The Story at the Bus Stop

I was flicking through a notebook yesterday, and I came across notes I’d made over the summer, when we were in England. Notes for blog posts that never got written. On one page were the notes I made after an encounter with an elderly lady at a bus stop. She was waiting for a bus, I was enjoying a country walk. She stopped me, and started talking. She told me how the bus company has cut back their services, so she can’t go and visit her sister-in-law any more. She can’t get there and back in a day. Then she started telling me about her life, talking with great animation. I was hooked.

She was 15 when war was declared. She told her father “I hope it goes on long enough that I can join in”. He said “It probably will. They usually go on quite a long time once they get started”. She overheard her mum and dad discussing whether to let her join the WAAF. It was her dad who said to let her go: "we better had, seeing as she wants to so badly".

She met her husband when she was in the WAAF. His name was Johnny. They were on the wing of an aeroplane, in for repairs. She asked a mechanic on the ground to throw up a part she needed. He tossed it high in the air, she caught it in her upturned, cupped hand, and Johnny’s hand came down – slap - on top of it, on top of her hand. That was how they first got talking. Later on, he asked her what she was doing in the evening, and she agreed to meet him. When she turned up at the bar, there he was with another woman. “I didn’t think you’d show up”, he told her. So their first date didn’t exactly get off to a flying start, but things worked out, and they married.

They had one son, and no grandchildren. Their son was disabled (she used the word "handicapped") and died young, "but he was a super little boy, he really was”.

Johnny died in bed one night, with his arm round her. She phoned the police, and they came, and they got her to phone her friend Mabel. Mabel came and collected her, and took her to her house. She put her to bed in her son’s bedroom. Mabel’s son was keen on aeroplanes, and his room was full of airfix models. She lay there, her husband gone, surrounded by aeroplanes to look at. It seemed fitting.

As the woman talked, I could almost see the movie rolling. A young Kate Winslet would be good as the WAAF girl, I thought. Was it just because of the wartime theme that I could so easily imagine the woman’s life as a film? Was it the disabled son, who made her life a little different to that of most mothers? What was it? I think it was the details on which the stories hung. Yes. It was the details, intricate and intimate, that brought the scenes so vividly to life for me.

I wonder, do we all have lives that could be moments strung together on a cinema screen, if only we tell them in a spirited way, as if engaging a stranger at a village bus stop?

Christmas 2011, the Christmas of the Towels

Christmas Eve, and Mr Claus and I were in the basement wrapping the final presents, and watching old episodes of Men Behaving Badly (yay, Netflix). I asked Husband to pass me a box of tissue, from the other side of the room, and as he pottered over in his socked feet, he paused and asked "why is the carpet wet here?". Yay for the box of tissues, which led us to discover that we have a leak in something (since it hasn't rained for a few days), and that water has been seeping into a corner of the basement, for probably several days (or weeks - who knows). This accounts for the slightly odd smell, which Husband had mentioned the other day, and I'd ignored. Our basement often smells slightly odd. It's usually to do with the dirty socks strewn around.

So the carpet is peeled back, the underlay discarded, and a pretty semi-circle of towels is keeping the water at bay. Towels which every few hours need to be wrung out, bunged in the washing machine and then the dryer (yay, driers.)

We had a lovely Christmas Day. We really did. Then last night, three of the five of us (Husband, me, 7-yo) went down with a bug. Or got up with a bug, I should say. Was it the turkey? Anyway, in these situations, I become a bit obsessive about washing everything: bedding, towels, pyjamas. I also put down a lot of spare towels, a habit which dates back to the days when our children weren't old enough to make it to the bucket, or good enough at aiming even if the bucket was right next to the bed. Thus it was that Husband, seeing me with another load on my way to the washing machine (yay, washing machines) wryly observed "This has been the Christmas of the Towels".

Right. Off to check that our house insurance is up to date.

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The Music of Christmas: Part ll

There's been a post doing the rounds where bloggers have been sharing their favourite Christmas songs. I've already mentioned a couple of mine, and told you how much I love and revel in Christmas music.

But even I have my least favourites. They are (in ascending order of awfulness):

1) Anything recorded sung by children. I don't mind hearing children sing. It's sweet. Lots of them have lovely voices. So why, when they make recordings of popular Christmas songs for the mass market, why on EARTH, do they recruit children who can't sing in tune? There is nothing cute about children singing flat. Or sharp. And putting a quasi-adorable picture on the front of the box, of several smiling children of different races is not going to persuade me otherwise.

2) The Little Drummer Boy carol. It's boring, tedious, gloomy, and factually ridiculous (little drummer boy goes to play drum for sleeping newborn baby - I hope Mary gave him what for). I grant an exemption from my loathing of this carol to David Bowie and Bing Crosby, who do a nice job of making it into a duet. It is the only exemption I will allow.

3) Frosty the Snowman. I don't know what it is about this song (I'm not going to elevate it to 'carol' status), but I really hate and detest it. I don't even know the lyrics. I looked them up for the purposes of this blog post, and frankly, I was happier when I didn't know them. Anyone else share my detestation?

If you don't share mine, what are your LEAST favourite Christmas songs?

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The Music of Christmas: Part l

I love Christmas. I always have. I think I've mentioned that before (and since a quick check reveals that I've written 18 posts to date with the label Christmas, I expect I have mentioned it more than once). And one of the best things about Christmas is the music. I love Christmas music. I love it all.

I love the familiar favourites about Santa and snowmen and reindeer and children, rehashed in scores of ways, played over wobbly sound systems in shops, abused as the background music to adverts on tv, warbled by children in school concerts.

I love the jolly ancient songs about wassailing. They make me think of our medieval forbears cheering themselves in the dark, dank, muddy, winter days, with a wassail bowl and a hog roast and a roaring fire. (Oh, thank heavens for central heating, fast food and shopping malls.)

I love carols, careful carriers of theological truths down the ages before most people could read and write. I used to love my 12" black vinyl record of carols, with a picture of snow-laden Christmas trees on the front. (I wonder if I still have it somewhere?) I love all those David Willcocks arrangements from Carols for Choirs. What a genius that man was. My favourite Christmas hymn is Of the Father's Love Begotten, which we had at our wedding (in January, not quite Christmas, but still Epiphany and therefore seasonal). It's based on a hymn written in the 4th century. It's old.

I love the Nine Lessons and Carols from King's College, Cambridge on Christmas Eve. I sat and listened to it with my grandmother in the last month of her life in 1983. I had just got a fancy radio/cassette player which I was rather pleased with - it had two built-in speakers, taking me to the lofty heights of stereo sophistication. She needed an oxygen mask on during parts of the service. It's one of my loveliest memories.

I love modern classics, All I want for Christmas is You, Santa Baby, Let it Snow, War is Over, Slade's So Here It Is - all of them. My favourite in this category is Paul McCartney's Wonderful Christmastime. There's something about that song that just gets me between the ribs.

I love mystic-sounding madrigals on CDs which have the word Celtic in the title, with pictures on the front of people in hooded garb, gazing mysteriously across misty landscapes. (Incidentally, don't you think the current iPod generation misses out, with downloadable music which has no need of album covers?)

I even love the offensively vacuous Kidz Compilationz CDs we have. I'm going to have to use the word 'festive' at this point. You know the kind. Lots of jingles and jangles and a good strong beat, where Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer morphs into Ding Dong Merrily on High which segues into We Wish You a Merry Christmas which blends into Away in a Manger which transmutes into Deck the Halls. We have one version in which they sing 'bows' of holly instead of 'boughs'. Falala-lala to that.

Ah yes. Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without the music. I love it all. Well... Almost all...



NB I've sent this post to Notes from Home for her Christmas Carnival. If you're writing about Christmas, why don't you join in too?

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I fuond tihs fasctianing

"Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe."

I got as far as the word "wrod" before I realised anything was wrong. Which just proves the point. But then I'm a dreadful skim reader. One of my very bad habits.

I wonder if that's why middle children are so screwed up. The parents are just concentrating on the first and last ones. (Hey, I'm a 3rd child out of 4. I'm allowed to be rude about middle children.)

My favourite character

My favourite character in the Bible is Jonah. Not very seasonal. You thought I was going to say Mary or Joseph, or possibly a shepherd, didn't you? Well, ha ha. Wrong! My favourite character, by a long chalk, is Jonah.

Jonah is best remembered for that stint in the whale, but the rest of his story is the best bit. He gets to Ninevah, where God sent him in the first place, and he preaches to them, and they all go "Hey, yes, Jonah has a point". They repent, and live happily ever after, and Jonah says "See, God? I told you there was no point me coming here. You make me so angry. And now you're probably expecting me to be all glad and joyous that the Ninevites have repented, but I'm not. I'm angry and I'm grumpy. Aaaaargh, I'm so angry I can't even speak. I'm going to sit under this tree in the shade and be really really angry". And the story ends with God trying to get Jonah's attention, and Jonah sitting in a great big wallowing grump, probably the emotional equivalent of the belly of the whale, and not talking to him. It's marvellous.

When I get to Heaven, the first thing I'm going to do is find Jonah. I'm going to sit right down next to him, under that tree, and I'm going to join in his great big long eternal grump. And I'm going to enjoy every eternal minute of it. I think he and I will get on really well.

We'll start with schools. I don't know if he had much experience of schools, or even had children, but I expect he did. I mean, that whole whale episode was so designed to be a Favourite Kids' Bible Story down the ages, it smacks of someone who knows about children. So we'll get started on schools, and how teachers can ruin your week by expecting you to help your child produce a project, on a huge piece of poster board, about Christmas traditions in some selected nation of the world, by Friday. Don't they KNOW how much some children hate doing projects on poster boards? Don't they REALISE that Friday is very soon after Monday? (and ok, ok, I could have read the homework page on the website, or maybe my child could have communicated to me, but GET REAL, this is life). Does anyone CARE about Christmas traditions in France? I will ask Jonah if they had the tradition of teachers' seasonal gifts back in his time. You know the one. Where you feel obliged to contribute to a pot of money for someone who is doing their job, just like all the rest of us are doing our jobs. But most of us don't have jobs that involve innocent adults having to help with projects on poster board. Am I the only one who has noticed this?

You see, Heaven will be Heaven, because it will be full of people who have noticed the poster board thing. I am sure of it. I'm guessing quite a few thousand of them will have drifted towards Jonah and his tree, and it will be FABULOUS, because we can complain about poster board projects endlessly (literally endlessly). And if we get bored with that, we can move on to children and their incapacity not to strew chaos everywhere (Heaven is going to be self-tidying, did you know that?), the Post Office, churches and all their members, the media, adolescents who answer every question with "I dunno" but manage to leave out all the consonants so that it sounds like a nasalised "I uuuhhh", tax forms, sleepovers, McDonalds, customers who want to tell you about their trip to England which happened so long ago they can't remember the names of any of the places they went to, the quirks of Blogger, apostrophes in the wrong place's, library fines, and families who have the nerve to get together at Christmas - together, I tell you! - without those of their number who live on a different side of an ocean.

So Jonah, hang on in there, up there, or wherever the Nth dimension is. I am coming. I'm going to join your club. I bet it's the coolest one in town (does Heaven have towns?), with all the anarchists, the Occupy Cities people, the trailing spouses, the disgruntled mums, and all those people who just can't face the shiny smiley ones over the other side of the cloud. We will eat far too much chocolate and drink far too much wine, and be really really grumpy all the time, without it mattering one single jot. We will whitter and whinge to our hearts' content, and dance to the very loud music of rejuvenated punk rockers dressed in bin liners with safety pins through their noses and lips, who will be tediously smug about how they started the whole body-piercing craze.

And ha! I've just had a brilliant idea! We will do poster board projects... about teachers. We'll do them badly, without reading the instructions, and hand them in late (we'll need a philosopher or two to help us out with the concept of "late" in an eternal setting). Ooooh. I'm looking forward to it already.



Picture credit: phillipmartin.info

12 Days of Blogging

Everybody is at it. Hot Cross Mum, The Potty Diaries, Nappy Valley in New York and Expat Mum. They've all come up with versions of the 12 Days of Christmas. I wanted to join their club, so I've done one of my own, about blogging.

Incidentally I have, actually, already done a truncated version of the well-loved carol, counting down the body parts I've lost, but that was a long time ago: (all my hair, 4 wisdom teeth, 3 moles, 2 boobs, and a lymph node, I believe it went.)

Anyhoo, here is one about blogging. I'm going to cut to the chase, and start at the 12th day.

On the 12th day of Christmas, my bloggy friend sent to me:

12 Tumblrs Tumblring
11 DiggIts Digging
10 Blogger Updates
9 Wordpress Downloads
8 RSS feeds
7 Pics a-Flickr
6 Tweets re-tweeted
5 BritMums Live!
4 Angry Birds
3 Facebook Friends
2 Gurgle Loves
And a Rise in my Site Meteree!

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