wonderfulexchange

seasonal lament

17 December, 200717 December, 2007 wonderfulexchange4 Comments

As I sat at my computer, eating a quick dinner of cabbage and mash I decided to catch up on my ‘blog 2’ list (i.e. ‘enjoy reading, but not a daily priority’).

The first blogger was rhapsodising over a week of nightly baking: sugar cookies, chocolate chip shortbread, peanut butter oatmeal cookies (it’s an American thing). I sought solace elsewhere.

Blogger number two was excited because she’d fulfilled all her household tasks and had made snickerdoodles and white-chocolate cranberry cookies.

Blogger number three had had friends round, who had cleaned her house and helped her make chocolate chip cookies.

I continued to munch on cabbage, wondering where my domestic life went wrong.

and a bright light shone

15 December, 2007 wonderfulexchange5 Comments

When I lived on the Southside of Glasgow, it was a fairly regular occurrence to have a police helicopter sweeping overhead. Once it was there for the better part of an hour, sweeping towards me, hovering near the building, checking all the gardens, veering off to the Gorbals, only to return. I never thought twice about it, save to enjoy the excitement and comfort the cats.

But when the same thing happens in Dunoon, with the chopper hovering over the rectory for 10 minutes, moving only as far as the bishop’s glen before returning, it is slightly more unnerving. (I watch all this, of course, from one of my many ground floor single glazed rooms.)

So, I decide to risk making a fool of myself by checking in with the local police. But it’s Saturday, so I get shunted to Strathclyde.

‘Look,’ says I, ‘there’s a helicopter hovering over my house sweeping my garden. Is there something I should know about? I live alone in a remote area.’

‘If there is a helicopter hovering, it means that the police are dealing with an ongoing incident. They are sweeping your garden in order to deal with it. There is nothing to worry about.’

How very reassuring.

Now, shall I heat the mulled wine to soothe the fretful felon should be appear?

homeopathy

14 December, 200714 December, 2007 wonderfulexchange1 Comment

After a funeral visit, I turned to Larkin for Love Songs in Age. It was in the wrong key. So we try this instead:

To write one song, I said,
As sad as the sad wind
That walks around my bed,
Having one simple fall
As a candle-flame swells, and is thinned,
As a curtain stirs by the wall
–For this I must visit the dead.
Headstone and wet cross,
Paths where the mourners tread,
A solitary bird,
These call up the shade of loss,
Shape word to word.

That stones would shine like gold
Above each sodden grave,
This, I had not foretold,
Nor the birds’ clamour, nor
The image morning gave
Of more and ever more,
As some vast seven-piled wave,
Mane-flinging, manifold,
Streams at an endless shore.

Philip Larkin
1943-1944
The North Ship

playing santa

11 December, 2007 wonderfulexchange6 Comments

Blog off for a couple of days while I visit my god-children.

Meeting the newest one for the first time (only three-and-a-half years left till I stand a chance of knowing what to do with him), seeing how the eldest has adjusted to having to share the nest, and offering solace to Tam, the cat.

All thanks to Molly’s own fairy-godmother who soothes and feeds her majesty while I’m away.