Well then. Things being what they are, there’s no Boxing Day family fun this year. Not in Tier 4 Puritan Christmas, anyway. It’s fair to say my feelings on this have oscillated.
“Sorry we can’t do more today,” I said to my sister on the doorstep. She’d brought two of my nephews with her to drop prezzies round. They danced about in the cold in that way that boys sometimes do.
I’m also not sorry to miss the annual conspiracy-theory chat, the shocked-by-electric-pen experience, or the cat getting lost in the pile of noisy wrapping paper. There are no lost batteries, broken new toys, or streaming tears of disappointment. There are no gradually cooling cups of tea either, not to mention the cycle through ‘jokes you just can’t tell anymore’ - and that is a relief.
Instead, it’s all very quiet. I’m at home; they came over and stood on the doorstep. I listened to the football as though I understood it, then did the washing up. The oscillation swings back to missing the things I just said I didn’t miss. Turns out I was wrong.
This oscillation is likely to swing into Betwixtmas as well, isn’t it? So much for the season of not-knowing quite what day it is, loping around in pyjamas, and over-eating. We’ve been doing it for ten months. It’s chilled out and wonderful, but also horribly familiar this year.
My niece got me a bag of car stuff. She couldn’t come because she was working and probably too cool anyway with her pink hair and grown-up attitude: de-icer, a chamois, some polish, a cloth, some anti-freeze fluid - it was very thoughtful. She’d snuck in a box of shortbread too, which was lovely.
I organised my poems into categories, I wrote a little bit of story for something that’s probably going nowhere. I’ve not accomplished much today really. I was glad to catch a glimpse of my family though.
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