Ten Days to go…

... for Knots in the String.

(A little bit early this week, but a busy day tomorrow!)

Nine days until Christmas Eve.

I had lunch with the ballet girls this week and we all agreed, jaded as we are, that Christmas Day is a bit of a bind. We like the food of summer, the rich Christmas goodies like Rocky Road or berry trifle, of fresh fruit-filled icecream and berry-covered pavlovas. Roast veggie salads and a hundred other salads and so on. We like the decorations and buying gifts for loved ones, but one of my friends said that other than that, it’s all a bit of commercial Bah Humbug.

To explain: we all live on a small island. We’re close geographically and we see friends and family weekly, sometimes daily. We’re lucky, we know. So Christmas Day when we all get together for a meal is really not much different to any other frequent get-together.

I envied one of the women who is loading a picnic in the car and heading off with her husband for Christmas Day. Another is alone, wants to be alone, and plans a decadent day of self-care after a frantic year.

Christmas globally is so tied up with snow, cold, robins in bare snowflake-bedecked trees, carollers wrapped in scarves and beanies belting out songs.

Here, it’s usually warm, we wear shorts on the coast, go for a swim if it’s hot enough. A full Christmas roast dinner is mostly an anathema to folk like me.

My dream has always been to load the boat with Mum’s delicious ribbon sandwiches, elderflower bubbles, Hebridean Rocky Road, some Christmas bonbons and a thermos of tea, and motor over to the south end of Maria Island where we can swim or walk on long arcs of white deserted beaches. The silence is natural and ethereal. Our choristers are sea and bush birds. We might be joined by dolphins in the boat-wake or see eagle- and sting-rays gliding along the white sandy ocean floor. The icing on the Christmas cake would be to see an albatross or a sea eagle.

What absolute heaven it would be.

Maybe one day…

However, my greatest recent joy over this whole Christmas period was taking my 5 year old grandson shopping last Sunday. All I had to do was purchase some wrapping paper and cellophane bags, but his fizz of excitement at seeing blow-up Father Christmases and reindeer, of seeing Christmas decorations for sale, of squeaking every dog toy in the shop as he looked for the best squeaker for the Terrier, of singing songs and oohing and aaahing, of telling me what was on his list for his letter to Father Christmas, of chatting to the check-out lady whilst a line of people waited patiently, smiling at his patent excitement. That was Christmas!

My Father-in-Law always said Christmas was for the Billy Lids (kids). And when I was a young mum, I used to smile resignedly at him with somewhat bloodshot eyes after being woken at dawn with the children asking ‘Has he been yet?’ (Meaning Father Christmas.).

Now, with a grandson, I’m seeing with my Father-in-Law’s eyes. It is for the kids!

And that’s okay.

Real life will hit them soon enough and if a little Christmas Dust can keep excitement and joy in their lives for a bit longer, then why not?

My Time:

Christmas. Buying gifts, wrappings gifts, decorating our little driftwood tree, making lists, checking them twice (or three or four times), hoping to the Fates that I don’t have to come to the Big Smoke again in the next ten days.

We’re lamb-shearing this coming week, so it’s a fairly busy weekend few days from tomorrow, cooking flat chat for morning and afternoon smokos. Smokos are ‘a break in the work of the morning or of the afternoon, originally to allow time for workers to smoke tobacco’. Politically incorrect now, I suppose, but sparking an image of the shafts of soft light that waft through the slatted windows of the shearing shed, the odd fibre of wool drifting in an updraught.

The machines quieten and the shearers wash their hands and faces, pull up a chair at the table and sit pouring tea or coffee, eating cakes and slices, and then stretching backs and legs outside, making phone calls, those who are smokers having a quick ciggie. There is the clickety-click of ovine hooves as pens are re-filled ready for when the shearers fire up again. Roustabouts sweep the board so that everything is tickety-boo when smoko finishes.

(This image is of merino ewes being winter-shorn in our shed, but it indicates the board and the team)

There’s a system in a shearing shed. A choreography. Everything flows rhythmically and with speed. It must be seen to be believed.

The lambs will be shorn of their 3 month old fluff. The rams will also be shorn because they’re very woolly and the weather is heating up. The ewes will be crutched and wigged – wigged so that they can see, crutched so that their bottoms are clean and so that they don’t get flystruck in the summer heat and humidity.

It’s a frantic time for my husband and son, working with the team in the shed, but it’s a fascinating and beautiful thing to watch when it’s done well.

I just keep cooking…

Reading:

On Kindle. Hurry up and Meditate by David Michie. I’ve been meditating daily for quite a few years although I still consider myself very much a beginner, but I’ve meditated enough to experience the power. David Michie’s books are a pleasure to read – he speaks simply through fiction and non-fiction around the tenets of Buddhism.

On audio The Dangerous Kingdom of Love by Neil Blackmore. Recommended to me by Audible.com, I presume because I generally read history fiction. Ostensibly about Francis Bacon’s relationship with King James I, with men and with love.

‘Witty … and clever, this tale of Jacobean power and lust is a blast.’ The Times.

In print, I ran into my local bookshop, Dymocks, and purchased Jilly Cooper’s Tackle (I have everything she’s written, and my previous Jack Russell was named after Rupert Campbell Black’s wife.) Saving the reading for post-Christmas when I thrive on a good rip-roaring laugh. I also ordered Monty Don’s The Gardening Book. I’ve got all his previous books on the shelves. I may listen to him in audio as well as his voice is beautiful.

On Substack, loved Sabrina Simpson this week.

And a stunning piece by Elizabeth Beggins.

From Australia, with a summer eye-view of Christmas, Sally Frawley who refers to Nigella’s Chocolate Christmas cake which I’ll make for the shearers. My fruit has been soaking in grog for over 10 days! The shearers will be ‘relaxed’ after smoko…

Watching:

The Duke with Broadbent, Mirren and a host of British notables. (Based on a true story) Another one of those gems that are British movies. Took a while to hit its straps but oh golly, Broadbent is wonderful!

Griff Rhys Jones Slow Train through Africa. Such a good reveal of a vast and dimensional country from the Mediterranean to Cape Town. Rhys Jones has a wicked, clever delivery.

Fenris. A Nordic Noir series. Dark and brooding and about wolves and people in a small community. Burrows into the psyche.

Sandy Toksvig Extraordinary Escapes. The places she goes! Most always accompanied by friends from her trade.

Our favourite location thus far has been a lighthouse and cottage on a private island in the Sound of Mull.

The water is as clear as our own at Maria Island with lovely beaches, and then that cottage! I could imagine settling in, rain, hail or shine, no one on the island because it is so private and isolated in that lighthouse way. I imagine watching the sea change its mood by the second, observing the balletic grace of dolphins, seals and Minky whales while the the sky does its Turner-esque best. Maybe having a wee dram to fend off any chill. Which is odd, because in real life, I don’t drink.

Glorious!

***

And so we come back to Christmas again.

I can remember my Christmases as a child – that awe and excitement.

Waking up in the middle of the night at my grandfather’s house, creeping to the loo and looking at the closed bubble-glass doors that led into the lounge where a big Christmas tree had been placed in front of an empty grate.

To this day, I would swear that I spotted someone in red moving around in that room and with a hand over my mouth and eyes bulging, I crept back to bed, somehow fell asleep until I was woken by one of my cousins to open our gifts.

When the doors were finally slid back and presents for 17 of us were revealed around the sparkling tree, I remember gasping. I had never (and have never since) seen anything so childishly fabulous as that enormous tree and the stacks of gifts!

17 cousins, sisters, aunts and uncles sat around the long table that day. Mum, her two sisters and my great aunt had cooked a traditional dinner in a wood-fired oven in the middle of an Australian summer, sweat running down their foreheads.

But we were little kids, we didn’t care how anything had been done, only that it was done, as we pulled crackers, read silly jokes and wore paper hats, ate roast chicken and veg and then Christmas Pudding with real silver coins inside. At 3 PM we watched the Queen’s Speech on black and white TV and then hastened off to enjoy our gifts. Our parents were left to clean up the detritus. No dishwashers in those days…

But it was fun and the fact that the memory is indelible is what urges me to make the effort for The Day. Not for me nor my husband nor anyone else except our little grandson who, when he is in his 70’s, might just tell his grandchildren about his best Christmas ever.

Music? Well, because our Littlest Farmer is wonderfully five and beyond excited about Christmas, what could I do but pick a Muppets’ Christmas song?