There is something about a grey day with gently falling rain with the horizon smudged into the sky which makes the gaudy stridency of a Christmas tree look woefully out of place.
In an instant, for me, Christmas was over - and the sooner the Christmas decorations were consigned to their respective boxes and returned to join the durance vile of my books in their cell in Bluspace the better.
Unpicking the baubles from a Christmas tree has much in common with Spanish officialdom: it’s going to take much longer than you think. Armed with this depressing truth it is possible to numb the active parts of the brain that would begin to convince you that existential despair is Christmas tree shaped!
All the decorations from the tree were collected. And when I say ‘all’ that is exactly what I mean. Never before in my experience have I placed all the balls in the box and started to dismantle the tree without finding the Last Bloody Bauble. This time complete! Even the disentangling of the sets of lights was less nerve jangling than usual.
I would not like to think that being fewer than two years from official retirement that I am finally reaching some sort of contented view of the world which puts ‘lights untangling’ in their ‘proper place’ as something ‘unworthy of regard’ something ‘trivial’ and ‘not worthy of concern.’ I am not sure that I want to live in a world which takes such things with what I regard as criminal levity.
It would only be a step further and such things as wearing baseball caps backwards; rap ‘music’; able bodied people parking in disabled spaces; Conservatives; electronic versions of Beethoven’s 9th as a ring tone on mobile phones; That Woman;
tripe; Big Brother and the renaming of Marathon bars – all of these will be regarded with a wry chuckle and a gentle lifting of the shoulders and the eyebrows. That attitude is pernicious. All the things listed are inherently evil and must be extirpated, terminated with extreme prejudice. At least.
That’s better, back to normal now.
The packing up of the decorations did have one mishap. A creature from my Belen fell to the tiled floor and two ears shot in different directions. My damaged stable creature: certainly a quadruped, possibly a ruminant, shaggy coat but uncloven hoofs – goat, donkey, horse – who knows, now had two white patches either side of its head. A deft use of my black CD marker pen and, while certainly earless, it looks whole. And that, after all, is the point.
The most thankless task in de-Christmassing the house is putting the Christmas tree back in the box from which it undoubtedly came. I think most people will agree with me that most Christmas tree boxes shrink over time so the failure to restore the tree to its hibernating space is understandable. However much you squeeze the branches back against the trunk of your (Chinese made) tree it never regains its sveltness that it had lying in its narrow virgin coffin. Once out of the box I seriously believe that the tree imbibes some of the electricity wreathed around it, changes it into a static charge and plumps itself out.
I have to count it a success that I managed to ‘close’ the lid of the Christmas tree box with the aid of only eleven strips of sellotape. I think that you will have to agree: a triumph!
The trip to the imprisoned volumes, coldly stacked in their cardboard boxes in Bluespace is always a frustrating experience only enlivened by my apprehension that I am the only legitimate person in the storage facility. I often wonder what would be found if the police went in there one day and forced open all the little and large storage spaces! Going on the look of the people I have seen there my mind irresistibly wanders back to that scene in the lock up in Silence of the Lambs – but perhaps I merely have an over active imagination. Possibly.
The shops in this area are packed with families buying presents for their kids. We are now in the lead up to Kings when every child will demand more presents and every town of reasonable size will have a grand procession the highlight of which will be each one of the Three Wise Men whose task it is to throw handfuls of sweets from the sacks of the stuff which surround them on their floats to the children who line the route of the procession.
Each child is armed (I used the word advisedly) with a substantial bag to collect the swag. The whole family is pressed into service to ensure that the child’s container is filled. This is not an easy task, as Paul Squared reminded me on the telephone this evening, “Those sweets hurt!” Certainly some of the distribution of candies seems to be more ballistic than beneficent. Rather strained alliteration there, but some of those sweets are aimed rather than distributed!
The free e-book library has now introduced me to Arthur Morrison
an author who was famous in the nineteenth century and noted for his detective stories with his rather engaging detective, Martin Hewitt. I must admit that I had heard of (if not read) the novel for which he is best known, A Child of the Jago (1896) and, if the site offers a free copy I will read it.
I am enjoying the detective stories. They all seem to be variations on the ‘locked room’ type presenting the reader with apparantely impossible problems with easy logical solutions which are explained in detail by a very helpful Martin Hewitt. Morrison consciously plays against the prototype of Sherlock Holmes and Watson by making his detective a little more human and allowing the Watson character to point out at one point that he should be asking Hewitt a question to allow him to display his amazing powers of deduction! These stories are facile in the best sense and easy reading for a damp day.
Meanwhile the ‘painting’ awaits its next step. Tomorrow definitely.
Something.
In an instant, for me, Christmas was over - and the sooner the Christmas decorations were consigned to their respective boxes and returned to join the durance vile of my books in their cell in Bluspace the better.
Unpicking the baubles from a Christmas tree has much in common with Spanish officialdom: it’s going to take much longer than you think. Armed with this depressing truth it is possible to numb the active parts of the brain that would begin to convince you that existential despair is Christmas tree shaped!
All the decorations from the tree were collected. And when I say ‘all’ that is exactly what I mean. Never before in my experience have I placed all the balls in the box and started to dismantle the tree without finding the Last Bloody Bauble. This time complete! Even the disentangling of the sets of lights was less nerve jangling than usual.
I would not like to think that being fewer than two years from official retirement that I am finally reaching some sort of contented view of the world which puts ‘lights untangling’ in their ‘proper place’ as something ‘unworthy of regard’ something ‘trivial’ and ‘not worthy of concern.’ I am not sure that I want to live in a world which takes such things with what I regard as criminal levity.
It would only be a step further and such things as wearing baseball caps backwards; rap ‘music’; able bodied people parking in disabled spaces; Conservatives; electronic versions of Beethoven’s 9th as a ring tone on mobile phones; That Woman;
tripe; Big Brother and the renaming of Marathon bars – all of these will be regarded with a wry chuckle and a gentle lifting of the shoulders and the eyebrows. That attitude is pernicious. All the things listed are inherently evil and must be extirpated, terminated with extreme prejudice. At least.That’s better, back to normal now.
The packing up of the decorations did have one mishap. A creature from my Belen fell to the tiled floor and two ears shot in different directions. My damaged stable creature: certainly a quadruped, possibly a ruminant, shaggy coat but uncloven hoofs – goat, donkey, horse – who knows, now had two white patches either side of its head. A deft use of my black CD marker pen and, while certainly earless, it looks whole. And that, after all, is the point.
The most thankless task in de-Christmassing the house is putting the Christmas tree back in the box from which it undoubtedly came. I think most people will agree with me that most Christmas tree boxes shrink over time so the failure to restore the tree to its hibernating space is understandable. However much you squeeze the branches back against the trunk of your (Chinese made) tree it never regains its sveltness that it had lying in its narrow virgin coffin. Once out of the box I seriously believe that the tree imbibes some of the electricity wreathed around it, changes it into a static charge and plumps itself out.
I have to count it a success that I managed to ‘close’ the lid of the Christmas tree box with the aid of only eleven strips of sellotape. I think that you will have to agree: a triumph!
The trip to the imprisoned volumes, coldly stacked in their cardboard boxes in Bluespace is always a frustrating experience only enlivened by my apprehension that I am the only legitimate person in the storage facility. I often wonder what would be found if the police went in there one day and forced open all the little and large storage spaces! Going on the look of the people I have seen there my mind irresistibly wanders back to that scene in the lock up in Silence of the Lambs – but perhaps I merely have an over active imagination. Possibly.
The shops in this area are packed with families buying presents for their kids. We are now in the lead up to Kings when every child will demand more presents and every town of reasonable size will have a grand procession the highlight of which will be each one of the Three Wise Men whose task it is to throw handfuls of sweets from the sacks of the stuff which surround them on their floats to the children who line the route of the procession.
Each child is armed (I used the word advisedly) with a substantial bag to collect the swag. The whole family is pressed into service to ensure that the child’s container is filled. This is not an easy task, as Paul Squared reminded me on the telephone this evening, “Those sweets hurt!” Certainly some of the distribution of candies seems to be more ballistic than beneficent. Rather strained alliteration there, but some of those sweets are aimed rather than distributed!
The free e-book library has now introduced me to Arthur Morrison
an author who was famous in the nineteenth century and noted for his detective stories with his rather engaging detective, Martin Hewitt. I must admit that I had heard of (if not read) the novel for which he is best known, A Child of the Jago (1896) and, if the site offers a free copy I will read it.I am enjoying the detective stories. They all seem to be variations on the ‘locked room’ type presenting the reader with apparantely impossible problems with easy logical solutions which are explained in detail by a very helpful Martin Hewitt. Morrison consciously plays against the prototype of Sherlock Holmes and Watson by making his detective a little more human and allowing the Watson character to point out at one point that he should be asking Hewitt a question to allow him to display his amazing powers of deduction! These stories are facile in the best sense and easy reading for a damp day.
Meanwhile the ‘painting’ awaits its next step. Tomorrow definitely.
Something.
No comments:
Post a Comment