Day 43: Spiritual Guidance

Days are short and nights are long.  Still dark this morning, with the moon high in the sky as I crossed the park, crunching over the frosty grass to get a paper.  Time to be bringing evergreen into the house, and setting big logs on fire - to, you know, celebrate the, um, birth of Jesus...

So, with that in mind, up to the market to get a Christmas tree today.  St Albans is in festive mood, with a Sally Army brass band playing carols, and all the stall holders wearing Santa hats and felt antlers.  Now the house smells green and resinous.  The tree is fairy-lit and baubled up.  And I am mince-pied. 

And watching 'A Christmas Carol' on television.  The Patrick Stewart version.  He's just been haunted by a door knocker/Jacob Marley.  'I wear the chain I forged in life'.  Cue redemption and transformation in the form of a tri-ghost therapy intensive.

"I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach. Oh, tell me I may sponge away the writing on this stone!"

Brutal, fast, effective, and all in the comfort of your own home. Where do I sign up?

(The Ghost of Christmas Present has a particularly excellent hat. Like a pagoda trimmed with holly. I would totally wear it.)

Day 42: Stitch and Hitch

Strap in.  St Albans Abbey has a knitted Nativity scene.  Yes.  A KNITIVITY.  Created in 2009 by Ann Hudson, wife of one of the vergers - the product of over five hundred hours hard knitting, and more than five kilos of wool.  She adds more characters every year. 

"Last year I added a donkey and an angel, this year I've made two camels," said Mrs Hudson, in a BBC interview (yes - there's some media heat around this, let me tell you).  "For some people Christmas is more about presents and what's on the telly, I hope the 'knitivity' reminds people of the true meaning of Christmas," she added.

The Herts Advertiser is running a competition to name the camels.  The prize is a PERSONAL tour round the Abbey, plus a DELUXE tea at the Abbey refectory.  I am most definitely entering.  Got to get those names right, though.  Paul and Susan?  Too plain?  Hilary and Beavis?  Too arch?  God, it's so hard.

In other news, the incomparable Christopher Hitchens is dead.  And the world is a poorer place.  Fiercely intelligent, free thinking, original, vibrant, humane, articulate, deeply moral, bold, witty and charming.  A sharp blade that cut through so much bullshit.  Sad that he's gone; glad he was here.     

Hitch and the Knitivity.  I think he'd have appreciated a fabricated Jesus...

Day 41: Oh my darling Clementine

Canary Wharf.  Financial buildings towering skywards in monumental cock-offs - Jenga in steel and glass.  Such an odd place.  The dated show-offy gloss - champagne & oyster bars, Rolexes, red braces (still).  And a very cold wind blowing off the Thames, howling through the empty plazas.  No feeling of soul or warmth.  Can anyone love this place?  I can't imagine it.  But then I only get a visitor's glimpse.  A bank of granite-faced receptionists with immaculate talons and air-hostess hair.  Sculptural flowers (penile, waxy) intimidate deliberately.  Then up thirty-six floors in a sickening matter of seconds.  ADMIRE our boardroom table.  It is BIG and SHINY and EXPENSIVE.  QUAKE at its might.  (I want to launch myself at it - on my stomach, and see how far I could travel.  Like curling.  With a couple of people brushing frantically in front of me.  I don't, but one day I might.  When I burn my bridges (yet again) and have to find a new start.) 

Things looks up immensely when I go for a coffee in Pret a Manger, and a woman called Agnes gives me a clementine.  Free of charge.  She balances it carefully on the lid of my coffee, where it sits and glows orange.  It pleases me disproportionately.  Then I notice the whole place is studded with clementines.  Everyone is getting one.  But I seem to be the only person to eat mine.  Lots are discarded, left on tables amid sandwich wrappers.  How can people not want a free clementine?  If not now, then in the pocket for later?  Perhaps finance types can't have clementines.  Perhaps zest will smear onto balance sheets.  Juice will make ink run.  Or they just simply don't understand or trust something that is given freely. 

My last job of 2011.  As I go home, the cold that I have been holding at bay finally wins out - eyeballs aching and feeling large as space hoppers.  Throat lumpy and raw.  And I'm tired.  But that's fine, because I have time to lie on the sofa and watch black and white films.  And drink hot lemon.  And eat clementines.  Because I have a pocketful.

Day 40: Love - Forty

Forty days of blogging.  And also the anniversary of my accident.  The accident that almost killed me, and left me with a scar like a tennis ball seam on the left hand side of my head.  One minute, talking to a friend in a bar; the next, waking up with lights in my eyes, and surrounded by a medical team in masks and gowns.  A brain haemorrage, a fall, a skull fracture and a blood clot - in that order.  Two questions - 'Do you know who you are?' and 'Can you move your feet?'  And thanks to the brilliance of the National Neurological Hospital in Queen's Square, the answer to both was 'yes'.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  The debt that I owe you still moves me to tears. 

Today - a job in Gloucester. A long drive, with the temperature dropping all the way, and ominous skies.  On the way home, rain turns to sleet turns to snow.  Whirling blizzard.  The markings on the road disappear in a total white-out.  Makes for tense shoulders and dry eyes, but worth it for the fairytale scenery - Narnia in the Cotswold hills.  Park appallingly when I get home.  So badly that it makes me laugh.  Normally, I'd correct it.  Today I can't be bothered.  Very liberating.

I know who I am.  I can walk.  I know who I am.  I can walk.  I know who I am.  I can walk.

There are many days I take this for granted.  Not today.

Day 39: Hair like Syd

Today I had good hair (for some of the day).  This rarely happens.  It can't be planned, as any form of intervention (applicances or 'product') is guaranteed to be spectacularly counterproductive.  (Good news, because quite frankly I am too damn lazy to do anything other than wash it and comb it.)  But today - possibly because of some strange alchemy born of damp air and violent winds - I caught sight of my reflection in a shop window and my hair was definitely, definitely Syd Barrett-ish (early era - before the drugs had done their worst).  In my book, this is a GOOD THING (I am not, nor will ever be, a proper lady.)  The heating and oppressive atmosphere of a few City firms put paid to my look - by 4pm I was distinctly limp and bedraggled.  But for one glorious moment, the planets aligned and I was Barrett-ish.

Two more jobs to go, and then my work calendar is done for the year.  I fully intend to retreat and hibernate.  Like a spent bulb, beneath a blanket of earth, slowly restoring reserves of energy.  I will need books, and films, and walks, and clean air.  Some historical ruins.  Possibly a ghost story or two.  Good smells.  (Anything cooking in wine and garlic.  Smoke.  Flowers.  Rain.)  Stupid amounts of sleep.  Time to fritter.  Broad margins.

I wish I was eight again, so I could read 'The Children of Green Knowe' for the very first time.  I remember lying in bed, reading and reading, retreating into a world of ebony mice and ghost children.  All contained in the walls of an ancient house - solid and safe, but alive with magic.  The writer, Lucy Boston, used her own house as inspiration - the Manor, Hemmingford Grey.  You can visit it.  I'm going to. 

In my head I'm eight.  On my head I'm Syd. 


   

Day 38: Bold-drunk and resourceful

Today I must face the possibility that I have lost my favourite cardigan.  It was baggy.  A bit loose at the seams.  But I loved it.  I've not seen it for a week, and given the weekend dust-mice corral, it's definitely not in the most likely spot - the bedroom.  Or the sitting-room.  Or my car.  So unless it's gone Houdini in the dining-room, kitchen or bathroom - which I doubt - it's gone.  It was looking rather tired, and I slightly suspect it has diminished and gone into the West, like Galadriel.  (In other words, I left it behind at the meditation retreat.) 

I've not given up hope yet.  I once found a contact lens deep in the entrails of the sofa - a hand blindly thrust down between stuffing and webbing, grasping at aged crumbs of crud.  A handful of tissue fragments, staples, pennies, grit, lentils (WHAT?  Oh, yes.  I made a bean(lentil)bag...), and at the bottom, my lens, belly up, dusty and all helpl ess.  On another occasion, back in my Crouch End days, after a particularly craven evening at The White Lion of Mortimer, I'm weaving home unsteadily when a twig flips a lens out (OK, my fault - I bounce off a bush).  On a particularly dark stretch of pavement.  No matter - I am bold-drunk and resourceful.  Noticing a well-lit house, I barrel up the path and knock at the door, in search of a torch.  I've stumbled on a party - no torches, but lots of drunk helpful people who came out with candles.  We stagger around loudly but ineffectually for a while, to no avail.  I go home, still bold-drunk and resourceful, and set my alarm for 5.00am, thinking that I'll get up early and go back to search the streets before the daily pedestrian traffic destroys all hope of finding my lens intact.  (Logical.)  The alarm goes off at 5.00am - I'm still bold-drunk, still resourceful.  Wellington boots on and a coat over my nightshirt (ever mindful of fashion), I retrace my route in the dawn light.  Not hard to find the area - spattered with footprints and waxy drips from the candle-fuelled search party.  If the lens is still there, chances are that it is ground into the pavement.  Having come this far, I lean over for a final look.  And the first thing I see is my lens, plump and shiny, sitting demurely on a dandelion leaf growing out of a crack in the wall. 

Sometimes things are lost.  Properly.  The watch that I got for my 21st birthday - lost the same day.  I knew it was gone.  Maybe my cardigan.  It feels gone. 
But I've had so many instances when I've almost given up searching for things that I thought were lost, but the final push, against the odds, has yield fruit.  Many lenses (so, so many).  My wallet.  My ring.  Some friendships.  So this post is dedicated to the final push.  Whether you're bold-drunk or bold-sober, bothering to go again. 

Go on. 

(This (left) is a message left for posterity in wet pavement concrete.  Nice work.)

Day 37: Cake or Death?

This morning there was a festive charity run in St Albans, so the town has been full of sweaty Santas all day.  I particularly like the ones who decided to make the most of their visit with a bit of post-run shopping, and have obviously forgotten they're in costume, so are trailing around looking bored/eating Nando's/having arguments.  It's a grey day, and the splashes of red are very 'Don't Look Now'.

Imagine this.  A man with half a face (and an off-putting manner) delivers a box containing a button to your house, and tells you that if you press it, you will receive a million dollars, but someone (unknown to you) will die.  (Premise of 'The Box' - Richard Kelly, starring Cameron Diaz and James Marsden.)  Do you press the button?  NO.  Because firstly, you are not some half-faced man's tiny dancing puppet.  And secondly, you know (as any fool do) how this works - that this is morally wrong, and will come back at you in more ways than you can fathom.  Obviously, in the film Cameron does press the button, because she knows (as any fool do) that unless she does that, there will be no film.  (Actually, I really wish she hadn't, on those grounds). 

Perhaps it would be a lot easier, generally, if most life choices came with a button, and a really clear signpost (turn left for cash/chaos/pain; turn right for poverty/happiness/freedom).  Most of the time I've not even been aware there was a turning, or that I'd taken it.  On the odd occasion I've clearly been presented with two choices, the signpost is inevitably incomplete.  There'll be some useful facts, but the missing element will be the one thing I've not even considered.  That thing on which everything hinges.

Every time I've made bum choices, it's when I've made a so-called 'rational' decision - even though it felt wrong.  My error has been paying attention to the signposts (source - unreliable riddler types) and ignoring my gut instinct (source - me.  Whole face, no riddles). 

Anyway, I've already had a man present me with a button in a box (see Day Twenty).  I didn't press it.  Tick.