The Third Day of Christmas

On the third day of Christmas my true love gave to me.... three recycling bin bags, two cold meat slices and a wedge of over-ripe brie.

In the song it was three French Hens, which, if we are honest is the last thing we want after all that Turkey. There is a suggestion that the song was a memory aid for catholics: a catechism song and the French hens represented the three virtues of faith, hope and charity or the holy trinity of father, son and the holy toast. The third day was also a feast day of St John the Apostle, who is the patron saint of love, loyalty, friendship, authors and bin bags.

On the third day of Christmas some people have gone back to work, many haven’t but all are confused about the day. Whether you are celebrating with three French hens, left over Turkey,the third day of cheesemas or having to take extra long walks with the dog to counteract the turkey farts the third day conversation will be the same.
“Is it bin day?”
“I don’t know. Is it Tuesday or Wednesday today?”
“I think it’s Wednesday.”
“Then it should be bin day.”
“No one else has their bins out.”
“Probably all still drunk.”
“No, I think the day changes over Christmas.”
“What if we miss out this week.”
“That can’t happen. The food bin is full.”
“How can it be full? We’re still eating leftovers.”
“Turkey carcass, vegetable peelings and egg shells.”
“Thank goodness you’re not making me eat them.”
“I think it must just move on a day.”
“So, we need to put the bins out tonight then?”
“Yes. Normal bins or recycling bags?”

This is where you really need to call on the patron saint of bin bags.

Tradition

I love Christmas.

The Birthday Gas Man had insisted that no one remembers Christmas or the presents they received unless something awful happened.  He might have a point. We all remember the year I burnt the pigs in blankets.

I’m not sure I really agree with him. Some people don’t remember very much. The Long Suffering husband has an excellent visual memory and can probably remember what everyone was wearing every Christmas since 1978 but can’t remember me telling him that I was going out on Wednesday night. I’m more likely to remember the funny stories. I remember the year I got a guitar because my little sister had a toy where little people went round on an automated train, up some steps and slid down a slide back into the train and she spent the whole of Christmas Day lying on her belly in her chocolate stained baby-grow vest; chubby legs bouncing behind her with excitement as she watched the little people go round and round. “Boggies. More. Boggies!” she shouted over and over.

It is true that many Christmases blend together and it can be difficult to say which year the funny things happened in. I can’t remember if the year my mum fed sherry to the fish was the same year she had to go to bed before dinner, although now that I have hosted a family party I can definitely see the appeal of a bottle of sherry.

It’s the tradition that makes the holidays blend into one. If you do the same thing every year, how can you tell them apart? It’s also the tradition that I love.


I hoped that this year wouldn’t be one that we remembered for the wrong reasons: the first year without dad and Mum being not so well. However, the traditions have made it unmemorable in a very special way.

The Christmas Eve church service is one of my favourite things. When the light from the candles is passed from one to the other it always makes me feel a bit emotional. This year the service might only be memorable for the fact that I complimented the vicar on his amazing organ(ist), while my family shrank away and my friend tried to explain for me.

This is followed by prosecco and mince pies with some friends. This year we played cards against humanity, which is always really funny but surprisingly not memorable.

Christmas Day has its traditions that include stockings, presents, food, a snooze and more games. This year’s game was Obama Llama, which is hard to play if you don’t know famous people. It was a good day. I didn’t burn anything and we all ate loads.  I have never laughed as much as when we successfully guessed the rhyme on Mum’s card.
“Sheep?”
“No. Better wool than that. I think they have them here.”
“Llama? Alpaca?”
“Yes. Alpaca. The next bit sips a hot drink.”
“Alpaca drinks a cuppa? That’s a terrible rhyme.”
“No, not tea the other one.”
“Coffee.”
“Little frothy one.”
“Alpaca drinks cuppuccino?”
“That doesn’t rhyme. Let’s see the card . Oh, Al Pacino drinks cappuccino.”
“What’s an Al Pacino?”

As usual, I insisted that everyone stay in the same room to watch a film which I then slept all the way through.

Today, though is my absolute favourite. Now that I’m older and we don’t have to do extended family so there is no boxing or fights of any kind. A new tradition has developed: A day for eating cheese and other leftovers, while starting on my pile of Christmas books, wearing a pair of Christmas socks and drinking from my Christmas mug.

Happy Books-In Day.

Happy Birthday Mr Gas Man

We recently had a new boiler and a new radiator fitted. The boiler was fine but the radiator leaked and so my Christmas preparations have included entertaining several gas men. Some have been grumpy, some lovely, most drink a lot of tea (and never seem to need the loo) and the last one, who finally fixed the leak was chatty.

He told me about his daughter, who is having to entertain her in-laws for Christmas and how much he is enjoying watching her regret offering. This was just after I had offered to host the big family party and so I had a lot of sympathy for his daughter. He wasn’t going to let her off that lightly, though. As a difficult child he saw this as pay back that he was going to sit back and happily watch. He told me that he had always cooked Christmas dinner and we discussed the best day to go to Tesco. He and his wife often have to work at Christmas. I was surprised that people got their leaky radiators fixed on Christmas Day but he said he was just on call for the ‘if you smell gas’ duty. His wife, as a midwife, is on call for the birth of Jesus. His daughter and her husband are physicists, working at Porton Down and even after only half an hour of hearing about her I am concerned. Not only for their Christmas dinner but also for our country’s nuclear weapons programme. She can’t do anything without a list, which I think sounds perfectly reasonable. I like a list. But if she has written, “get up at 20 past,” and she sits in bed until the clock ticks to 7.21 she can’t get up until 8.20. This caused Mr Gas Man unimaginable stress when his kids were at school, because school busses don’t wait an hour for their students. Her list is rarely time focused but task focused. One day she was due to meet her sisters in London and had agreed a time. Her and her husband had written their list before going to bed. Thinking that they normally wake up at 7am they decided they had time for two episodes of Game of Thrones before she had to catch her train. The list went something like this:

1. Wake up

2. Make cup of tea

3. Get some cereal.

4. Eat breakfast in bed

5. Watch 2 episodes of GoT

6. Get up

7. Shower

8. Get dressed

9. Go to trin station

10. Catch train

The problem came when they didn’t wake up until 8.30. One of her sisters rang, “Where are you? You’re half an hour late!”

“I’m just getting in the shower. I’m at number 7 on the list.”

“It sounds as though you’ve had a lucky escape, not being invited to theirs with the in-laws,” I pointed out to the chatty Gas man. 

He told me that he wouldn’t go to hers anyway. Not on his birthday. 

“It’s your birthday on Christmas Day?” I asked, surprised that he hadn’t mentioned it before. “That must be...”

What could I say? 

I think it would be awful. 

He thought a birthday just after Christmas would be worse, “At least you always have a nice time on Christmas Day. You get a nice dinner and people try to like each other.”

“I don’t suppose it ever gets forgotten,” I said.

He wasn’t sure. His uncle always gave him a joint birthday and Christmas present but his brother got about the same and it wasn’t his birthday. 

Happy Birthday, Mr Gas Man. I hope this one is memorable and you get twice the presents of everyone else. I hope Jesus isn’t born, that no houses explode from gas leaks and that everyone appreciates your cooking.

The Hostess with the.....

When I was growing up I'm sure there was an advert that used the phrase 'Hostess with the mostest," and it has a lot to answer for. I have no idea what the advert was for; maybe Cinzano or a hostess trolley but I do remember the woman, with a frilly blouse undone to show a perfect 1970's bosom and flicky hair, simpering into the camera talking about how important it was to get a party right.

I am a reluctant host.  To be fair, I'm a reluctant attendee of a party but hosting comes with the pressure of being perfect.  I am not perfect.  I'd love to be one of these people who breezes through hosting a party with a clean kitchen floor, all homemade food and tea towels over the cooker handle with their stripes in perfect alignment and all I can do is aspire to it.

I try to make my own sausage rolls and the Long Suffering Husband wonders aloud whether it might have been better to buy some, or whether we rename them sausage meat with a side order of incredibly flaky pastry. I have been cooking for four days (that's not really true) and am now ready for bed.

My large extended family are due to arrive in less than half an hour and although I have warned them that I'm a grumpy host I'm not sure they will be entirely prepared for me settling down to read the book I have bought for the occasion. 

I also have a notebook hidden in every room because they are not dull people.  Do you think writing this  blog is fair warning?

Sausage in Banter

“There are drunk teachers everywhere,” a barman whispered at me on Wednesday night, before telling me all the schools in the area with teachers that like a drink at the end of term. I think he had a complicated system for ranking them and my school were probably at the top (or bottom, depending on your viewpoint). This was at bar 8 of the 12 bars of Christmas which comes at the end of the fun bit. As a non drinker I always enjoy bars four to eight: the work talk has stopped, there is a genuine relaxed funniness and it hasn’t started to get messy.

I love the people I work with and one day they will make a great sitcom. I keep warning them that a staffroom based sitcom is a good idea.

Our last school day was a great episode.

After church there was an extra long playtime, where coffee, broken mince pies, biscuits and chocolates were used in early preparation for the evening’s drinking. Staff were tired and the filter was beginning to slip. The language in the staffroom at the end of term is shocking and that is why teachers need holidays, to save the poor children. It is only possible to be sickly sweet with no swearing for six weeks at a time.

At lunchtime Christmas dinner was eaten in the hall with the children, so the staffroom filled up gradually, as each class went out to play.
“That was a great dinner.” We all agreed that our new kitchen staff were amazing and reminisced about passed times when we were too scared to go anywhere near the kitchen.
“Did you like your sausage?” my friend shouted down from the other end of the table.
Everyone laughed. She blushed. “I can’t believe I said that. Why did I ask you about your sausage?”
“Because you knew I couldn’t manage it. It was just too huge.”
More laughter. More blushing.
“I much prefer a small one.”
“They’re meant to be little at Christmas.”
“It was nice though.”
“Did you nibble the end?”

Let's face it, sausages are just funny.  I had seen one of the church official referred to as 'Mrs Sausage Sandwich,' on Facebook by a local cafe. It amused me so much I told my colleagues and some of the staffroom conversation was about how no one can remember her proper name any more.

I hadn't joined most of my colleagues until the bar with the whispering landlord because a few of us went for a meal first.  By then, the staff that had still been eating with their class had been told about the lunchtime sausage conversation.
"We've heard about your sausage," they said.
"Oh yes, I couldn't get it all in my mouth," I replied and winked.
"JULIA!" I was surprised at my ability to shock very drunk adults.
I noticed that my friend was missing and there was a suggestion that she had gone home because she is a lightweight but then she appeared.
"I went to get chips," she explained, "We've been sitting on the bench eating chips and a sausage in batter."

"Wouldn't it be great if the next blog that came up was, 'big sausage,'" someone said, "I'd love that."

I did intend to write it but it's Christmas. I went shopping and accidentally shoplifted some toiletries from Superdrug (I did go back and pay and no one tried to arrest me), knocked every display over in John Lewis, spent time with a chatty gas man, made a few cakes, cleaned the house, watched Elf, and made sure my sausage rolls could fit into any lady's mouth.

Then another friend sent me this picture out of the blue, which is statue at an Australian school.

I replied, "Come and feel my sausage little boy." Then I remembered that I had a blog to write.
Now, as I get to the end of it the LSH texts from the chip shop.
"They have the sausage."

There are sausages everywhere.

Being Appropriate

Every year our we have a Christmas Quiz for our Youth Orchestra and every year I am reminded that quiz writing is harder than it looks. 

With a quiz, you have to think of your audience.  As you know, music builds the brain, so our kids are very bright but we have members from the age of 7 to 18 and it has to keep them all entertained. I made a poem out of the answers in the first round and started to make the second round answers begin with N but I got bored.  I thought about rickrolling the whole thing and getting a bit of Mr Astley and Never Gonna Give You Up in there but I was too lazy.

I had every round as something to do with Christmas and forgot that to deliver the round on where different Santas were from required me to actually pronounce them.  Święty Mikołaj is Polish and is actually pronounced Schvienty Mikolai which I only found out because one of our members is actually Polish.

One round where they had to find the missing carol lyrics sounded incredibly rude when read aloud and had the other committee members sniggering naughtily when I read "Blank blank thee Lord Jesus."

I also had a picture round that I stole from the internet. I took some of them out and luckily decided not to use this one.

In case you are wondering, it is O Come All Ye Faithful. I think you have to be American not to see it as complete filth.  Ol' faithful is a geyser in Yellowstone park although it doesn't appear to be penis shaped and despite scouring the internet I see no photos of men wearing condoms on their head standing next to it.

Obviously, it wouldn't have been appropriate to use it but it is perfect for a blog.

Worried About my Brain

”If I only had a brain,” sings the scarecrow in the Wizzard of Oz.

I do have a brain and I’m beginning to get worried about it. You notice how I’m detaching myself and avoiding all responsibility here, like my brain is a separate being? Well, that’s how I feel.

Maybe my brain is weird because it’s December, I’m still a music teacher (even if I am doing slightly less and drifting through everything in a weird stress free way) and although I have come to terms with the elephant, he is still there, being elephanty and throwing the occasional peanut.

I know I have a brain, still because it wakes me up at 3am thinking about things. It wants to know why there are no B batteries, what happens if a snake bites his lip and why David Cameron is still thought of as a good guy. It also panics:
“What do you need to do tomorrow?”
“Why haven’t you got any icing sugar?”
“Have you marked those Christmas Carols?”
“You’ve got to play the piano in Church on Wednesday!”
“You haven’t picked up your contact lenses.”
“Fool! You agreed to have all the family round. You’d better organise it.”

It might be there but it’s not reliable.

At the weekend the Long Suffering Husband and I went to the Christmas market in Amiens. We were ‘Les Enfants Terrible’. Our friends were going and they had space in the back of their car. It’s one of the advantages/disadvantages of children growing up - they don’t want to go on holiday with you any more. For us, this was and advantage, as we were able to sit in the back and try not to interfere when
Mummy and Daddy were bickering about the traffic. We had a lovely time and watched a cathedral move but being away made me realise how remote my brain is at the moment. We were halfway there when I realised that I couldn’t remember putting my coat in the car. I sat quietly panicking for a while. The forecast was for freezing temperatures, biting winds and a risk of snow. I imagined myself with my coat over my arm getting in the car but it wasn’t with me. I asked the LSH if he had put it in the boot but he didn’t think he had. I didn’t think I had either but I must have done because it was there when we arrived.

On Monday I shopped for the Youth Orchestra Christmas party. I had a list, so I must have got everything but my brain thinks I’ve missed something and it keeps waking me up to tell me. I put the party food in the freezer and left everything else in a bag on the table. On Tuesday the LSH was working from home and he called me, “Did you mean to put the fudge n mince in the freezer?” He asked. I had no idea what he was talking about. He explained, “There’s a packet of country fudge and a packet of mints in the freezer.”
Suddenly I remembered, “The sweets for Tommy!”
Tommy is a traditional Youth Orchestra game that unfortunately this year will have to be played without a man in a tutu but the sweets shouldn’t have been in the freezer.

Wednesday was our work Christmas meal. We sat in the staff room at lunchtime and discussed how I was giving my friend a lift. She has been covering maternity leave and everyone was saying how much they will miss her, along with the other two people that are leaving. In front of me were the pots for leaving gift donations and the cards. I put money in the pots but for some reason never signed the cards.  At the end of the meal we walked back to the car and I opened the passenger door. I knew something didn’t look right but couldn’t quite work out what it was.
. “You’re driving,” my friend reminded me.
“I’m a bit worried about my brain,” I said and she agreed that she was also worried about it.

The first school nativity performance was on Thursday. My brain has been unreliable with the actions, causing actiongate. If you have been caught up in actiongate then I apologise for my brain. I thought I was going to be late for work and couldn’t find my phone. I rang it, as you do. It was on silent. I rang it 17 times. I could hear it vibrating in every room I went in but I couldn’t find it. It was in my pocket. The performance went well and I’m hoping no one noticed my moment of total panic when I couldn’t remember whether to tell the children to stand up or not.

The afternoon was spent enjoyably teaching. We were using stones to make music, as part of a Stoneage topic and have been practising doing the cup song rhythm while singing SingUp’s wonderful song, Two Piles of Stones.
“Okay, everyone, are you ready? Sit up straight, performance smilance.”
I laughed at my brain. “You’re making up words but I like it. It works. You always need smiling silence at the beginning of a performance,” I told it. Unfortunately, I had spoken aloud.
“It’s a portmanteau,” said the children. It’s amazing how good children are at labelling language now. Listen to any 4 year old read and they will point out the diagraphs to you.
“It is,” I said, “and I’m keeping it. If the politicians can have Brexit I can have smilance.”

I wonder what my brain will get up to today? I am slightly worried, as it’s a busy day: two performances, orchestra party and a Macmillan cocktail party to go to.

So Wrong.

George Osborne, in his new role as editor of the Evening Standard, has tweeted a political cartoon from his paper. He is proud. He is petty. He is attacking a former colleague who got the job he thought he was going to have.

I could edit this picture to be the right way round but it is wrong anyway.

When I first saw it I was confused. Apart from it being blatantly sexist (you would never attack a man in power who you thought wasn’t doing a good job by drawing a cartoon of them naked) I just couldn’t see why he thought it was brilliant. I thought it was a reference to Bob Fosse’s Caberet dance moves. Was the cartoonist trying to draw parrellels between Sally Boweles and the pre-war KitKat club? Then I found that it’s an exact copy of a photograph of Christine Keeler, except the prime minister is scowling, rather than making the pouty face models are told to make to turn men on.

Less than two days after Christine Keeler’s death an image of her, that she was forced to pose for, despite not wanting to was used to shame a female Prime Minister, not for her policies but just because she is a woman! Geoerge Osborne should be hanging his head in shame. The same paper published a long piece on the Time Magazine person of the year. This year, they have named all the women who spoke out about sexual abuse. The Evening Standard praised these women and recognised that it could be a turning point; a chance for things to change. If only.

There will be people who don’t like the current Prime Minister who think this is very funny. It isn’t though, is it? It’s just I very bad taste. Christine Keeler is painted as a temptress, a seducer, who lured those poor old politicians to their downfall, whereas, she was an abused child, groomed by older men, taken advantage of and used as a scapegoat.

I would like to say more and be more coherent about this but I am just too depressed. It seems as though things will never change.

Cassandra goes Christmas Shopping

I can see a terrifying future. A future where there are no shops, only warehouses full of robots stuffing items you’ve told Alexa to put into a virtual basket into over-sized cardboard boxes. There will be no human interaction, ever.

You would think that as someone that hates shopping (unless it’s in a bookshop) I would welcome this development. I am grateful that the shops are less crowded but still worry about the future. Without shopping there will be no chance human interactions. No smiles from strangers; no random conversations in Marks and Spencer men’s department about how nothing makes you miss your dad more than the jumper section at Christmas; no overheard conversations. It would be lonely. 

I am generally worried about the rise of technology on our health and not just our mental health. In the Long Suffering Husband’s favourite store I saw a woman looking at the Echo. She wasn’t sure but a random stranger came to her aid.

“They’re brilliant,” she told her, “I wouldn’t be without mine. Just for turning the lights on .....”

The LSH looked at me and mimed pressing a light switch. I panicked about a future where I would have to sit in the dark because I’d lost my voice and couldn’t tell the technology to turn the lights on.

No matter how many warnings I give about this bleak future, you won’t believe me. I am Cassandra.

The LSH and I decided not to buy everything from Amazon but go out and use real shops. His colleagues were incredulous at the suggestion and I did feel guilty for buying a book for £7.99 that would probably be free on the kindle but we were doing our bit to preserve actual   shops.

In M&S we talked to the lady at the till about how quiet it was. 

“Everyone shops online,”she said, oblivious to her future redundancy. “We all do it, don’t we?”

“Actually, we’re trying to use real shops. Use it or lose it,” we replied.

She was unrepentant.

“At least if you buy it online it’s fresh. It hasn’t been touched by any,” and here she shuddered, “children or anything.”

I can see it now. In the future those big shopping malls will be empty. Homeless ex-shop workers will be sleeping around the edges, while inside the lights and heating are bizarrely still on.

Back in the LSH’s favourite store, the one where my daughter had noticed a worker dusting the bins (never knowingly under-dusted), he had wandered off to find a secret Santa gift for someone he doesn’t know and there was a man trying to drum up interest in a board game. I love a board game and I felt sorry for him. Everyone was rushing past, looking at their phones, ordering their presents cheaper and fresher online. 

“Let me explain it to you,” he said, “most people think they know a lot of words but they don’t. Let’s play?”

I didn’t walk away, he beamed from ear to ear.

“Rictus. Do you know what that means?”

“I think I do,” I said pointing at my mouth, “It’s when it goes stiff.”

I blushed realising that double-entendres with strangers in department stores are inappropriate. 

He turned the card over.

“Errr...” He read slowly, started to talk about Bill Clinton’s expressions and then decided that it was just about right but he was disappointed that he hadn’t been able to give me the three options to guess from.

“Let’s try another one. Cassandra?”

“I know who Cassandra was. She was from Greek mythology: a beauty. One of the Gods, Odin maybe, fancied her and gave her gifts. She wasn’t interested despite him being a powerful god and so he raped her and cursed her so that she wouldn’t be believed.”

The LSH had returned.”It can’t have been Odin,” he said “He was a Norse God.” 

The man was looking stressed that there were now two of us knowing stuff.

“So, I guess that a Cassandra is someone who tells the truth but isn’t believed.”

The man scratched his head  and consulted his card.

“Wasn’t she to do with the Troy story?”

“Yes but that wasn’t the interesting part,” I said, climbing onto my soap box. 

He read from his card. “ Yes,  she was given the gift of being able to see the future by Apollo.”

“Odin -Apollo. They start the same,” I said to the LSH, proving that I can’t spell.

“Wasn’t He Roman?” asked the LSH, “I thought you said it was a Greek myth.” 

“He cursed her to be not believed when she rejected him." the man ploughed on with his reading but I interrupted again.
"But he raped her anyway. He was a vicious God. A powerful man who was determined to get his own way and no one believed her. It's interesting when you think about the current climate, isn't it?"
"You know lots of stuff," said the man awkwardly.
I blushed again and apologised.
The man reached for another card but the LSH steered me away by the elbow, wondering how long the man would have tried to find a word I didn't know.

Maybe the poor man would be happier if my Cassandra vision of the future does come true.  It might be better to be a homeless person sitting at the edge of an empty shopping centre than having to deal with people who know stuff and ruin your game.