury Advertiser, October 2012 edition.
Someone new has taken up residence in our kitchen uninvited. He’s been here so long, without showing any signs of leaving, that I may have to add him to the electoral register. Unless a spider domes along to take care of him – for our new resident is a plump and noisy bluebottle fly. He’s become so familiar that now and again I glance at him wondering if he’s strayed from that ancient science fiction film, “The Fly”, and listen out for the tiny voice crying “Help! Save me!”
When I was younger, I would happily kill a fly with one adept swing of the fly swat. If no more specialised weapon was available, a rolled-up newspaper would do. I spent my teenage years in a house near a small German forest. Every summer swarms of fat houseflies would pour in the minute you opened the windows – which you had to do as in the middle of that continental landmass, the weather was often unbearably hot. Returning home from school each afternoon, I’d quickly build up a double-figure score before starting my homework.
My aversion to flies may have had something to do with my sixth form Biology genetics project: bringing home a jam jar full of fruit flies, feeding them mashed banana, then anaesthetising them with ether to count how many had curly wings and how many had straight wings. Give ether to a schoolgirl? I hear your horrified cry. Surely that’s asking for trouble? This was of course the good old days, before health and safety regulations took over.
But as my memory of the awful stench of etherised, banana-stuffed fruitflies has diminished, so has my eagerness to kill flies. These days I’ll shoo them out the window if possible, but our current visitor is most uncooperative.
Nor can I kill anything else (as my friends and relations will no doubt be pleased to hear). My attitude on seeing roadkill is much the same as my horror at seeing dead bodies on the news: “Oh no, that’s some mother’s son!” I think I must have watched too much of Johnny Morris‘s “Animal Magic” TV programme when I was a child: I anthropomorphise far too easily.
So I’m dependent now on the appetites of an itinerant spider – of which there is currently no trace. A couple of months ago, you couldn’t enter a room without finding a spider – or sometimes a dozy wasp or a ladybird. I can’t kill spiders either, thanks to the indoctrination by my kindly elderly neighbour who abided by ancient country sayings. “If you want to live and thrive, let the spider keep alive,” she often told me.
Up to a point, I’m happy to maintain peaceful coexistence with a spider.. I’m no arachnaphobe, but nor do I want long-term spidery lodgers. I have therefore applied with great success the rural remedy of leaving conkers about the house, which spiders cannot tolerate.
Conkers - and no sign of a spider (Image via Wikipedia)
This autumn, the massive horse chestnut tree beside my house has distributed so many conkers in the garden that we haven’t seen a spider for weeks. I think if I want to attract a spider, I’ll have to collect the conkers from the garden and throw them over my neighbour’s wall. (Well, it will make a change from snails and slugs.)
But in the meantime, a bigger problem has arisen in our camper van. We’ve acquired a couple of mice. At least our new kitchen lodger is flying solo, so we don’t have to worry about it breeding – but a pair of mice? Hmm. Now, where can I get a hungry cat?
You don’t need me to tell you that the autumn colours have been fantastic this year. Each day late October, early November, I kept thinking “I really must bring my camera with me next time I’m out”. Everywhere I went, breathtaking treescapes of gold, amber and bronze, dramatic as fireworks, rose out of rich, dark, newly-ploughed hills. Then, overnight, they disappeared. Strong winds stripped the trees bare, leaving muddy heaps of compost at their feet. It was as if a herbicidal maniac had been on the rampage. Suddenly it was winter. The clocks had gone back. And it was dark.
My sense of loss at this overnight tragedy made me less dismissive than I might otherwise have been when a day or two later I spotted my first Christmas tree of the year in the front window of a house near my mum’s. Not only had the occupants put the tree up on the wrong side of Remembrance Day. They’d also sprayed lavish drifts of fake snow on the windowpanes, as if egging on the winter to do its worst. The shiny red stars and golden bells were a garish echo of the subtle russets and auburns of the departed autumn leaves, but boy, was it a cheery sight.
All at once I found myself looking forward to the rash of Christmas lights that would inevitably follow. Nothing cheers me in winter as much as bright lights. In a former life I must have been a Druid. For the rest of the year, my usual mantra is “Put that light out!” (So maybe I was once an ARP warden?) My husband and daughter treat our household like a Christmas tree all year round, in terms of lighting, and for the rest of the year, I go round turning unnecessary lights off, muttering disapproval. But when it comes to midwinter, I need a burst of light to stop me hibernating.
Certain local routes round here provide a real tonic at this season. Last year, the white-lit Christmas trees, hung proudly like flags above the shops through the centre of Tetbury, were as cheering to me as any Olympic opening ceremony. And who can resist the uplifting annual switching on of the Christmas lights? Passing by the Arboretum, I’ll slow down to savour the “shop window” for the Enchanted Wood, which revitalises bare trees with coloured floodlights. And just a little further down the Bath Road, there’s an ever-growing beacon that takes many by surprise. The first time I passed that way after dark, I was convinced that I was about to come across a major conflagration on the road ahead. I listened out for sirens, but there were none. Rounding the bend, I discovered it was actually just Willesley’s cattery and kennels in all their electric glory. Their furry residents must feel ever festive by Christmas Day.
In the past, I’ve shied away from too lavish a Christmas lighting scheme at my own home. Think Ikea candle arches, and you’ll get the picture. But this year, in the depths of this dark winter, I feel the need to throw caution to the winds. That’s appropriate enough, as my electricity comes from the wind-powered Ecotricity in Stroud. If their profits suddenly go up next quarter, you’ll know the reason why: I’m planning to splash out this year on the festive lighting front. Now, can anyone tell me the best place in Tetbury to buy an illuminated reindeer?
Wishing all Tetbury Advertiser readers a very merry Christmas, and a New Year filled with light. Let it glow, let it glow, let it glow…
(This post was originally published in the Tetbury Advertiser)
“Shall I put some Christmas decorations up now, Mummy?”
My daughter has just put the Halloween decorations away in a box to be stored in the cellar till next October. She’s acquired quite a collection of plastic pumpkins in her seven years, each with a different feature – a ghoulish laugh, an integral torch, a battery-powered spooky judder. It made a surprisingly cheering montage in our front window.
Since Laura was tiny, we’ve enjoyed making seasonal displays that can be seen from the front path, echoing our house’s past as the village post office with a permanent shop window. Now that there’s a post-Halloween void, she’s itching to fill it.
“Wait until after Guy Fawkes Night,” I plead, taking a rare opportunity to dust and polish the bare windowledge.
Obediently, she potters off, humming a Christmas carol. I’m unwilling to fast-forward my thoughts to December, but I realise I’m unlikely to gain much of a stay of execution. We’ve already had to pack our Christmas shoeboxes for school and the Nativity Play has been cast.
“I’m going to be Mary!” piped up an excited voice as a throng of infants headed out of school on Guy Fawkes Night.
I appreciate their teachers need a long run-up to the festive season, to be sure that the children know all their lines in time. I just wish I didn’t feel compelled to rush in to December when November has barely begun. As it is – whoosh! not only will November hurtle by, but in no time at all 2010 will be a thing of the past, and we’ll be giving a nostalgic sigh each time we remember to write 2011 on a cheque.
What we really need is a late November festival to act as a brake on the speed of the year. Harvest Festival is long over, but there are still some leaves on the trees – why not an Autumn Leaf Fest to mark the baring of the skeletal trees, victims of the late November winds? Or a Winter Warmer Day, when everyone finally accepts that there is no Indian summer around the corner, stashes their cotton clothes in the back of the wardrobe, and dons their thermals for the first time. Or a pre-Christmas Purge, chucking out the old toys that haven’t been played with since last Christmas Day, clearing the decks ready for this season’s excesses. Any of these could fuel Laura’s passion for window displays and hedge off the onslaught of Advent.
How I envy the Americans their Thanksgiving Holiday – perfectly placed to fill the void between Guy Fawkes Night and Christmas. Would it seem churlish to celebrate it here too, as if we were glad to get those pesky Puritans off our soil?
Perhaps we can engineer an acceptable alternative of our own. After all, we have plenty else to be thankful for. And acknowledging our blessings might also serve to constrain the unnecessary excesses of the modern Christmas.
