Stories that make sense
Ask for help. Accept help. (In this case, a hat – originally knitted for the baby’s cousin by his other granny – to replace the one that blew off half way down Ryde Pier. But the principle is more widely applicable.)
Tea. Got to be tea.
I couldn’t immediately remember making any significant decisions, as opposed to just going with the flow, this year, but, thinking about it, there were a couple of major decisions whose results have integrated themselves so seamlessly into my life that it becomes clear that they were the right ones.
Choosing to give birth at the Rosie Birth Centre in Cambridge was one of those. Even then so much was down to things that were outside my control – what my body and the baby wanted to do, my fabulous always-had-my-back community midwife being on duty that night…
Maybe choosing to have a sweep on my due date helped nine days down the line, maybe it didn’t; activating airplane mode at eight days overdue was definitely a good idea. Anyway, I was in the right place with the right people, and it was lovely, and I still get a bit teary thinking about it now.
I’m sharing a picture of the Quentin Blake drawing in my room, although it isn’t entirely representative as in the event I didn’t have time to get into the pool, let alone look at the artwork. This motherhood lark is hard work, but my theory is that most people get something that goes irritatingly perfectly, and for me it was the birth itself.
This box has now been removed, filled, taped up, and addressed, and will shortly be posted. Poor cat. I’m sure we’ll find her something else to sit on and scratch up.
Haven’t been reading much lately so had to go back some months, but here’s one fiction book and one non-fiction.
“Hood” dates from before Emma Donoghue started writing historical fiction, but has become a period piece in its own right – a snapshot of the Irish lesbian scene thirty or forty years ago. Complicated, but generally likeable, characters, and a really convincing portrait of the intricacies and contradictions of grief.
“Winters in the World” is much more recent – in fact, probably the most recent book I read this year. I think it came out late 2022. It’s lovely – a slow journey through the seasons and festivals of the year as seen through early medieval literature. Some of the pieces quoted were familiar, from church or from my long ago Eng Lit degree, but most were new to me. Much more enjoyable and edifying (she tells herself sternly) than arguing online over whether some advertising gimmick invented in 1957 is a sekrit pagan survival. (I don’t actually argue, but I do waste time and emotional energy muttering to myself about it.)
Not pictured, because on my e-reader, Plain Bad Heroines (Emily m Danforth) and Bad To The Bone (Brian Waddington) – two slick, stylish, cynical novels with what I’d like to call a side of magical realism if only that didn’t sound so much like whimsy. Which they very much weren’t.
On the sofa. I spent a lot of last year on the sofa, and 2023 continued the trend. Lately I’ve been making sure to get out of the house at least once a day, but I always end up back here. It’s a good sofa.
Hygge is one of those words that sets my teeth on edge (and do you know how hard it is to find an NHS dentist these days? I have failed to find a replacement for mine. No wonder I’m grumpy today). It’s not that I object to loan words. It’s that it was everywhere a few years ago, and, more to the point, it was everywhere trying to sell me stuff, and fads have always got my back up (fortunately I am not currently having to seek any treatment for my back).
My understanding, however, is that it’s generally taken to mean something like ‘being cosy indoors while it’s miserable outdoors’, which I am all for. So here’s what’s going on on my sofa.
Not sure if this is the favourite, but it’s certainly a favourite. That’s my youngest brother putting out a hand to hold the ship on which my oldest brother and family are off on honeymoon, and my mother waving. A gorgeous evening in May, a view that’s always restorative, and the honeysuckle running riot. I think there was a cat twirling around my feet, too.
This was meant to be the Christmas newsletter but the printer decided that what I really wanted was instructions for the breast pump. We got there eventually.
I always keep the Christmas letter to one side of A4. This year it’s one side of A5: our very big news meant that there wasn’t much space in the last two quarters for much else. Some people get very snobby about them, but I think they’re as good a way as any as keeping loved ones updated.
I think maybe you’re all meant to know each other’s news already? It doesn’t work that way in my immediate family. My father, who spent most of his evenings on the phone to various friends and relations, was a distinct outlier; the rest of us are dreadful at it. Then there’s the point that a typed letter looks superficial and impersonal. Yes, but definitely better than nothing. Certainly last year, when I was pregnant, not telling anyone about it quite yet, and suffering first trimester exhaustion the like of which I’d never imagined, I was in no mood to write out fifty times by hand that my father had died and that I’d had a bout of COVID that it had taken me two months to get over.
Or are you meant to assume that people don’t care about your news, on the grounds that you don’t care about theirs? But I do care. I always enjoy reading other people’s letters, regardless of whether I was present at every event they report on or haven’t seen them for years.
Anyway, friends who do them, keep writing them; I’ll keep reading them; and I’ll get mine sent out as soon as I have some time to write some cards. Which might be this month. You never know.
Beginning with this slightly wonky Advent candle, which I need to jam more firmly into its bottle. I’m not sure that I’ll share pictures for all the prompts (I’m generally not sharing baby pictures publicly, for a start), but we’ll see how we go. It’ll be interesting to see how the prompts do or don’t match up with the names of Jesus on the candle, and the windows in the calendar, and the poems in the book (any of which I may drop behind on any day, of course). Anyway, I have to burn my way through this star to get the whole thing started.
Kathleen Jowitt 