Half Life – 9 – First Christmas
24th December 2020
The all-powerful virus has handed us something unexpected; our first Christmas at home with just the four of us and JJ the dog. Nervously approaching The Boys with the decision, and expecting disappointment, they surprised us. Loving the idea, they immediately set about putting in requests for pyjamas all day, eating Quality Street on the sofa watching trashy films, and bids for when they would be allowed on the Play Station. Accepting that my educationally focused options of Scrabble, reading, and life enhancing discussions on moral philosophy were probably not going to get the engagement I’d hoped for, they are going to get their way. We might take a break to attempt to eat as much as we can of the significantly over-sized turkey we’ve ordered, otherwise our Christmas will be one planned by an eleven and a thirteen-year-old. I hope it’s not too late to change my letter to Santa to include a sofa cleaning kit and new toothbrushes for all the family.
The Boys deserve it. They’ve had a crap year like the rest of us. Serious guilt-free, chocolate, wine, and mince pie consuming laziness for a few days will do everyone some good. As long as The Sound of Music is returned to its rightful place at top billing, I am sure everyone will be pleased. With 2020 hindsight (sorry – someone had to say it) we will laugh about how some people, worried about their own cooking, bought as much toilet paper as they could to prepare for a lockdown. Nostalgia will kick in about standing on your doorstep clapping and banging pans, or going shopping having to wear a mask and then sanitising yourself from head to toe afterwards. As we tell our grandchildren about our struggles with bandwidth for a Zoom quiz for forty people, they will not believe we coped with just cable and broadband. How archaic it will sound as they revel in a future age of laser projected data, direct to the eyeballs. At the moment, our national collective future ambitions don’t seem to go much further than the arrival of a vaccine, so we can go inside pubs again to watch enormous televisions together, or camp in a field and rub armpits at Glastonbury. Even the desire for a deal with the EU has rightfully dropped behind the need for the return of communal drinking and body odour sharing.
Regardless whether your view is, with the inevitable changing of the year, that we are heralding in the new dawn of liberation from the oppressive yoke of Brussels or waking up to the startling reality of the greatest act of folly and self-harm in our history, I want a ‘deal’ for very personal reasons. Looking at the array of bizarrely named medicines I take every day, I notice all of them are made and transported from the continent, mostly Belgium. In addition to giving me the first reason in 50-plus years to find Belgium interesting, beyond chips and mayonnaise, they keep me alive for longer. My doctors, who have supplied enough to get me to the end of January, already mentioned the possibility not getting supplies. In principle, there is no reason for the drugs not to keep coming, but politics is a crazy world, inhabited by crazy people, who do crazy things for reasons known only to them and their teddy bears. My trust in their desire to keep me and my kind alive over making shallow political gestures is low. Equally important, but probably of more interest to the Old Etonians who, obviously, have our best interests at heart, is the continued flow of that other vital mind and body medication from Europe, wine. There are other places around the planet which produce fantastic wines, but restrictions, or even more taxes, on French, German, Italian and Spanish wine would be a serious disaster. English white and fizzy wines are OK these days, but to expect me to swap red Burgundy, Claret, or Rioja for the deeply disappointing attempts the English make at creating red wine is simply uncivilised. Following the lead set by my doctors, I have ensured stockpiles to get me through to February. Afterall, nothing washes down painkillers and chemotherapy tablets better than a decent Rioja.
The food, laughter, sparkling lights, and emotional lift Christmas brings this year will come with the shadows of those who are not here anymore. Among them my mother, who died earlier this year, as did the parents of several friends in The Village. The virus was not the only weapon in the Grim Reaper’s armoury, although due to its appearance many more than usual will have a hole cut in their world which someone special, and loved, once filled. I was lucky, I managed to say those things to my mother I wanted to when she was still here and able to understand. Not everyone was able to do the same.
If ever there was a time to hug The Boys, play with JJ the dog, and tell The Wife how much I love her - it is now, as we have our first Christmas celebration on our own, at home. We will raise a glass or two of something, probably red and French, and use the toast my long-gone grandfather always liked - “To absent friends” – and think of those we will see again and those we never will, but who will live for as long as we remember them.
(Half Life will be back in 2021 – have a very Merry Christmas and a very much better New Year.)
Another lovely piece. Gently written but packing a roundhouse of emotional oomph. I'll be raising a glass (0% abv) to our absent mothers. A la folie, mon ami. X
Another wonderful piece of writing and food for thought - as always x