Boxing Day
I still think it’s a funny name. You all know about Boxing Day, don’t you? British (or Commonwealth, says my British dictionary, but I wouldn’t’ve said it was a big item in Canada or Australia, can anybody correct me?) tradition where the toffs go around bestowing largess on the commoners who’ve worked for them over the last year, and the scum had better be grateful. Maybe it’s not really any different from Christmas bonuses, and it’s just my well known allergy to the aristocracy* re-emerging. But still . . . Boxing Day. Why not Bonus Day, Prize Day, Incentive Day, Pat on the Head Forelock-Pulling Day? Or even Box Day. Or Hamper Day. Or Basket Day. But Boxing Day?**
Perhaps the main thing to say about yesterday is that I didn’t break anything this year.
I think I’ve told you that the parking court at the mews is a jigsaw at the best of times. It gets worse at Christmas.*** And we’re, which is to say Peter, is number one, at the far inner end. I like having a side that has no neighbours-that’s the side the piano is on-but the parking aspect is not pretty. You’ve already pretty much got no wiggling room, and anybody driving an SUV is automatically on my hit list: you park nose in to the wall, and there’s barely a car width between the row of car-butts and the narrow flowerbed running along the front of the mews. An SUV means that I’ll be driving through the lavender bushes again to get past the thing. Usually I can manage to turn around again before I head out†, but there are limits.
Last Christmas night I was backing out very slowly and carefully and I’d JUST MADE IT when there was this awful noise. . . . because as I’d backed around the freaking corner at the end of the queue my front bumper had managed to catch the lip of the very tall thin elegant flower pot by Peter’s neighbour-but-one’s front door, that holds, or anyway held, the climbing rose around their door. AAAAAAUGH. So I got out, at midnight on Christmas, the remains of the pleasant warm holiday glow evaporating faster than burning brandy over your Christmas pudding, leaving the headlights on so I could see what I was doing and the motor running so my baby hellhounds wouldn’t get cold, and tried to scoop the worst of the ruin out of the way, so that at least no one else would run over it again. The pot was past hoping for but the rose should be salvageable.†† Oh gods. This was also our first Christmas in the mews, and if you’re going to believe in Other Realms and Nonverbal Communication ††† then you have to give some passing credence to omens. Also this is the one unjolly neighbour.
I rang Peter the minute I got back to the cottage and too bad about waking the poor man up‡ to ask him to please camp out on his neighbour’s doorstep starting at dawn and at the first signs of life (thumps, moans, smell of coffee) or at least before any scrabbling noises on the other side of the door suggestive of it opening to view the prospect from the front step, to please knock and explain that Peter’s dunderheaded wife had broken their rose-pot the night before. I showed up later bearing irises.‡‡ And the neighbours were extremely nice about it. The man had actually heard it happen: well I’m very glad to have been spared the Angry Householder appearing like an Avenging Wraith (presumably in his dressing-gown with Pillow Hair), not least because the man in question is about seven feet tall and a trifle forbidding with it.
There are two kickers to this story. The first one is that of course I offered to pay for the replacement pot. (Cursing myself for not having run over a small child or something cheaper than a vast noble flower pot.) They graciously allowed this . . . except for the fact that they still haven’t replaced it. And the remains of the pot are still tidily piled up by the front door. Are they trying to torture me with my guilt or something?! Buy a blasted pot, let me get on with it.
And the second one is, I was one hundred percent sober last Christmas. I can’t remember why I was having a dry Christmas-there has to be have been a reason-but I was. Holier than the virgin snow, if we had any snow. § I was not wholly, 100% sober last night. §§ But I managed to back out of the jigsaw without running into anything. (I may have given a slight glare to the pot-shards as my headlights swept over them.)
And tomorrow I’ll probably post some more about food.
* I’ve already told you that Peter’s an Hon.^ Which makes me an Hon by marriage. Fortunately you don’t have to wear it or anything, where it might give you a rash. And, for example, I’m extremely glad that some of the astonishing houses and gardens that members of the peerage with too much money and too much time on their hands put up, because chances are that’s the only way they would have been created, and as grandiloquent art forms go, I’d like to keep, oh, say, Blenheim Palace and Hampton Court, thank you. As any kind of system of government I think it’s bogus. Not that any of the other forms of government loose on the planet today fill me with anything other than foreboding, and at the top of that catalogue of infamy stands American democracy in big drooling letters.
^ Yes! We had a lord and a lady at Peter’s birthday lunch! And several other Hons!
** Although the idea of Hampering Day amuses me. Hee. Okay, I amuse easily.
*** As someone who was delighted to be having a quiet Christmas with only husband and hellhounds^, I’m afraid I allowed myself to be amused at the sight of one or two presumably family parties dutifully going for a pre- or post-prandial^^ strolls who conspicuously would rather be anywhere else. Or maybe I’m reading too much into anyone who doesn’t smile, however involuntarily, at my irresistible hellhounds.
^ And a rather late tree. Visitors do make things like trees happen a bit more to schedule.
^^ Word doesn’t recognize prandial! Microsoft might do better to hire literate programmers! No, no, how foolishly idealistic of me!!!
† Wolfgang-that’s our ancient beat-up VW Golf-has this interesting Bends in the Middle option. Straight out of a James Bond film. There’s this little button on the dashboard. . . .
†† I’m told that indeed it’s flourishing away like anything, replanted in the back garden where there are no cars. Maybe it had asked its fairy godmother to get it out of the pot and she said, okay, I can do that.
††† And I do
‡ No, I didn’t go in and wake Peter while I was still there. Where was I going to leave the car? The point about turning around as soon as you can is that at the end of the mews courtyard you have an archway to go through followed by a long double-walled curve of drive. I’ve backed out through all of this, yes, but not if I can possibly help it. Given my luck thus far, if I had left it where it was, the other late-leaving person would turn up as I was unlocking Peter’s door, and for obvious reasons I was not going to pull forward into our parking space again.
‡‡ You’d think Boxing Day was a poor hope for the florist’s to be open, but it was. Maybe they do a lot of business with people who’ve broken things on Christmas.
‡‡‡ That I was going to be ringing something should be the likeliest, but we usually ring Christmas Eve and Christmas morning and then are free to get as sloshed as we like: although this year I forgot and got mildly sloshed Christmas Eve too. Fortunately we were as usual so short of pairs of hands on a rope that no one was anything but glad to see me. Although the six^, like a horse or a hellhound, knew that something was up and kept coming down^^ on me because it could. You could hear the wicked glee in the bongs, like a horse shying with one giveaway ear cocked back at its rider or a hellhound hitting the end of its lead.
^ Sixth bell. The first, lightest bell is the treble, the last, heaviest is the tenor, and the ones in between are called by their order in the queue
^^ Not returning the full 360 degrees with every stroke. A nice friendly bell will pretty much ring itself-and this six is usually perfectly friendly-some of them you do have to keep hauling away on to keep them up there. And you HAVE to keep it up there, turning 360 degrees every stroke: that’s what change ringing is all about.
§ You so can’t please me. Yesterday and today it’s finally warmed up a little-the ice in the half-barrel by the kitchen door at the cottage may even melt, if this keeps up-but mud for Christmas? That is unseemly. Even if it means I can stand down from red alert on Chaos. I think.
§§ Let me not appear to be romanticising alcohol, in case it looks like I am. I am and have always been a very cheap date. My idea of ‘sloshed’ is anything over two small glasses of wine. Last night I had (a) one glass of champagne (b) one half glass red wine (c) one half glass dessert wine. I loved every mouthful and would have been happy to have more, but it’s not worth it. I don’t get hung over, I just don’t wake up the next day, and see above: Not Worth It. I have things to do with my time and my life. I wish more people felt that way, and there’d be less alcohol abuse. Except for the people who need to feel they have fewer things to do with their lives, and dull the frenzy with alcohol. If I were going to go the alcohol route, I’d be on the latter, so what a good thing my liver or whatever it is precludes this course.