Archive for December, 2007

A Christmas Swanee-Kazoo

Monday, December 24th, 2007

It is, indeed, Christmas Eve. I have been watching A Christmas Carol (Patrick Stewart!) on the telly this evening, and to my increasing horror, weeping helplessly as it all got more and more sentimental and, by the time Tiny Tim died [Or, did not die. Or is going to would have died - Ed], downright revolting. I dare say the enormous gin and tonic I brought along to help jolly me through the dinner-cooking process was having much the larger say in the matter.

I daresay I have absolutely no business pontificating about Christmas, being a diamond-hard atheist of the Dawkins flavour (if, I do so very hope, somewhat better manners). But there has always been a Solstice festival of some sort, a time to eat up all the bacon before it goes off, kill any calves that we can’t afford to feed over the winter, coddle gramps a bit, because that cough is Not Reassuring; a time, around the arse-end of the year, to look up at the darkening sky, and hope, and pray, that next Solstice we will also have enough spare food to feast on, and beloved people to feast with.

All utterly meaningless to a woman who lives ten minutes walk from Waitrose, has organic smoked salmon in the fridge, and has voluntarily elected to stay the hell away from family until well after Boxing Day this time.

Nevertheless, there I was, sobbing pitifully at Dickens, at reconciliation and charity and dancing with your family after dinner.

You see, it has been a particularly bloody year chez Reed. You may have observed the general paucity of blogging, the ominous weeks-long silences, mentions of surgery, that sort of hintingness. In the grand scheme of things, it is as nothing, mere wisps of unpleasantness that will dissipate the second I cease to exist and/ or get over myself. Please don’t try to hold my hand, I’ll only start bawling again and embarrass the lot of us. My friends have been perfectly sweet (I keep thinking, one day I shall indeed have a big Dickensian Christmas, and have it solely for friends and familial honourable exceptions, and then I shan’t answer the telephone until March, so the dishonourable majority can’t say a word to me about it). My family have been a pain, bless them, even when they most earnestly did not mean to be, and really, it’s Christmas, and I should have been more charitable and spent it with them. As it is, S and I are spending tomorrow barricaded into our little flat, eating ourselves silly, preferably in pyjamas, and generally being bah-humbuggy little Scrooge-bags all by our selves.

And wondering if the three Spirits of Christmas are going to break in and give me hell for it.

This Christmas

Wednesday, December 19th, 2007

[Written at work today, while waiting for Microsoft Word to stop crashing and let Reed actually do some, funnily enough, work, and after a morning completely wasted on Christmas shopping - Ed.]

No snow, no frost, again this year,
No ice nor sleet nor hail;
The south-west wind brings in the rain,
The rain brings in a gale,

And twinkling Santas, reindeer, stars,
Strain against their ropes -
Not dreams of warmth and food and light,
No need for self-same hopes,

No dark, no cold, no starving night,
And this not one bright jewel,
No candle held for sun’s return,
No hopes to dash – oh, cruel -

[Methinks she has inhaled hard in the vicinity of Emily Dickinson.]

Could do better

Sunday, December 16th, 2007

I seem to have spent a week with my head up my bottom with regards to this blog. This is not good for the neck.

She can’t come out to play. She’s doing her homework.

Sunday, December 9th, 2007

Three coursework deadlines all at once. Which is mean.

Nothing a coffee-fuelled all-nighter, or two, can’t solve. It’s not like I have to be coherent and speakable and at work the next morning or anything.

No, wait, that was when I was 20.

Damn it.

Onwards and up… err, sidewards

Monday, December 3rd, 2007

I, naturally, spent the weekend recovering from the extraordinary delights of, basically, flicking the dust-bunnies out from the hindermost parts of my brain and leaving them on display all over the internets. Hello! What did you all do?

But I had a think, while lolling in an undignified manner and/ or trying to get my Sims to snog each other on the laptop [And getting Sims was possibly the most cretinously unproductive act of your life, young Reed - Ed]. And I thought thusly:

  1. I must really do something about the blogroll. The blogroll is starting to smell. I must add all the new interesting people and places to it, and I must rearrange it into less amazingly pretentious categories.
  2. I must actually talk to people, because there is actually a line between ’shy’ and ‘antisocial’ and personally I seem to have wondered so far over it I’ve ended up in ‘has issues’.
  3. I’d like to write more fiction. No, let me rephrase that. I bloody well must write more fiction. I have a very untidy heap of paper scraps, torn from note-books during meetings, like as not, that are all over ideas for short stories. Now, I had never really written much in the way of short stories before, so this is either a New Development or, more likely, the result of having a seriously battered attention-span, especially when I’m supposed to be writing policy documents with it. Do you care? Is this going to fizzle embarrassingly after one go? [Yes].
  4. And I need to read more Proper Books. I mean, really, current haul seems involve a great deal of detective fiction I am not quite getting on with, and not nearly enough, say, Jorge Luis Borges, who, after all, damn it, was a Librarian.

Aha! Directions! I’d rather been missing some of those. How nice to find a few under the dust-bunnies. God bless NaBloPoMo, and all who sailed in her.