I don’t suppose I could have one of those: socks, funerals and fantasy farming

 It was my uncle’s funeral yesterday and I forgot to show everyone my socks. 

I say that as though lifting a trouser leg is some kind of family ritual. It’s not but I do wish I had.

I’ll be honest. I’d got myself in a bit of a tizz beforehand. Funeral dress code used to be so much simpler when it was smart black. Nowadays people mention colour and the lines of etiquette are blurred. I understand, though, they want their person’s life to be remembered with the full vibrancy that they lived it. I might have hysterically thrown a few clothes around the bedroom before deciding that a grey jumper was the most colourful I could manage. It wasn’t about clothes, though. Not really. No one wants to go to a funeral and the first of my mum’s family to die since my mum felt as though it might be difficult. My nod to colour came with my silly socks.

I needn’t have worried because convention gripped us all. The crematorium was packed (quite a testament to a 80 year old man) with smart dark colours and, according to the celebrant, colourful socks. 

Funerals are quite nice, though, aren’t they? You say things like, “I’m so glad to see you. Whoops. Sorry. I mean it would be…in better circumstances.”

You smile and hug and wish you didn’t leave it until death to meet up. This becomes especially frightening when you might be the next one. I mean, I’m not getting any younger. After the service you shuffle out and stand in the cold for a while before heading to the pub for a much needed drink and a plate from the beige buffet. Then you chat and reminisce and life is good.

The next day is harder. You wake with cramp because you decided to wear heeled boots . You feel bereft and have a writing commission.

“Don’t let me down now. You promised,” were my cousin’s parting words. “I loved the 12 days of Cheesemas. There was one every day.”

“Oh, I don’t know. What shall I write about?” I feigned a lack of ideas.

“Just say something funny and she’ll write it,” said my sister rolling her eyes, having been the victim of that more times than she cared to mention. She is naturally funny. Oh no. I’ve done it again.

“Write about the farms,” my cousin said.

It was one of the brilliant conversations you have a funeral when you are examining your own life for it’s worth and wondering what would be said as a eulogy for you. We considered our regrets and my cousin told us hers.

“You know what I’d really like do?”she said, “Go off somewhere and have a farm. “

Fantasy farming.

We’ve all thought it. Especially at times when life feels to busy to bear. Chuck it all in, go off grid, have a collection of animals to stroke and let all your worries disappear. My Aunt and I talked about how when you want to do adventurous things like that you don’t have the time or money and then when you could run away you don’t have the energy.

My friend at work has this fantasy all the time. We send each other pictures of cows after a very tough day.  For me, it’s fantasy farming; I think of the reality of cold and shit smells but my friend was a young farmer so maybe she will swan off and commune with the cows. 

If my cousin was to make fantasy farming a reality I think she’d have pigs, which is why I wish I’d shown her my socks. Relatives tend to stay a particular age in your mind. This cousin is about 6. She was our bridesmaid and we saw quite a lot of her at that time. My parents took her to Marsh Farm and she pointed to the pigs and said, “I don’t suppose I could have one of those?” This is her legacy. We all say that now, whenever we see a pig. I say it every time I wear the socks. 

Mud sticks, shit stinks

 I’ve woken up with this phrase in my head: mud sticks, shit stinks.

My brain can’t trace it. Usually these little aphorisms came from my dad or, more often, his mum, Big Nan. However, this time I can’t place its root. It is the kind of thing he would say when cautioning me not to blame other people. In his opinion, people who blamed others did so because they had skin in the game. Those people who had nothing to do with a situation that had gone wrong had no need to do anything except sit back and watch the mud-slinging with wide-mouthed interest. I’m not sure I agreed with him because there are just some people who love a fight, whether it affects them or not.

This phrase is how I feel about what is going on at the moment over the wonderful Post Office drama that has, miraculously changed laws and policies overnight. The politicians are jumping up and down with excitement hoping to score points over each other by slinging the mud that has fallen around this issue. But it’s not mud, is it? It’s shit. A cesspool of poor decisions, incompetence and a justice system that was always designed to protect the rich. It has been going on for so long now that almost every living politician, post office executive, lawyer, computer company has defecated in the dung pile that they are now slinging at each other.

I’m pleased for the Post Office workers but it’s not enough and they know it isn’t. So politicians will, like captive monkeys in a cage, keep flinging their shit at each other in the hope that they’ll make us like the least smelly one the most.

I wish they wouldn’t. 

Banksy might have been right

Real life

 Now that Cheesemas is over it’s time to do real life again. 

Haha.

Don’t be silly. What century were you born in? No one does real life anymore. Nope. The most real things are reels. You start and end the day with reels and send them to your partner while on the toilet, proving that you are in a real reel-ationship. 

I met Mary Whitehouse once. I was working on a questionnaire design project and she had commissioned her friend (my boss) to test some questions about TV. I don’t remember the questions now but I do remember thinking that she was wrong, old, fussy and out of date. She was standing in the downstairs room of our office, where my Boss’s secretary worked. Me and the other research assistant had come downstairs to see what all the fuss was about. The secretary, another 50 year old woman, was hanging on Mary’s every word, mouth slightly ajar, touching her similarly neat perm. I couldn’t take my eyes from her shoes, which were surprisingly neat courts, rather than the sturdy old-lady-bown-lace-ups I’d expected. Also, she didn’t smell of wee, as I’d assumed from watching her on the telly. She was fierce in a fluffy, conservative kind of way. She blamed TV for the decline in morals. She thought that if you put terrible things on a screen in people’s living rooms then they would come to think those things were normal and act them out.

As a book lover I didn’t agree. I read all sorts of things that I had no intention of trying. I’d just finished Oscar and Lucinda and had no intention of becoming a gambler, no matter how easy Oscar made it look. I had also just started reading Denis Potter's Blackeyes because it was one of those Sunday night dramas and it only slightly put me off wanting to be a writer.

As I was thinking about books she launched into a tirade about how the gogglebox was dumbing down intellect. People had no need to read anymore, she thought. My eyes rolled loudly and my colleague made hasty excuses about how much work we had to do. We had a sense that we had just visited an endangered species in the zoo. The woman was clearly mad and her ideas were outdated. She just didn't understand. A dying breed and good riddance to her.

Now that I’m a woman over fifty I realise that moral outrage is part of the territory. I hear women that were perfectly sensible in their youth suddenly declare that Mary Whitehouse was right. The country has gone to pot and nobody reads now. I only subscribe to the comfortable shoes and weak bladder aspects of my age  and I'm very careful not to let moral outrage about television or sexual orientation creep in. 

Screens are mostly good and Black Mirror is there to give us the hideous warnings. BookTok has normalised my reading rate. People read amazing books because they’ve become films (I can’t tell you the number of people who told me, “That book you recommended? Well, I saw the film and it was great and so I read it and you were right. It was beautiful." I try to remember that once stupid boy, shooting dead his classmates because he's played too much call of duty is not the millions of people who play it and don't want to kill anyone. 

Drama gives people with no imagination the chance to feel something.

Like Rishi Sunak, I watched the Post Office drama about the Horizon computer scandal and the destruction of the lives of several sub Postmasters. It wasn't a new story to me and I was surprised other people were acting as though they knew nothing about it. I wasn't going to watch because I thought I knew it all. I have an imagination and have been cross on their behalf for years. But I did watch and I was surprised at how brilliantly it was done. A drama can show things that the press (with all that truth telling they have to do) can't.  They can also cast the Post Office bosses as wasp-chewing ice queens and the postmasters as everyone's favourite actors.

The Prime Minister also watched and now they are back to work (honestly, please tell me again how teachers get too much holiday)  it is all they want to talk about. I'm glad that the postmasters are finally going to have proper reparation but the Mary Whitehouse part of my brain asks, 'Doesn't anyone read anymore?' If only there had been a clue that the government could have acted on sooner. If only there'd been articles in the Press, maybe Private Eye could have tirelessly campaigned for justice for them? Maybe the postmasters' MPs could have brought the issue up as a parliamentary question? Maybe there could have been a really high profile court case. If only there had been a select committee hearing where a senior MP could then woodenly play himself in the drama. 

It took a drama that everyone had time to watch over the Christmas break. I'm now hoping that the BBC drama department picks up the Ofsted Ruth Parry suicide story for next year's festive jollity, or maybe, like the postmasters, headteachers will have to wait for a few more lives to be ruined, a court case, a satirical publication to be on their side, MPs to ask questions and a select committee hearing before any change occurs. Meanwhile, I will continue to be furious on behalf of Ruth Parry and her family. I read the report on her death and everything Ofsted have said about it since (they are currently taking a two week break for mental health training) and I don't need a drama to realise that they have been treated appallingly. The coroner at the inquest agreed.

Mrs Smith continues to shine a light through her comedy.

The Twelth Day of Cheesemas

 That’s it. You’ve done it. It’s over for another year. You don’t have to eat cheese again for 350 days. You could even throw yourself completely into Veganuary if you’re into self-punishment. The cheese is gone and you’ve had the epiphany.

History tells us, the four wise men looked at the sky. They saw a huge star and thought it meant a baby was born. Looking at the star gave them a craving for cheese, as it was so big it reminded them of the moon. They got together a caravan to put all their cheese in for the journey. Artaban missed the caravan because he was looking for pearls of cheese which he later used to swap for a woman. The other three set off, camping across the desert and eating cheese. They were so pleased with their discovery that they stopped off to tell King Herod, who completely misunderstood and set about killing real Jewish babies.

You see, everyone suggests that the wise men were not that clever. I mean who takes myrrh (a scent you wash dead bodies in) as a present for a baby? A pair of booties or a crocheted blanket would be far more useful but they weren’t stupid. The clue is in the name. They were wise men. They took ‘gifts’ that could be used as money. Because they knew there would be an epiphany when they got there.

The epiphany was….

You don’t have to get cheese in such large amounts.

They found baby cheeses. 

The baby cheesus 

It’s why Artaban didn’t need to go - he already had mozzarella pearls. 

To celebrate the 12th and last day of Cheesemas I had a mini babybel. Although, my personal motto remains: cheese is for life, not just for Christmas.

Note: I am aware that this is blasphemy and is not the story told in the many books of the bible. Also, the 4th wise man was from a novel not the actual bible. However, my blog has never promised to be the complete truth. 

The eleventh day of cheesemas

 The 11th day. You are back at school. You had forgotten how tired you can be. Sad cheese sandwich for lunch and a cheese and onion pasty when you get home and pass out on the sofa.

“Am I too old for this?” you ask yourself.

“Where have you been all day?” the dog asks before laying on your chest.

Tomorrow is the last day of Cheesemas. Not that it will be the end of cheese consumption because cheese makes you happy.

The tenth day of cheesemas

 If you are in education (school not university) then I hope you made the most of the 10th day because it starts again tomorrow. Parents could be pleased, although, even before I taught I was sad. I do like my job but there is so much less time for cheese and books. 

Technically, your decorations should stay up until the 12th day because that’s when you have your epiphany but mine always arrives a bit early.

It goes something like this:

That’s it! I can’t take it any more. It just looks so cluttered. How can I possibly be in the right frame of mind to go back to cat-wrangling with all this clearing up hanging over my head. And do you know what? I’m getting to be sick of the sight of cheese.

You may well take a sharp intake of breath. Sick of the sight of cheese! Are you feeling alright?

Ok. Breathe. Pause. There has to be a solution.

You need sustenance to get that tree down. There’s no point getting on a chair (other ladders are available) and exhausting yourself cleaning the windows of all those chalk drawings you did when you should have been shopping on a cheese depleted stomach.

Cheese scones are the answer. 

Then when your house is clutter free, it feels huge and clean. Anything is possible and you can go to the supermarket, buy flowers and some cheese for your sad school sandwiches, knowing that it is, at least a short week. 

If only you’d had another day then you might have been able to make a sculpture of the dog from cheese, as this Scottish man has done. 

The Eighth and Ninth Day of Cheesemas

 Day 8. New Year’s Day. This was the best day of the year, so far. I hope you made the most of it. This year, the sun shone so the walk was perfect. We ate too much to have room for the post-roast cheesecake and played board games. I made my usual resolution, which was not to save self improvement for one day. There may be people out there who like themselves enough to only have to think about being better on one day a year but I’m not one of them. New Year’s Day is the day I give myself off. I hate being told what to do, so it is quite a relief to stubbornly believe that there is nothing about me that needs improving (just for one day) 

Then the 9th day of Cheesemas hits you between the eyes. The Christmas decorations are getting on your nerves, you’ve spent too much time with the same people, you’re too full of cheese, you’ve got a back to school cough before you’ve gone back, you realise you only have two days left and you had a day off self improvement. Day 9 has to be better. 

It starts well. You do the first yoga with Adrienne of the year. 30 days of flow it’s your 10th year and either she’s slowing down or you are getting better. You walk the dog in the rain and talk to the other dog walkers. 

“Happy New Year. Terrible weather. It was nice yesterday. Still, at least we’re not in Japan.”

You are caught in that moment where you need your waterproofs but you are too hot. Why? Have the hot flushes started again? But then you realise that the weather is really warm for January. 

You get home and start some work. You are determined not to start the year in your unusual, unprepared way. You get distracted and 5 hours later you’ve written a story about penguin’s knees. You’ve also accidentally kicked in a weird healthy eating plan because you ate all the carrots from the fridge and a few cheese crumbs. 

You feel a little tired and decide not to walk the dog in the storm. Storm Henk. I’m not sure it’s possible to take this one seriously. The neighbour is jet washing their car. You  turn on Big Jet TV to watch planes nearly not land at Heathrow airport. This wind makes them all look like Ryanair pilots. 

The back end of Cheesemas is proving to be a little disappointing. Maybe you’ll take the Christmas tree down tomorrow and give up cheese on day 10. You could be that wise man who got lost and never made it to see the baby cheesus.