Stuff.
So ........ a New Year. I think I feel better today than I did at this time last January but I'm not going to look. I especially didn't write anything on New Year's Eve because of the weird freakiness of the falling spreadsheets or whatever happened the year before when my entire blog disappeared into cyberspace at midnight and Badger had to come in secretly in the darkness and retrieve it all. (You know that I will never forget.)

Christmas was also better because all my children were here and not like last year when the older one was in India and we had had spiteful e-mails rows because she only revealed she wasn't coming back in time after she got out there. Though each year now may be the last as any minute she is bound to settle down with someone with a close and loving family who will also be shattered if he isn't there festively. Last year her place at the table was taken by Tim, a stuffed dog which I bought when we all oddly started longing for a real dog at the same time. There is no way that I am going to be tied down by a dog rationally but every so often I find I am soppily perusing the animals for sale section of the local paper ... No, no, no ... Tim, in a golden paper crown, had a strong and cheerful presence and, at lunch at least, totally made up for her absence. This year it seemed churlish to exclude him so he was there again - and again worked his magic as we got through the entire meal without a snappy word.

We even managed to find acceptable presents for each other; mainly because both the girls either bought their own in clothes form or wrote down specific details of i-pod accessories etc. My son surpassed himself by ending up thinking of NOTHING that he would like. Luckily I got a lift into the local town where a strange paved alleyway of hippie shops still exists; one of them oddly (as it is illegal) devoted to all things epod-related*. Where I stocked up with many things including a ceramic g..b* shaped like a clump of mushrooms (highly amusing), a string of leaf(!)-shaped fairy lights and other adolescent related paraphernalia. Although he is actually already too sophisticated for this crap, he and his friends also already see it as sophisticatedly ironically unsophisticated - even though just two years ago it would have been sophisticated. Scary.

My husband gave him a cl@y pigeon flinging device and lots of clays so they can shoot them at home and not pay millions of pounds at the lesson place. (We live in the middle of nowhere so we can). And I bought a flat-pack wooden go-c@rt which he could make himself (as if) and produce his own 'family heirloom'. I was obviously desperate at this point but bizzarely on Christmas Day afternoon I was moved to actually unwrap it (he hadn't bothered and I hadn't minded because it was really boring) and started to screw it together and was instantly joined by all three children. After some low-level fighting and not finding the right screwdriver and forcing it into place with a large hammer they were all vastly jolly and took it out into the darkness. And sped down the (steep) drive laughing and screaming just like in the picture on the box.

Oh .. AND ... it snowed.



- posted by Iris @ 1/04/2005 11:06:00 AM comment