Tag Archives: Cotswolds

The Tyranny of the Christmas Card

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A Christmas card from 1870

Image via Wikipedia

Well, that’s it, I’m finally ready Christmas.  It’s just a pity that Christmas  couldn’t wait a little longer for me.

On December 1st, the inescapable countdown begins, and my heart sinks a little lower with every passing day.  No, not the countdown to Christmas Day – opening presents and eating too much I can cope with.  What I dread is the arrival of the last posting date for Christmas cards.

Always, I buy my cards in plenty of time for that deadline, picking up tany that strike my fancy as and when I see them.  I’m very particular, avoiding anything fluffily sentimental or inappropriately commercial.  Favourite designs are those depicting snowy postboxes (ironic, considering my aversion) because I live in an old post office, wintry Cotswold scenes reminiscent of my own village, and anything  at all in support of my favourite charity, the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF).

I spend a great deal of time thinking about the friends and relations I’ll be sending them to, fondly recalling their last year’s Christmas message, wondering how this year has treated them,  and selecting snippets of my news to tell them.  But my inspiration always falls at inappropriate times when I don’t have a Christmas card to hand – driving in the car, pushing a trolley round the supermarket, submerged in the bath.

Meanwhile the blur that is Advent begins, with a rush of Christmas shopping, nativity plays, carol concerts, and parties at home, school and work.  In such a social whirlwind, it’s all I can do to keep the household running smoothly, with quick pit-stops between events.  And I like to get the house extra clean and tidy so that it’s a more pleasant place in which to spend the extended holiday. The house doesn’t dust itself, you know (contrary to my husband’s apparent belief).

Around 5th December, I make a start on the cards, transferring my stockpile from my Christmas cupboard (well, it gives me the illusion of being prepared) to my desk.  Then I amass my various address books, paper and electronic, and the writing process begins.

The people who are only due a simple greeting message get priority treatment.  Those meriting a letter are set aside to be picked off one at a time later, in reverse order of the likely length of the letter.  Thus the friends to whom I plan to send the longest letters receive theirs last of all.  They may appear to suffer from the greatest neglect, but my intentions for them are of the very best.

This year, they’ve had to wait a very long time indeed.  I know myself better these days than to stock up on Christmas second-class stamps.  I accept that the second class posting deadline will have come and gone long before my cards are ready to send.  First class it will have to be.  But what I really need this year is some sort of uber-first-class, a time-travelling stamp that can make a card posted after Christmas Day arrive a few days beforehand.  Only today have I finally finished and posted the final card, slinking furtively up to the pillarbox, slipping them  through the slot as guiltily as if despatching a signed confession.

This year, I’m thankful that any friends who don’t read my blog may just blame the snow for the delay in receiving a card from me.  When my missive  finally arrives, they may be glad to have belated proof that I’m not dead.  But my honest nature compels me to confess my inadequacy.

By chance, one of the cards I chose this year  had a 12 Days of Christmas theme.  I’m hoping that recipients will pick up the subliminal message that the festive season doesn’t officially end till January 6th.  That would left me off the hook.

However, sufficient is my chagrin to make me resolve to do better next year. Some people I know start their Christmas shopping in the January sales.  Maybe I should resolve to start writing my 2011 Christmas cards the moment the new year dawns.

Happy New Year, everyone.  No, actually, make that Merry Christmas!

The Centre of the World

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The prime meridian at Greenwich, England

Image via Wikipedia

“Why isn’t our village mentioned on television more often?” asks my small daughter, Laura, as we’re watching the weather forecast.  “They mention Bristol all the time.”

The swooping BBC weather map has just reached the city where her grandparents live.  Our airspace, as ever, they have passed over without a mention.

For Laura, rural Gloucestershire is the centre of the world.  Now and again she seeks my reassurance that we will live here forever.  She worries that I may sell the house.  When I gently suggest that she may one day want to move away to university, or in pursuit of a career or a husband, she gives me an old-fashioned look.

I understand.  I still feel a gravitational pull towards my own roots in London suburbia.  I was born not far from the Greenwich Meridian, by which the whole world set its clocks – proof, to my childish mind, that I lived at the centre of the world.  Any mention on the telly of Sidcup still makes me feel proprietorial, even though it’s likely to be in the context of a comedy show.  “Porridge” and “Rab C Nesbitt” both used Sidcup to raise an easy laugh.

In my subconscious there lies a world map.  A large pin marks Sidcup as the focal point. Radiating out, in pastel colours, are the territories I’ve explored, while large tracts of uncharted land remain dark.  Even today I take pleasure in visiting places I’ve never been, so that I can mentally colour them in.   My map looks pretty colourful these days, but Sidcup’s central pin remains in place.

Few people feel no pull towards their roots.  We are all like tethered goats, though some have longer ropes.  My Scottish husband, an economic migrant to England at the age of 20, has lived and worked in many English towns and travelled as far India for holidays, but every summer he heads north, as compelled as a homing swallow, to conquer another few Munros (Scottish mountains over 3,000 feet high).   Avidly he records his conquests on a vast mountain map that fills our kitchen table.  If Laura had been a boy, he’d have insisted on naming her Munro.  Both she and I are very glad she is a girl.

About the time I was busy being born in Sidcup, a Tetbury-born friend of mine left home for university.  His career took him all over the country before he eventually settled in Norfolk –  about as far east of his roots as he could get without leaving England.  Yet in retirement, what should be at the centre of his thoughts but the area in which he was raised?  He’s now penning a series of whimsical stories1 based on the tiny territory of his boyhood, meticulously remembering every hill, every field and every lane.

Laura’s personal map is already of conquistadorial proportions: not many seven year olds have travelled as widely.  Before she was four, she’d been to Albania: her first kiss, at the age of three, was from a small Greek boy in Athens.  This summer she added the Outer Hebrides to her empire.  She’s now set her sights on Mexico.

“How many countries are there in the world, Mummy?” she asked the other day, wondering how many she has yet to visit.

“194,” advised the internet.

“And which one is the most popular?”

For a moment I’m stumped, till I consider a democratic approach.

“If you asked everyone in the world, the most votes would probably go to China,” I suggest.

She frowned disapproval, patting her “Team England” t-shirt to indicate where she’d cast hers.   (Later, doing the laundry, I check where her t-shirt was made.  No prizes for guessing its country of origin.  I decide I’d better not tell her.)

But no matter how far Laura travels, I’m sure her rural Gloucestershire home will always be her favourite destination. And now, as the autumn nights start to draw in, we are both very happy to be here.

(This post originally appeared in the Tetbury Advertiser, October 2010.)

Our Global Village

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You’d think that the novelty of the internet would have worn off by now.  But every so often, tapping away at my laptop, I’m bowled over at this power we have to be in touch with the rest of the world.

A glance up from my desk reminds me that I’m still in Hawkesbury Upton.  Familiar horses trot past my window; neighbours flit up France Lane to the shop.  Exotic, it ain’t.

star trek

Image by Combined Media via Flickr

But, look back at my screen, and I can be anywhere in the world.  It’s like having my own personal teleporter: beam me up, Scottie, I think I’ll take a trip to Seattle.

A message has pinged in to my email box from an old school friend who lives there.   As our village heads towards bedtime, she’s just settling down for her lunch.  By the power of Facebook, we bounce one-liners off each other as easily as if we were in the same room.  We’re as closely in touch as when we were children, talking to each other in the garden through tin cans linked together with string.  Except, on the internet, the message comes through more clearly.

Clicking on my website traffic report, I find visitors from three different continents.  From Korea to Kansas, from Dubai to Dubrovnik, people have been checking me out, even though I don’t know a soul in Seoul.

The news I pick up through this route is not the stuff that national headlines are made of.    Food, drink, weather, hatches and matches are the most frequent topics of the posts by my Facebook friends.

But the sense of a unified, peaceable community, reaching way beyond our own Hawkesbury Upton, is overwhelming and enormously heartening.

There’s still nowhere else I’d rather live, of course.  But it still feels good to extend the  village boundaries across the ether now and again.

(This post was originally published in the August edition of the Hawkesbury Parish News.)

How Green Was My Pot Plant

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BIG Aspidistra

Image by gadgetgirl2007 via Flickr

Keeping a pot plant on your desk is meant to make you more creative, happier and healthier.  But if your desk is in an old cottage with small windows and not much natural light, that’s easier said than done.

Especially if you’re not very good with pot plants.  I tried hard in my first flat, (light and airy with floor-to-ceiling windows), but I still couldn’t get much more than tradescantia to survive.  I once overheard my father saying to a visitor “And this is the area where Debbie tortures plants”.

Not long after that, I had the opportunity to learn from a master of the art of desktop gardening.  I went to work in an open-plan office where my desk adjoined that of Gloria.  Gloria loved houseplants so much that her desk resembled a small rainforest.  She certainly had green fingers: some of the plants were almost as big as she was.  Her massive money-plant seemed particularly auspicious, given that this was a sales office.  We were a happy and successful team until one day management asked her to cut back a bit on the undergrowth.  She took umbrage at this and felled the lot.  Things were never quite the same in our office again.

But now I don’t need green fingers because I’ve discovered some fabulously realistic plastic pot plants in Ikea.  They are pleasingly tidy, don’t need watering and have a restful, refreshing effect on any room.  I’ve just installed a pair of them on the windowsill above my desk.  Whenever I glance up from my work, they almost seem to smile back at me.  I’m so taken with them that I think I’ll invest in a few more.  One for the bathroom, two for the kitchen, then maybe I’ll move onto the bedroom.

But not yet.  This weekend my gardening efforts will have to be redirected out of doors.  I’ve a conservatory full of vegetable plants, thanks to the Gardening Club’s recent sale, and they all need to be transferred to the garden.  I wonder if Ikea makes convincing plastic vegetables?  They’d be so much easier to maintain.  But hang on, with the barbecue summer the weather forecasters have got lined up for us, they might melt.  And in any case, I’d never get them past the judges on Show Day.

This post was first published in the June 2010 issue of the Hawkesbury Parish News.

John O’Groats – via Hawkesbury

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John o' Groats sign

Image by Auz via Flickr

Driving back from Yate down Sandpits Lane, I slow down to read a message on the backpack of a lone walker: “Land’s End to John O’Groats – for Derby Cancer Research”.  Is he lost? I wonder, and stop the car for a chat.

Not at all, it turns out.  Chris, for that is his name, has just chosen a spectacular route for his epic journey, including the Cotswold Way.  (He’s clearly a man of taste.) I slip him a few quid for his sponsorship fund and invite him to my house for a cup of tea, if he feels like making a detour.   Realising it would be cheating if I offered him a lift, I drive off, and that is the last I see of him.

So you can imagine my delight when our lovely postie, Ray, delivers to me a few days later a cheery postcard thanking me for my donation and offer of tea and giving me his web address so that I can follow his progress.  Here’s a snippet of his blog:

“I’m dedicating this walk to the memory of my late brother-in-law Michael, who lost his fight against cancer in October 2004 aged just 51 years.  There is a special magic about the phrase ‘Lands End to John O’Groats’, conjuring up images of challenge and adventure… My immediate challenges were planning the route, contacting and booking almost 80 B&B stops, and having to cope with my failing eyesight. I will be walking 1,150 miles in 79 days (11 weeks) … 15 miles per day. I leave Lands End on March 29th and cross the ‘finish line’ on June 15th (Lucy’s birthday, Mike and Jane’s eldest daughter).“

What a very special birthday present that will be for Lucy.  As the parish mag goes to press, he should just be passing through Derbyshire.  If you’d like to follow his progress, here’s his blog address which also tells you where you can make a donation:

Well, you can never have too much cancer research, can you?
This post was originally published in the May 2010 Hawkesbury Parish News.