Christmas<\/a>, I have been doing twice as much work every day as I usually do so that I am free and clear for a bit over the actual proper Christmas bit and yet \u2013 no. I still have oodles to do before Boxing Day. How?<\/p>\nI\u2019m not complaining, please understand. I love to work and I love my job, two facts that I frequently send up prayer-type-things of thanks for before I bend back over my laptop to recommune therewith. I simply cannot fathom the maths. Twice as much for ages should eventually result in some kind of gap in the timetable, no? Deadlines met early, extra stuff filed, cached away, that should mean something, eventually, should it not?<\/p>\n
I eventually expressed some of my bafflement to a friend. \u201cNo,\u201d she said. \u201cWhat you have discovered is the essence of life as an adult. Time has no meaning. Existence is just one thing after another. You embrace that fact and move on. Or rather, you don\u2019t. Because, as I say, this is life now.\u201d<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not sure this is exactly what Wizzard meant when they sang that they wished it could be Christmas every day. But we are where we are.<\/p>\n
Christmas Eve<\/p>\n
A change is as good as a rest, they say, and today I am working on the train as my mother and I head to Devon to spend Christmas with my sister. The train left from Waterloo at 11.20am so my mother has been camping at the station for the last four days. I was in charge of buying the tickets so neither of us can be sure they\u2019re right.<\/p>\n
We discuss my character flaws all the way there. I try to distinguish between my moral weaknesses and what I call \u201cjust being a different person from you\u201d. But it\u2019s a hard sell.<\/p>\n
Fortunately, one of my many defects is a willingness to partake of sustenance in public, because I was not raised by nuns who patrolled the streets of Preston looking for convent girls indulging in such venial sins and beating them to death outside Booths.<\/p>\n
And one of my mother\u2019s few points of ignorance is that she doesn\u2019t know that alcohol comes in vessels other than big green gin bottles. So I am downing cocktails in cans without her being any the wiser and Christmas is looking good.<\/p>\n
Christmas Day<\/p>\n
My sister managed the whole thing perfectly. Great food, great presents, great reminding me to put my son\u2019s stocking out before I went to bed \u2013 top work all round. The rest of the family did well too. I\u2019d bought my husband the correct edition of the Dorset Pevsner he\u2019d asked for, so he disappeared with that all afternoon.<\/p>\n
We gave Mum all our odd socks in a big basket and she happily sorted those all afternoon while trying to remember the names of everyone in White Christmas and refusing her grandson\u2019s pleas to let him look it up on Google.<\/p>\n
We ate, we napped, we listened for the first time ever to the king\u2019s speech and decided his mother probably wouldn\u2019t be too ashamed of him. We washed up, we went for a little walk with the dog, we napped again, we agreed we should play a board game rather than stare at our phones, we did not play a board game, we went to bed. Strong recommend, especially the sock thing. She\u2019s been quiet all day.<\/p>\n
Digested photo of the week 2: \u2018Victoria, can you finish laying the table? I\u2019ve nearly got fun mode activated, just got to figure out the last little bit.\u2019 Photograph: Simon Dawson\/AvalonBoxing Day<\/p>\n
We are, as I say, in the Devon countryside this year, so the traditional trip round the sales that my sister and I customarily take was not possible, alas.<\/p>\n
I love the Boxing Day sale vibe. People are just so glad to be out, to be free instead of surrounded by loving relatives and weirdo uncles, to be looking round meaningless stuff again instead of having to feel gratitude and love and blessings and things. It\u2019s got little to do with bargain hunting. In fact, if retailers had any sense, they would put their prices up. Everyone would pay the Boxing Day premium \u2013 the price of liberation.<\/p>\n
Christmas is lovely but, like sex or massages, it is even better when it stops.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Monday A canal in Shropshire has disappeared into a sinkhole. I paraphrase, but not by much. A report…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":337328,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-337327","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337327","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=337327"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337327\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/337328"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=337327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=337327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=337327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}