Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing

Having set out early in anticipation of a bad journey, my uncle & grandmother made excellent progress and engendered a minor panic by arriving slightly ahead of schedule. It was, apparently, the clearest journey up the M1 my uncle could remember having. Once lunch was finished we had a lightish lunch — parsnip soup, bread, salad, and pâté for the carnivores — before setting down to listen to, cook with, or fall asleep during, the carol service from King's College.

( Mater making chestnut stuffing... )

Afterwards the more efficient members of the family wrapped their remaining presents — I usually leave my wrapping until the morning of the 25th! — while I made the traditional Christmas Eve fondue for supper — mixing grated cheese into hot wine isn't really much of a chore & it's the least I can do given the amount of cooking the parents have got coming up over the next couple of days.

A gentle start to the day followed by the arrival of my sister and the nephews, come to finish dressing the Christmas tree. As ever the results were somewhat eclectic combining lights and tradition elements — baubles, bells, puddings, skaters, and Fathers Christmas — with Russian, Chinese, and Vietnamese objects either given as gifts or picked up on one of pater's tours of duty.

( This year's tree )

In between dozes my sister helped my youngest nephew go through his spare advent calendar in search of unopened doors, uneaten chocolates, and unread snippets of scripture. The poor boy seemed to lose his enthusiasm towards the end, either due to an overdose of religiosity or an overdose of sugar — I'm not quite sure which.

( Opening yet another door... )

My sister's lot pushed off in late afternoon — determined to fit in some last minute shopping and a visit to Santa's Grotto. We tidied up the remains of the decorations, following the children's activities, and went for some rather unseasonal lentil rissoles for supper — probably the last healthy thing any of us are going to eat this year.

With the departure of our visitors on the 27th, mater turned her thoughts to Christmases and Christmas excuses past, hitting on a puzzling failure of memory in the process.

Casting her mind back to the 1980s, she remembered an occasion when the Christmas we'd had with my grandmother in Belsize Park. When we arrived on the 24th, we discovered very few preparations had been made — because, mater says, my grandmother claimed to be too old to do it — so the parents were required to dash about in order to get everything before the shops shut. So while she went shopping in the village, my father went to the butcher's where here found the poor man about to shut up shop, having given up on my grandmother coming to collect the turkey she'd ordered. On the day itself, pater did all the cooking and a couple of my aunts came to lunch. The experience was, according to mater, rather glum.

It was obviously also rather traumatic: neither pater nor I could remember a thing about it. My only clear mememories were of Christmases spent with my other set of grandparents, but with a hazy and indistinct memory of a small tree at my granny's place. My sister also thought she remembered it — she says it was the time she first realised that Father Christmas wasn't real, so perhaps that explains her flashbulb recall — but she thought she was older than the rest of us thought she ought to be to accomodate our hypothesis as to which year it had been.

After an initial search of the photo archives came up blank, pater's epic project to scan all our and all our antecedents' photos came up trumps. He hit on a set of pictures probably taken with my camera by my sister, one of which showed us all sitting round the table in Belsize Park wearing paper hats, a Christmas pudding on in front of us and turkey visible behind us on the kitchen counter, and another which showed the tree I remembered, its pot set in a saucepan.

Using the age of my youngest cousin to tweak a couple of our original factors, we were able to determine that the event took place just after my 11th birthday, when my sister would have been eight — in line with her recollection — and my grandmother would have been in her mid-sixties. Thus, if my mother is right, granny's current assertions that she's too old to do anything go back at least 25 years!

Least stressful Christmas Day for some time, thanks in part to my general present amnesty. A few people failed to take me at my word — or, in my mother's case, had bought me something before I made my announcement — so I got a few unexpected bits and pieces including: a import of The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson from my parents; a desk calendar from my uncle; and Aaron Copland's What to Listen for in Music from one of my aunts.

At lunchtime, my sister pushed off to work and the kids distributed themselves to various grandparents, with my oldest nephew staying with us. After a couple of goes at the original version of Half-Life, a game that pre-dates the boy and hasn't aged badly at all, we went to down lunch. My nephew's manners were astonishingly good, his whole behaviour was light years better than last year, and a good time was had by all.

Once the nephew had been sent off home and the more mobile of us had been on our usual Christmas Day walk around the park, we polished off Monday's cryptic crossword, answered a couple of sections of the Guardian quiz — we gave up at the style section, which was clearly completely beyond us — and, felling tired and ill, I went to an early bed.

A quick visit to Go Outdoors to pick up a last few bits and pieces for the kids. On returning home I started to notice definite signs of an imminent cold or some other sort of throat infection, just in time for Christmas...

Finally back from my solstice sojourn in the Land of Limited Connectivity, where things were rather better than expected. The High Days themselves passed relatively smoothly, thanks to good scheduling on my sister's part and the earlier than usual arrival of the lunches, with the rest of the time taken up with family visits including a first meetings with my cousin's new daughter.

The travel was surprisingly tolerable. I arrived early on the journey up after my train from the westcountry arrived on the adjacent platform to the Euston train, allowing me to hop across and catch a connection with 30 seconds to spare instead of having to wait for half an hour. The journey back wasn't quite so good: I left Coventry earlier than expected after being offered the chance of lift to the station, just missed the early train to Exeter, spent an hour wandering around Birmingham and waiting for my scheduled train only to discover the windy weather in the north meant that it was running an hour later than timetabled...

Traditional biannual walk and lunch with J&T who were over from the US for Christmas. Although the weather was not quite as cold as it had been, there was a lot of slushy snow on the ground around Lapworth and the canals were still largely frozen, and some of the bridges were lethally icy. Lunch was as reliably good as it ever is at The Boot — I had a goat's cheese tart, a lasagne that included some type of bean, and finished with an extremely good crème brûlée.

My quote of the day comes from J who, as a keen kayaker and cyclist etc, often gets accused of being a sports fiend. When this happens she replies, "I don't do sports. I do activities." Which, I've realised, completely captures up my attitude to the things I do.

After the usual round of Christmas Eve activities — listing to carols from King's, mater peeling chestnuts, me cooking supper — we found ourselves caught up in a long discussion of whether it is possible to consider the literary merits of book independent of whether the process of reading the book was enjoyable.

I argued that it was quite possible to read something, to be aware of its skillful use of language, it's polished prose, it's insighful characterisation and fine narrative, whilst finding the whole process of reading the thing deeply unenjoyable. My uncle argued that literary merits were inextricably linked with enjoyment but, not being a great reader (by local standards, at least), he found himself somewhat short of examples. Pater finally clinched the argument for me by citing as Henry James as an example: an undoubted a master of the craft of writing whose books are almost unreadably dull — "It's only possible to read James in the middle of a day when you've slept well and don't have anything else on your mind. And even then, it's only possible if you read in extremely short bursts."

Another annual awards day and Christmas event this afternoon. I didn't feel the mince pies were as good as last year — lots of pastry and not much filling — but I suppose I should be grateful, given the current mood of austerity, that we got a ceremony at all.

My parents cooking has claimed another victim: my uncle is in hospital after succumbing to an attack of gall stones. His doctors' advice? No more fatty foods...