It's been ten years since I started this diary-cum-blog-cum-whatever-you-want-to-call-it, and three years since I last wrote anything in it. There's probably a reason for that but since I can't honestly think of what it might be, I don't see a whole lot of point in indulging in fruitless speculation. I'm not sure I could explain it anyway... let's just say things happen, and not always the way we plan them to, and leave it that. So why the sudden urge to write again?
The catalyst for this is the fact that amid what for most people, I suspect, has been a pretty grisly year, my wife Carol died on 15th October. I won't go into the details now, but I may do later: for the moment I'll just say that it wasn't unexpected and in some ways a blessing for her, but after 47 happy years together (it would've been 48 last week) a reality that's been difficult to adjust to, and I'm hoping that writing about it may help. I don't see that it can do any harm, anyway.
When I started this blog in the heady optimistic days of 2010, and indeed when I kept its predecessor, she asked me not to mention her in it, and I gave her my word that I wouldn't. I'm not altogether sure why she didn't want to be in it, but at the time we had we had a more 'vanilla' now-defunct website which she compiled and maintained, and maybe she didn't want to be associated with some of my more 'eclectic' material? Yeah, I think that was probably it. Whatever the reason, I don't feel it's breaking the promise I made then to say that the situation has changed sufficiently unexpectedly for it to be unreasonable for me to be expected to keep it.
So... Christmas. Traditionally a time of joy and thanksgiving, but tinged this year with sadness. I tried to give it some veneer of normality by sticking to things I'd always done right from when I was a child, and that started with getting an Advent Calendar. We were living out in Germany at the time and I remember as a small boy being enchanted with these magical things (and getting major grief off my mother for mischievously opening the little windows for a sneak peep before the appointed day). Whether it's a particularly German tradition (I don't think it is) it was one which it was nice to revive. I put a little tree up on the window-sill and decorated it and on Christmas Eve I put the cards up. For some years we'd been accustomed to finding little notes to say that somebody we knew had died during the year, and this year it had been my turn to write one. I got some nice messages of commiseration.
I'd have been in my teens, I think, when my father and sister decided one year they were going to go to Midnight Mass. I remember being somewhat intrigued by this - not least because neither of them were churchgoers - but whether I didn't ask if I could go too, or whether I asked and they said no, I can't now remember. However it's a custom which I eagerly adopted when we got engaged in 1971 and have been keeping up, with a few lapses in recent years, more or less ever since. This year I couldn't discover whether there were any being held locally, so I settled for watching a televised one from Clifton Cathedral. They put the words of the two carols up on the screen so people could sing along at home, and I amazed myself by being able to remember most of the words to "O come all ye faithful" and "Hark the Herald Angels Sing" pretty much from my schooldays.
Christmas Day, then. I didn't bother with a turkey. When there were the two of us we used to get a mini-roast which lasted through Boxing Day and the day after but I didn't fancy the idea of that dragging on through into the New Year! One year quite recently I got us some turkey dinners-for-one which were really nice, much better than things like that usually are, but that was the one and only year I've ever seen them. So it was a Duck in Plum sauce, preceded by Prawn Cocktail and a bottle of Asti to wash it down with. There were no presents to open, of course, but an unexpected treat in the form of a phone call from, Paul, my best friend at school. We'd kept in touch on and off for over fifty years: divorced with two grown-up daughters now living abroad, he like me was spending Christmas on his own. And Christmas Day wouldn't be Christmas Day without the Queen's Speech. There's been no Christmas Top of the Pops just before it for many years now, but at least we're spared the ghastly compendium of 'Christmas Special' episodes of top comedy shows that used to grace out TV screens on Christmas night at one time. Ugh!
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