END OF YEAR

I did think I might review the year, as we speed towards the end of December… an account of good and bad things that have happened.  But it doesn’t feel like real life to do that, life not being a credit and debit balance sheet.  Wondering how I might describe it better, the image that came to mind was a deep flower bed, one of those that you find in the grounds of country houses, where rows of intense planting, the tallest plants at the back and the most vivid in sequence along the border, show a glorious mix of textures, colours, smells and shapes, none of it better or worse than anything else but each setting off the other, blending in without uniformity in apparently random throws of nature.  It is not random, of course, and needs a great gardener to achieve this effect - someone who sees a weed and yanks it out, someone who understands what is perennial and what is temporary, someone who has an overall feel for the pattern and colour of things, not just a handbook to work from.  This gardener, oneself, gets better at doing the work over time, more attuned to the detail and its lasting effect, more able to let nature take its course as appropriate. 

But enough of this simile, a word that I note is only a letter away from a smile. 

I consider my early morning ritual.  Rising at about 6 am, I go to the bathroom, make tea and return to bed to read another chapter of my current book (Ian McEwan’s Solar), only putting it down because I don’t want it to end too quickly. Bliss! I take a moment to admire the dawn out of the window - a hazy pink this morning.  More luxury.  I note the silence of the house and the quiet street at this time of day, the only sound the creak of centuries-old wood around me and my own breathing.  Utterly, joyfully peaceful.  I do my usual floor exercises and think how lucky I am to have flexibility of movement, noticing the energy of the new day surging through my body.  In the kitchen I am surprised by the number of Christmas cards I have received, having resolved this year that I wouldn’t send as many and quite sure that others wouldn’t do so either - not least because of the cost of postage, but also because Christmas has become so meaningless.  But no, the cards are there and I am reminded of love in my life as I look at them.  

By 9 am I have made gingerbread biscuits for the grandchildren and feel satisfyingly productive.  My Circadian rhythm doesn’t seem to have changed much with age: I am always at my most energetic in the early morning, but go into decline at about 4 pm.  I really should have had a job that started at 6 am and finished at 2 pm, then go home, have lunch followed by a short sleep, and then do only the most undemanding of tasks until retiring to bed at 8 pm.  As it is, I force myself to stay awake until 10 pm and then, thankfully, sleep as soon as my head touches the pillow.  

The birds and the plants on the flat roof do not know that it’s Christmas but must be tended, whatever the season, and this I do after breakfast, padding out onto the flat roof to throw some bird seed or dead-head a plant.  I am amazed at their hardiness, both the birds and the plants, and indeed many of the plants still seem to be green despite earlier frost.  The geraniums I have brought into the house to over-winter look brighter and healthier now than they did during the summer months, as though they are glad to be sheltering from the bleakness outside.  

Yesterday, gorgeously mild for end-December, I noticed the gifts of this season - gifts offered by the hard work of others in a small community.  A brass band of young people playing carols along the High Street, reminding onlookers that there are young homeless people in Hertfordshire.  Further out of town there are red pillar boxes in beautifully crocheted covers promoting a dog's charity.  All that work, the sewing, the music, the organising, just to delight the rest of us.  The Big Issue seller who appears at this time of year tells me that buying the current issue will bring me luck.  Ha! I love the sentiment in his sales pitch and buy a copy.  At this time of year, dressed in thermal underwear and adding three mismatched layers, I know that I will not be appraised for how I look, but instead get to wave a warm Hello or a Happy Christmas to people mostly of my own age, who often wave back. 

These are the small adventures of an older life - small things please inordinately.  Larger things, although I keep up with them on the News, often seem a remote reminder of a life I no longer feel part of.  I am cautiously transgressive, not the Old Lady in the Van of Alan Bennett’s life by any means, but able to delight in living by my own rules and no-one else’s.