Yuletide Message

Hello everyone!
We haven't sent lots of cards this year - a pack of ten charity cards costs nearly £4 so 40p each, add on the stamp and every card we send costs the best part of a quid. Even the years I have made cards we've still spent a fortune, and the charities get maybe 10p each time. So this year, we've dramatically cut the number we've sent, and we will just give all the money to Breast Cancer Care (who have helped me) and the RNLI (who we hope we'll never need to call, but some of our friends have!).
So, Yuletide Blessings and Merry Christmas to all our friends and loved ones, and the space we've left on your mantlepiece has helped to do some good!

And in the meantime, here's a message from a friend, who gave me these wise words a couple of years ago - I think it bears a revisit.

I don't generally go in for moral lectures, but this one sort of caught me a bit - anyway, here it is...

A Personal Appeal...

As someone who has experienced sleeping rough, please spare a thought this Christmas as you tuck into your hot meal and open that pair of socks from Auntie Mildred that you loathe.

• Look through your cupboards, is it filled with tins that you haven’t used, probably won’t. Then donate them to your local soup kitchen.
• Got old sleeping bags, there are plenty of homeless charities and soup kitchens who would appreciate them and could pass them to someone for whom that warmth could save their lives.
• Smile and wish them merry christmas, just because they are homeless doesn’t mean they aren’t people anymore. Sometimes all it takes is a bit of human contact to give someone hope again.

Don’t just think of the homeless freezing in the cold, think a little closer to home too. Have you seen your elderly relatives lately? Maybe you should, they might need a light bulb changing, a heater fixing or just a chat.
How about the little old man in the bungalow at the end of the road? Smile, say hello next time you see him. Behind his door he might be sitting in one small room next to a single heater, cold and worried about the money he doesn’t have. While you eat your turkey, he might be eating a cold sandwich because he can’t afford the gas bill with the price hikes. If you got to know him, well then it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to pop over christmas day with a hot plate of christmas dinner and a smile. You might just make someone's christmas a merry one.

 

Yuletide joy

It's been a day of peaks and troughs.

My poorly friend made it through the night... this wasn't a foregone conclusion, his kidneys had failed catastrophically and his family were told to prepare for the worst. It seems unfair, he's 48, has never smoked and has had a drink about twice a year in the thirty years I have known him. He's spent all his life doing "good works" - youth work, scouts, special constabulary - a really nice bloke. And it's all gone horribly wrong. I've learnt, though, in the last couple of years, that the world isn't fair, and shit things happen to nice people.
As the day has gone on, the updates have been getting slightly more positive. When they took the DNR notice from his bed, that was a pretty big milestone - a few hours more and they reduced the drugs they've given him to keep him from moving - now they are talking about letting him wake up. It's been a long slog so far, and there is a long way to go, but now they are saying that he's stable, rather than critical.  If he can get through another night, and breathe for himself, then there will be cause for real celebration upon the morrow.
He does seem to have had his usual effect on technology though - so far he's broken three dialysis machines...

On a less positive note, I saw my next-door-but-a-couple neighbour today - she was diagnosed with a cancer in her jaw a couple of months ago, which was discovered at a dental check up. She has had some chemo, but I hadn't seen her for a few weeks, and another neighbour had mentioned that things weren't going too well... It seems that the cancer is pretty advanced, and they've told her that they can't do anything more.  The surgery they would have had to do would have left her unable to speak or eat, the radiotherapy would have burnt her face painfully and it would all have only given her a few more weeks. So she's decided that she's had enough, and she's withdrawn from the active treatment now. She's very frail, and talking to me for half an hour wore her out so much she had to lay down...

So, a day of contrasts. Fear, joy, sadness... It's the longest night, as I type it's about half past midnight, and so we're about half way through the longest night.  The Solstice is at just after 5am here - when we are as far from the Sun as we will be this year - from then on, we start the slow but steady climb back to spring, when there will be new life and growth all around us.  Before that spring, we have to get through the rest of the winter... but knowing that spring is coming is what will get us through.

Whatever you celebrate at this time of year, I hope that you have a merry and peaceful one.  Sending Yuletide blessings to you all...
FFFF

Conservatory - Day four - short and sweet.

They arrived at 7.45am.
They pronounced that "the ballast is frozen" and went away.
Sigh...

On a more positive note, spend Sunday making lots of presents... I might actually get this all done... that's this afternoon sorted then!

Day 2 part 2

Within an hour of the chaps leaving, the rain dried out and the sun shone for the rest of the day.
They didn't come back...

Conservatory - day 2

Sort of...

They were here at 8am... Actually they were here at 7.45, but I was still sat in bed cuddling a coffee and trying to muster the energy and enthusiasm to face the day. Astonishing how the sound of a builders' lorry arriving can galvanise things, isn't it! So I bounded downstairs, rushed out to move the car off the front of the drive - to find rain. Not stair rods - not a monsoon - just a steady, insistent, all-pervading drizzle.
They did their best, poor lads, they unloaded all the materials from the lorry and stacked them under the car port, they sloshed around the swamp and prodded yesterday's concrete... they struggled manfully for an hour in the rain, and then they gave up. The forecast suggests that the rain is set to stay and people slightly further west than here are saying that they are getting some snow falling, which wouldn't help at all.

It's not so big a deal as the actual assembly of the conservatory isn't scheduled until January - they happened to have a slot with some lads free for a few days to fit the base build in this side of the festive season, so they thought they'd get it done now. The glas panels are still being manufactured, so there's no great pressure to get it done this week. They will be back tomorrow - we'd already agreed that they'd work tomorrow - but I don't expect they'll be finished, so that means Monday, and I was hoping to take Monday off and head for Wales. And we do want to be able to put all the stuff back in the garage at some point.

Ah well...

'Tis the season to be chilly...

... tra-la-la-la, la-la-la-brr......

It's been a bit parky today.  Not quite the way it was a year ago, though - a year ago we were walking on the beach in about a foot of snowdrift, which was a tad freaky...  It was something of a surprise when I looked at these pictures and realised it was exactly a year ago today.

There is something about a seaside town in winter which is strangely endearing, to me at least, but then I have spent much of my life in seaside towns and I learnt early on that I love them more outside the summer season!  The fairground looks rather magical in the snow, I thought, what do you think?  The lonely figure in his sailing waterproofs - now that's a slightly different thing.
It's past my Dad's birthday now (Nov 28th) - as a child, this meant that we could at least acknowledge the approach of Christmas.  We weren't allowed to even mention it before then!  Now it was safe to talk about it, but not to do anything about it - that wasn't permitted until after my baby sister's birthday on December 7th.  There are other December birthdays to worry about now, and my poor son-in-law has his on December 23rd, which does have a tendency to get lost in the madness.  A friend from school was born on New Year's Day, which meant she never got a proper birthday party as everyone was all partied out by then.
The Christmas dinner season is starting in earnest now - Monday night is the 2CV club do, then Tuesday night is the other 2CV club do... we went to the pub this evening and it was full of tinsel and fairylights, the tables starting to be bedecked with crackers and holly for other people's parties...  I guess we do need to start thinking about it soon!  There are sweeties to make, embroidery projects to be finished, stuff to buy and wrap... I hate the stress of it all but I do like the whole giving pressies bit, I get a real buzz when people open something I've agonised over and smile enough that I believe I got it right!!!

Do it yourself - please...

A funny couple of days... Not really making any progress anywhere. Spent a couple of happy afternoons fighting with B&Q kitchen drawers... the wire baskets on runners. Dead easy when I put them in the last kitchen (on the previous boat) - but that was when I was building the units. It's a bit of a trial to fit them into existing units which are built, fixed to the wall and full of stuff! Anyway, there are now four neat tidy drawers where there used to be a cupboard full of big stuff stacked on little stuff which all fell out if the door was opened - and sometimes even when it wasn't!

Yuletide present production has not really got going - the plan this year (as has been for the last few) is that pressies for grown-ups are one or more of; cost less than a fiver, made by the giver, from charity shops, preferably edible (or drinkable!) or usable rather than dustable... recent examples are monogrammed hankies, home-made sweeties, glasses cases, sloe gin... last year I got a brilliant bag of samples of expensive make-up - Clarins and Clinique - as I hardly wear the stuff a tiny sample is as much as I need, I am set up for the next ten years! Still not worked out what I am going to make for most of the family, and if I am honest sitting here tweeting and blogging is a displacement activity to get out of actually getting on with it.

I am working up to a bit of a rant about manners... Remember manners? old-fashioned stuff that your parents used to go on about. Giving my age away a bit here, but then it says I am fifty-summat all over this blog... Anyway, by the time I got to the end of junior school it was second nature to say please and thank you, to hold doors open, to give up a seat on the bus if someone else needed it, to apologise if anything went wrong whoever's fault it was ("terribly sorry" "no, my fault entirely" "no, no, I wasn't looking where I was going" "no, if my feet weren't so big you wouldn't have run over them with your shoppingtrolley") - all those little things that make the wheels of civilisation go around.
Manners seem to have taken a bit of a beating over the last few years. Not everywhere, and this isn't the "youth of today" complaint... Lots of people of all ages are perfectly polite. Having said that, there are some "more mature" people about who really should know better and set some sort of example. And don't get me started on people who expect manners from other people (particularly young people) but can't actually manage returning the compliment. I have lost count of the times I have seen my grandchildren holding doors open for streams of people who just glide past without bothering to say "Thank you", or seen "grown-ups" barge past them without so much as "excuse me" while loudly complaining that they are in the way...
Anyway, manners cost nothing. A step beyond having no manners, however, is blatant, gratuitous rudeness, which is unpleasant and unnecessary. If someone runs over my foot with a trolley, while I might not think it my fault for having such big feet (size 4!), I probably would hope that they might apologise, and would probably give them time to do so before gently remonstrating with them. (Although I am somewhat averse to conflict, so I would probably just hobble off and suffer quietly in the corner). What I would not do would be to scream and shout and eff and blind at them straight away - but this seems to be the option of choice much of the time.
And whilst mistaken identity, or a wrong number, can be annoying or potentially be embarrassing, surely it's possible to be polite about it. The guy I called yesterday, when a letter from the hospital had the wrong dialling code for an office I am not used to dialling, was clearly bored with hearing from people asking for ext 3608, but he managed to be polite about it...
So when my Mum-in-law sent a jolly "Happy Birthday" text message to her granddaughter (who has reached sweet sixteen today - Happy birthday E!) but got one digit wrong in the number, why was it necessary for the person who received this little attempt to spread joy to respond with "Who the f*ck are you?"

A seasonal message on behalf of someone else...

This is lifted from the blog of The Broken Photographer - I can't make the reblog function work, guessing because I am not a tumblr member...

I don't generally go in for moral lectures, but this one sort of caught me a bit - anyway, here it is...

A Personal Appeal...

As someone who has experienced sleeping rough, please spare a thought this Christmas as you tuck into your hot meal and open that pair of socks from Auntie Mildred that you loathe.

• Look through your cupboards, is it filled with tins that you haven’t used, probably won’t. Then donate them to your local soup kitchen.
• Got old sleeping bags, there are plenty of homeless charities and soup kitchens who would appreciate them and could pass them to someone for whom that warmth could save their lives.
• Smile and wish them merry christmas, just because they are homeless doesn’t mean they aren’t people anymore. Sometimes all it takes is a bit of human contact to give someone hope again.

Don’t just think of the homeless freezing in the cold, think a little closer to home too. Have you seen your elderly relatives lately? Maybe you should, they might need a light bulb changing, a heater fixing or just a chat.

How about the little old man in the bungalow at the end of the road? Smile, say hello next time you see him. Behind his door he might be sitting in one small room next to a single heater, cold and worried about the money he doesn’t have. While you eat your turkey, he might be eating a cold sandwich because he can’t afford the gas bill with the price hikes. If you got to know him, well then it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to pop over christmas day with a hot plate of christmas dinner and a smile. You might just make someone's christmas a merry one.

Can anyone disagree with any of this? I can't. Think on...