For the sake of auld lang syne...

It’s the end of the year again and we all have our funny ways! Nations are no different. Back where I come from, we all send each other sentimental greetings at Christmas or New Year, with bits of updated news about our children, our grandchildren and this year’s holidays. At the end of the year many of us party, linking hands at midnight and singing (drunkenly) a rather peculiar centuries-old song, remembering and honouring old friendships in old-fashioned words nobody really understands. It’s a tradition.

This year, writing the annual Christmas cards got me thinking. Each year the list is subtly changed. A few names are added; a few are crossed off. Life has become very mobile and new acquaintances are many. The list becomes too long and unwieldy and difficult choices must be made. My parents’ Christmas card list seemed to stay the same until the day they died and I still send cards to one or two of those old family friends who seemed to have become almost as close as blood relations. We have a few of those on our list too, friends who were at our wedding or whose children were early friends with ours. But the rest are fluctuating. Some years I feel ruthless. Names are crossed off, because they never get in touch. More names go because we fell out: their children behaved badly in our home; we disagreed about politics or religion; they never even rang us after we moved away but dropped us because we no longer lived round the corner…

This year I am looking at things from a different perspective. I must be getting old! Life is too short, it seems, for those kinds of disagreements to matter. I am busy putting names back on the list. Surely, in view of our common humanity, there are more things to agree on than to dispute? Friends are precious. I am slowly learning that and would like, if it were possible, to retrieve the addresses of former friends, probably long moved on, who we have lost, through differing opinions or just neglect although, realistically, I can’t send cards to them all! Looking back, we’ve had some fun. Some of those friendships were very special, some of those families had children who watched the same firework displays with ours on Bonfire Night and shared the same tricycles in the back garden at weekends; with some of them we spent long nights, with a glass of wine in hand, discussing the nature of God and the universe and putting the world to rights. Of course we fell out – it happens all the time! But they were friends.

Nowadays we live in a temporary community. We are expats. Life is ‘temporary’; we live amongst people who are on temporary contracts, living in temporary houses and, worst of all, sharing temporary friendships. At least, that’s how life could be if we let it. I’m not keen to leave it that way! I have another growing list of friends – we email, we send photos, we forward jokes and thought-provoking anecdotes and one day, hopefully, will meet up again, in England, Turkey or Australia or who knows where? ‘Lest old acquaintance be forgot’, I must look forward to another new year of emails and phone calls, photos and maybe visits one day and I must remember to value those close-at-hand family and friends whilst I have them, ‘for the sake of auld lang syne’.

A very happy blogging New Year to you all!

As pleased as punch

It's one of those phrases! We trot them out, heedlessly, and then sometimes, in reflective mood, we think "Why did I say that? What did it mean?" Where do these sayings originate? Who was the first person to be as pleased as punch - and why?

Back in the days of our youth (not long ago really)... we were famous for the odd lovers' tiff. These we executed with passion and panache, with cries of "what about the neighbours?", followed by "s.. the neighbours!" It was colourful, it was dramatic and then it was over. Making up was fun. Back in those heady days we were once christened 'Punch and Judy' by a group of delightful young people we helped to escort on a youth camp. Hilarious, eh? Well, not at the time...

So am I as pleased as Mr. Punch? Am I happy, like Punch, to entertain the children on seaside proms along with the wife, the dog and Mr. Plod? Was Punch pleased? Did it make him deliriously happy to wield a policeman's truncheon and terrorise the wife, the dog and the policeman and then threaten the audience? And, anyway, whoever allowed a tale of domestic violence, grievious bodily harm and cruelty to animals, let alone acts of aggression against the police force, to become holiday viewing for kids? They seem to have found it good, harmless fun for more than a century - the precursor to 'Home Alone', I guess.

Maybe it has something to do with the current festivities and that innocent little cocktail brewed up with an indeterminate number of bottles of stuff, of varying potency, together with deceptively healthy-looking pieces of fruit floating in it? Pleased as punch? Drunk with punch? Punchdrunk? Drunk as a skunk, perhaps? Now, there's another one...

Tongue-tied again at Christmas!

It's happened again! All through the year we writers sit, poised, bristling with ideas, ready to astonish the world with our tantalising, creative and imaginative outpourings, lovingly crafted, sensitively drawn, painstakingly revised and polished. Our blogging blossoms, our poems pulsate with life and poignancy. Our audience applauds. We blush modestly and inwardly glow with pride. Then comes Christmas. The blog is up to date, house clean (well, clean-ish), presents tastefully wrapped, decorations lavishly and extravagantly executed, brandy butter chilling in the fridge, turkey in the freezer... time for those Christmas greetings.

The man in my life, my lover, super-hero, friend, mopper-up-in-times-of-trouble, love of my life, husband and fellow-sufferer of 35 years' standing. Who deserves, more than anyone, to be the recipient of loving, sensitive, caring, gentle words of appreciation this Christmas, gently laced with wit and humour? Why, my husband! Why, then, at this crucial moment, does all creativity desert me? What shall I write? "To my beloved - a happy blogging Christmas to you"? "Thank you for putting up with me all year!"? "Did you remember to buy the mistletoe so we could be romantic?"? "Happy Christmas - please could you clean the oven after dinner"?

I am full of shame. I have saved the best till last - the most important task of them all - and, as usual, I'm knackered! Only the dregs and dog-ends are left. My mind's a blank, the creative juices all run down. The river is dry. I've said it before, darling, and I'll say it again: "I love you - lots! I love you - Merry Christmas - and a happy blogging New Year!"

Last Day of Term!

What is it that makes the last day of term so special? As a parent and teacher's wife I am well used to the way life is split up into terms and holidays, coming one after another in a rhythmic pattern throughout the year. It's a way of life and has been so for as many years as I can remember. We had a brief interlude when no-one was at school or college and no-one was teaching in our family and it was actually bliss! We took holidays when we needed them, not when the requisite number of weeks of term had been completed. We took off to the sun in May, just when the weather was perfect - not too hot and not too cold. We paid reasonable prices for flights and hotel accommodation because it was out of school holiday time.

Not so anymore. Now our world is again punctuated by those half term pauses, two week holidays for Christmas or Easter and, finally, that wonderful last day of the summer term, when teachers and pupils tumble out of school together to rapturously embrace six weeks of glorious well-deserved holiday! Not that I'm complaining about the holidays, just the exploitation by holiday companies!!

However, there's something good about that sense of rhythm that comes with the academic year that is satisfying and carries you through the year with a feeling of a well-ordered existence: a progression of periods of labour followed by well-earned rewards. Friday was the last day of term: cold and snowy, making it hard to get to work and harder still to get home, but still bringing with it that wonderful sense of anticipation that it has always had. Magic! In addition to the Christmas lights, festive decorations and mouthwatering food, visits to family, carols and candlelight and all the mysterious romance that this season holds, it's holiday again and we can put our feet up!

Last day of term - it still feels like something from an Enid Blyton story or the tales of Narnia. I'm still a child at heart! I may prefer to sit by the fire these days rather than to go toboganning or throw snowballs, but there's nothing like the anticipation of a couple of weeks free of work to lift the spirits and warm the heart. Merry Christmas one and all!

Fragments

There is a talent which I lack which some other people have, it seems. It is a gift which involves the threading of one’s stories, like a string of beads, onto a credible chain or sequence – making a life history that is valid, secure and satisfying and forming a chain whose links are safe and robust. Life must be formed of more than a random selection of isolated incidents and chance happenings.

Instead, when I look back at my life, I see scattered fragments, like beads in a box, odd shapes and colours which can never be fitted together. I can find no way now to make something that is whole, structured and cohesive. I have moved on too many times, done too many things and forged and lost too many friendships.

I have been a shape-shifter. To begin with I was restless, easily bored, often searching for new experiences, new friends, new jobs and homes. Little by little, the restlessness has grown into a habit and now, it seems, my life has become an ever-revolving merry-go-round from which I cannot easily alight. Life is temporary. I have long ago lost those strong and lasting ties that held me fast to other people and other places that gave me a history and a sense of belonging. My roots are pitifully undernourished. A strong wind will topple me.

A book I have been reading lately has interacted with these jumbled thoughts and engendered in me a wistfulness, a sense of longing to find a way to assemble the fragments of my past in a new and creative way. Howard’s End, written with such a vision of hope by E.M. Forster, its innovative and thought-provoking author, encourages me to try again to ‘see things steadily and see them whole’. “Only connect” says Forster. Like the enigmatic and other-worldly Mrs Wilcox, I need a new vision that will make sense of the fragments and cause them to hang together to be the link, the connecting factor, of a life that is whole, integrated and fruitful. I am on a journey, searching for a meaning onto which I can thread both past events, people and happenings and the rest of my life. I must find it in the thread of ongoing personal identity and developing relationships with those around me which run through my life, moulding it and providing its meaning and value.

There is always more than one way of looking at things. From one point of view the fragments of my life are so varied, so different, so separate from each other that they defy any attempts to hold them together. However, on close examination, there is a pattern and there are links in the chain. Those links are myself, my family and the personality that has grown and developed, together with the values, the likes and dislikes and traditions that have formed themselves around me and permeated all my various doings. I will choose to look at life in this way and I will look for those connections that make sense of life and gather rather than scatter. As the psalmist once said (and Pete Seeger and The Byrds agreed!), “there is a time to cast away stones and a time to gather stones together.”

Cover your tracks

I woke up this morning,
Suddenly the world was white.
A strange light flooded through the window
And the sky was heavy.

Outside everything sags under a blanket
Of white - pure white.
Not a footprint, not a mark,
Just pure, white silence.

The world looks so beautiful today:
Country lane, rubbish tip, factory,
- All the same,
Under a covering of pure, clean white.

Not so yesterday – or tomorrow.
This soft white blanket covers
A multitude of sins,
Ugliness – our ugliness.

We can whitewash our pain,
Hide our wounds under a blanket of pride.
But, thank God, with time, healing goes deep –
Not just icing on the cake.

Memory stick

What an amazing thing – a memory stick! Today it is just a part of our everyday computer jargon but, viewed apart from its ICT connotations, it is an intriguing concept. It conjures up so many possibilities for us humans.

My mother was never officially diagnosed with dementia or Alzheimer’s disease, but from quite early on in middle age, I remember she had problems with memory. Later she suffered mini strokes and got worse. In time she learned to laugh at herself and at her misfortune and then life improved for her, but it took a long, long time. I wonder now and then if I might one day have similar problems. Are these things hereditary? Already I lose concentration easily, get lost, oh, so easily and turn the wrong way coming out of shops and resuming my way down the high street. So a memory stick would be really useful.

I often feel like a computer that has lost access to some of its discs. ‘Wrong disc’ I say sometimes, when I open my mouth on holiday in France and out of my mouth comes the correct word – in Dutch – when I was searching for a French one. I wish I could just plug in the right disc. Living in different cultures makes it worse, or just moving house or location in the same country. Each time we move on I need a new disc for new cultures, new language, or new places to shop, new names for neighbours, work colleagues, friends … Then the old discs fade away into oblivion and all the names, places, phone numbers and even some of the precious memories fade and then they’re lost.

Memory is a funny thing – if you manage to dig up one name that is on an old disc, or a smell – even more powerful – or a remembered long-lost friend – the rest of the disc comes flooding back. Perhaps we really are like computers … what a soul-less, awful thought … but quite useful if that memory stick worked. If I could just pop it into my poor overworked brain and suddenly all the memories would come flooding back …