Christmas 2010

We're standing in Boots, looking at the makeup. Well, I'm not. But Herself is talking some coded talk of reference numbers with some young wan in black and teeth and nail polish about foundation and breeze blocks and mortar and the like. My brain is on "Idle" and it's making a slight "blid-de-poodle-do" noise in my head.

"Now," says Herself, as we're thanking the young wan for serving us whatever it was in a very small bag that cost a very large mortgage. "I'd love to know how much that bottle of perfume is. I used to wear it when we started going out. Do you remember?"

"Of course I remember!" I retort, rolling back my male nasal memory reel. Let's see... Bacon, cat poo, Brut aftershave, toilet cleaner, air freshener and peanut breath. "I'm surprised you have to ask me!"

I make a very small mental note of the bottle shape, size, colour... but something shiny or curvy or stamped with the words "Black & Decker" immediately wipes it from existence for me.

It's around 4pm on the very last day of the week that I am ever going to go out of the house again before Christmas and Herself announces by SMS:

"You remember the new mobile phones we got each other? Well I got you something extra. Because I wanted to."

"Me too" I text back with that sinking feeling as memory cogs shear off teeth in my lumbering brain.

I text Herself's Second Daughter.

"Is Slumbering Nettles the perfume yer Ma used to wear when we started going out?"

"It is," she sends back.

"Thank feck! I'm just within range of the chemist's and I wasn't entirely sure."

"It's a stressful time for men," she sympathises.

And so on Christmas day we exchange our new mobile phones and I get my extra pressie excitedly and totally unexpectedly Herself unwraps a bottle of Slumbering Nettles.

She takes a whiff.

"It's given me a big whoosh back! Why did I ever stop wearing it?"

"Me too!" I grin.

Herself dabs a bit on and we enjoy the next ten minutes of pressie opening.

Then she starts to sneeze.

Than I start to sneeze.

The cats sneeze.

The birds on the bird feeders make little "tichoo!" noises out in the garden.

We watch Indiana Jones through gritted teeth and with the aid of boxes of Kleenex. I don't remember the Temple of Doom being a weepy before, but in our house it is.

The cats refuse to come into the sitting room, as they can't sleep for the microscopic sneezes coming from the mites living in the carpet.

"Do you like you pressies then?" I ask, though Herself is now just a blur through tear-filled eyes.

"I do. Lovely!" she says, dabbing two handed at her face.

"Me too!" I say with no end of enthusiasm.

Ah, love!

There's always next year's pressie to think of.

New year a-comin'

We've had a tender and mild Christmas in 2008, with the irritant that I picked up a grusome cold with a cough about three weeks before and am only now getting through the other end of it.

It hasn't been a great year for us, my teeth playing merry hell for most of 2008, losing my father towards the end of July (and the teeth.... he paid for the job to be done before he died). We also lost a favourite pussy cat to old age, after nearly 17 years, around Halloween. So Christmas was planned as a strictly winding down event, but as I mentioned that didn't even work out too well and Herself had to shoulder most of the burden of festive things.

Of course, we had many blessings too -- our family grew with the addition of a grandaughter who'll be a year old in March! Her big brother (aged 3) has taken to her very well indeed and he continues to be a joy. The rest of the family is generally hale and hearty and we'll be catching up with them all at various times in the New year.

I got paid for role-playing writing for the first time in over a decade -- $10, a cheque I haven't cashed but will probably keep as a souvenir. And I took a left turn in Second Life by starting a Dungeons & Dragons group in there. We play every Thursday. People pretending to be people pretending to be people....!

So New Years Eve looks like beers and waiting for Jules Holland's annual tv programme. We have folk over on New Year's Day for dins, then I have the game in the evening and back to work on Friday.

No, I didn't get the Friday off. Is it too late for a "Bah! Humbug!"?

Hope you've had a nice Christmas and that you can look forward to a comfortable and happy New Year.

Back to work...

...and my back is playing silly buggers. My workmates diagnose Sciatica. As someone is always suffering some ailment, I don't doubt their collective opinion and it's saved me €60 at the doctor's anyhow. I spent last evening with a heat pack strapped to my arse and walked everywhere like Elvis in his 68 comeback special, but without the leather gear. The pain is gradually easing, thank you for asking.

Good things: I forgot that my Christmas pressie from my chums was stashed under my desk and when I found it again today and looked closely, it turned out to be a box full of beer.

As I said, the pain is now gradually easing.

I shall not hazard the chilli flavoured peanuts that accompanied the beer in case the lack of bowel control that I read on the Internet can be associated with severe Sciatica should kick in.

There is only so much speed I can muster with one good leg and the other trailing a half-step behind and I should not like to shite circles around myself on the way to the loo.

Herself is making small prayers in the hallway, taking down Christmas decorations. The place is starting to look bare.

If it is fine tomorrow, I may attempt to paint the doorsteps, which need a blackening. Thus far, we have not yet found suitable tiles for the floor of the new porch. I suggested a temporary linoleum and two days of ice and snow resulted.

Post Christmas Colours not all Blue

There are few things as colourful, post Christmas, than the local cemetery. That's where Herself and I ended up this afternoon to lay some Carnations in the vicinity of the Mammy's memorial and also to drop a few sneaky sweeties (no doubt she has a packet down the side of her celestial armchair).

There are rows of bright ribbons, green garlanded wreaths, bows, Santa Clauses, windmills, wind chimes, toys and flowers all over Newlands cemetery today as visitors remember their loved ones this Christmas season.

My mother's cremated remains are in a compartment in an eight-foot high wall part way into the cemetery. The lettering has weathered and I spoke with my father this evening about having it renewed, maybe with gold paint. I'll phone the cemetery people next week to ask how it can be arranged.

It brought a lump to the throat, visiting her again. I miss her, especially at this time of the year, which she enjoyed.

We then went on the hunt for some tiles for the new porch. I fancy something rust coloured or reddish, but the prevailing fashion appears to be for non-threatening biscuit. I can see the point.

We came across some dark brown tiles which might have done the trick. But the assistant (I wouldn't call him a "Salesman") pointed under the display to perhaps twenty individual tiles lying on a wooden pallet:

"Those are all there are of that pattern."

"And you have no more in stock?"

"No."

To be fair, he did show us some other tiles on display, none of which were to our tastes. As we left and went back to the car I said to Herself:

"A real Salesman would have persuaded me to buy the display and recycle the tiles on it..."

I suppose there wouldn't have been enough to finish the job anyway. I must look up some other tile outlets this evening before our next sortie into the retail world tomorrow.

Funnily enough, B&Q had no black masonry paint in stock. There were lots of bizarre colours: the types that youngsters in first-time mortgage apartments might paint their walls. There were a couple in their 20s going about the paint aisles arguing over whether or not they were going to repaint at all this season. He was saying that he'd pay for it himself. She was not impressed with the offer, so I guess whatever it was that needed painting she had chosen the original colour.

We looked at CCTV options. There are ones which look like ordinary spyholes in the front door but which are really cameras. Ditto ones which look like ornamental outdoor lamps. The spyhole options start from around €20, which seems cheap and possibly unreliable. But in true B&Q style, it seems that the cheap bit is followed by the also cheap bit cable, connected with the slightly-more-expensive black box bit, connected with the slightly more expensive other black box, and so on and so on until the debit card is slightly melted.

Off to Woodies tomorrow to buy black masonry paint. And an extendable pole to hang Christmas lights which I am going to adapt to window cleaning.

Turkey and whiskey a la mode

When you have been cooking with a bad oven for a long number of years, it is easy for a good oven to become a bad oven. And not in a good way.

Our old electric cooker -- the one with which I cooked our Christmas dinner in 2006, for example -- had a wonky oven seal. It had also given up its internal glass door one day in spectacular fashion, exploding while hot into a million tiny fragments that danced like a netted shoal of fishes on the cold, tiled, kitchen floor. But I was used to cooking with it, despite these flaws.

"Add another hour to the time," I would say, having done all the cooking-time calculations.

This year, 2007, I installed a new oven. Then I uninstalled it and moved the cabinet to another position. Then I reinstalled the oven again. This week, I stuck a 20-pound turkey into its stainless maw and tried not to think about the seven place settings for Christmas dinner. Many hours later, the turkey was not inedible, but to me it was a little dry.

"In the oven too long," I thought.

The old cooker used four large electric elements to heat the huge cauldron in which we cooked the 2006 ham. This year, in 2007, the halogen-heated ceramic hob I fitted into the counter (then uninstalled and refitted into another, permanent kitchen surface) only needed one-and-a-half rings to bring the water to a furious, steaming maelstrom. The meat eventually fell like large pink raindrops off the bone.

"Tender," Herself called it.

"Over-cooked," I said to myself.

But the turkey tasted like turkey and the ham tasted like ham and no-one has been unaccounted for since December 25th with possible food poisoning. We are, however, more stuffed with turkey than the turkey ever was. We have had turkey with ham and ham with turkey. Turkey with gravy and turkey without. We have clawed the last shreds from its bones and served them cold. There was even talk of turkey soup made up from the bones and the last bits of pale flesh. But the ham finally ran out yesterday and the stinking remenant of the turkey walked itself out into the wheelbin today.

I am now replete with good old fashioned pork chops and mashed potato and have no particular yearning to taste fowl until at least St. Patrick's Day -- which, incidentally, is not allowed by the church to fall on March 17th in 2008, so we are shaping up for two days worth of St. Patrick's Day festivities next year. We've done it before. We know it can be done again.

I must ask Herself what became of the jar of apple sauce she dropped into the shopping trolley in Lidl in Ballyfermot this afternoon. I thought it was to feature in this evening's meal.

I am presently having a whiskey and red lemonade (with ice, thank you). It is a hard and unfair life all round.

Descent into Christmas

Herself and I walked into the local B&Q store last Sunday, December 16th, 2007, to find that Christmas had been devoured by locusts.

Or so it seemed to us, who has been there only a week before and had wandered through a sizeable portion of the store under flashing lights, garden ornaments and various Santa Claus figures in differing embarrassing poses.

This week, there was nothing but a large, empty space awaiting the January sale stock. A few latecomers, like ourselves, wandered about the other aisles of plumbing fittings and kitchen cabinets in a half-hearted manner.

"Christmas is gone!" Herself said to a passerby, who nodded, gloomily in agreement.

It's now the 19th and I have yet to buy a Christmas present. I have warned people not to expect much this year, but on the evidence of our last visit J-Cloths and packets of free-flowing salt are going to feature prominently in my Christmas theme in 2007.

Guinness Christmas Advertisement

That time of the year again

Christmas 2007

Remember me on this computer

Our black cat has come on wonderfully this Christmas. Instead of running in blind panic to the absolute limit of his territory (three back gardens away on the edge of a shed roof), he now slink runs as far as the bottom of our own back garden only.

The cause of the panic is Christmas. Or, in particular, Christmas visitors.

Black Cat doesn't like visitors. It goes against Routine.

The Hare and Tortoise prepare lists

Herself is running mad about the room.

"Where's my Christmas list?"

"You mean, of all the presents you're going to get me?" I ask, innocently.

"No..... Of all the jobs that need doing before Christmas."

I find the list, which is something like three pages long. Lists are things that run other people's lives. I'm not a fan of them. My mother, for example, used to leave them everywhere for herself to look up later and wonder where they came from.

Make breakfast.

Something for dinner.

Then in her later life, she would leave them for me. And notes. I found one in a fold of an old armchair one day a couple of years back. It reads: "Fried stuff for Dad in the morning."

It was reminding me to make the breakfast I made every single sorrowful day, in case I forgot.

Bugger lists.

So, my Christmas list, faulty and all as it is, is inside my head. It consists of two major instructions:

"1. Buy presents (If you want to).

"2. Don't worry (If you want to)."

I'm getting there.

We're all getting there.

Merry Christmas, if I haven't wished it for you already. And even if I did.

Gift of Gold

Crib

Poinsettia

Santas

The Mouse and the Owl

Globe II

Globe I

Rocking Horse

Tinsel