Variety in a Life of Spice

I thought it would be fun to look back at my last blog and see what I was up to this time last year. I found this amusing entry.

Last year, it was our first married Christmas, and we were preparing for the entire family-in-law to join us in an enormous house where the only small piece of furniture was the tiny little table we had to eat around. This year, we’re going to my parents for Christmas, and we only have a tiny little cottage to clean and look after, but bizarrely, I feel almost as unprepared. It’s not the cards or the presents (sent those! feeling smug) but the general cleanliness of the house, and the pitiful decorations. Especially the tree, which isn’t really a Christmas tree but some other kind of garden bush which is vaguely the right shape, and which now looks very silly with lights on it, and which I stood in a Quality Street tin filled with water just before discovering that Quality Street tins leak.

The freezing fog is a bit worrying too, with three family members attempting to fly home in time for Christmas, but I’m sparing a thought for the poor people at Heathrow who are stuck in the middle of their journeys, camping out in a country they never planned to be in in the first place. “Women with children, including babies, are standing outside in the cold because the marquee is chock-a-block with people,” said Mr Matthews on the BBC website. However, it’s all in keeping with the first Christmas. I’m sure that if God had decided to stage His coming to earth in the 21st century, we would soon see flight attendants from the nearby airfields heading for the marquee, a single star (or is it a plane?) piercing the fog above it, while three lost-looking wise men from the East have been caught up in Customs and are having the highly suspect frankincense and myrrh removed from their hand baggage in case it can be mixed together to form an explosive device. Meanwhile angels squint through the fog, warbling soon-to-be Christmas classics such as “Silent night, holy night, Foggy dawn, cancelled flight” and
“O Little Airport of Heathrow,
How still we see thee lie,
Above thy loud and angry crowd
No aeroplane goes by…”

The comments section awaits your completion of these.
Merry Christmas!

I have just finished writing this year’s round robin Christmas letter, the purpose of which is mainly to let everyone know our new address. I won’t reproduce it here, because then it won’t be a surprise when you get it. However, I will warn you that it’s in very bad rhyme which doesn’t scan properly, due to each line ending with a feminine rhyme and starting with an upbeat. I recommend having a drink or two before opening the envelope, and treating the whole thing as a tongue-twister.

I’ve noticed that several people have blogged on this subject, and have some quite strong opinions on round robin letters. Personally, I’m ambivalent. I really enjoy the funny ones, patiently chew through the unfunny ones and definitely prefer them to sending a card to someone I haven’t seen all year which only says ‘Happy Christmas’ in it. I have got to admit that to me, that seems a waste of a stamp and a decent amount of envelope space.

Having said that, we got so tied up last year worrying over what to put in the cards that some people got printed letters, some got handwritten notes, some got the thank-you letters that we still hadn’t sent from the wedding, and some got nothing at all. Hopefully this year will be much more uniform and successful. However, to ensure your safe receipt of a Robinson Christmas Card, I advise you send me a nagging e-mail containing your postal address NOW.

A school visit from our lovely lady parish priest this week has provided several interesting insights into children’s minds. One child from another class, while preparing for the visit by writing down questions to ask, had evidently got the idea that they were going to meet God himself: “Is it nice in heaven? Do you know James (name of a boy from the school who died last year)?”

In my own class, the questions were varied but mainly showed that despite all attempt at preparation, the children had no clue at all about exactly who they were going to meet. One boy very seriously asked her whether she was religious, and how many Gods she believed in? There were lots of questions about whether she liked her new house (she’s moved from the centre of Cambridge) and about her hobbies, resulting in drawings afterwards of a lady in a cinema, a cafe and (mysteriously, as this didn’t come up at all in conversation) on a skateboard. There was only one drawing which actually included the church.

One boy was desperate to ask his question, and it was obviously something that had been bothering him for a long time: “You know in the church? You know when you look up above the stage and there’s a cupboard and the doors are always closed? Well – what’s in there?!“

Some observations that the children wrote in their books as follow-up to the question and answer session:

“Our new minister is good because she helps people.”

“Our new minister doesn’t like the cold, but sometimes she has to get cold if she wants to photocopy something because the steps are outside.”

“She marries people and helps with death.”

And a picture of her with a bride and groom, and a speech bubble coming from her mouth: “I preset you husband of wife”. Now the implications of that one deserve an entire blog entry to themselves.