Hello, darlings. It’s 2010, and DoctorDi has already identified that it is a year of elegance,  of symmetry, of monochromatic and severe chic and elan. The shape bodes well for the way the year unfolds. When I see 2.0.1.0 written out like this, my synaesthetic mind sees a segment of piano keyboard – blacks, whites in stripes.

A friend I met for lunch today told me she felt that the Full Moon at the New Year had  so cleansed her and rejuvenated her – it was a blue moon, full in Cancer and there was a lunar eclipse also. All that going on in the sky above, acting on our watery bodies afloat on earth, another watery body. A sea-change for the better, perhaps?

Most of the people I know are embarking on new pursuits or fulfilling dreams large and small. 2010 seems to be the year for new things. A friend who began his relationship with his girlfriend at about the same time as mine began asked his lady to marry him on Christmas Eve. And there’s hundreds of stories like that coming to my ears – stories of hope, of positivity, of energy and promise and high ideals.  

For the first time in years, I am wholly excited and anticipatory about the year to come and everything it might bring. The path looks clearer, at any rate. The picture at the head of this post is the breakfast we ate at Three Chimneys on New Year’s Day, on our return from a long and frosty walk with Barty. Lovely fresh eggs and bacon, lovely toast, sausages, fried bread. Champagne and orange juice. Coffee. But look at the table. That table was a joint effort – and we enjoyed it together.

This, I hope, will be the key to the year. Joint effort, clarity, black and white – and being together. What it’s all about, in the end.

I hope not, lovely people. For the first time in I don’t know how many years, I don’t. I thought I felt it coming on about 2pm on Boxing Day, but I chased it off, kicked it in the pants and stuck it out for the bin men and it has not been back – that nasty, dirty-footed leering little shaggy-haired sprite that gurns and capers to the left of my vision, telling me all the fun is over, the money’s run out and the leftover food is all going to waste. Oh, and that there’s a mountain of laundry to do, what with all the guest sheets and towels….

No! Nowt o’th’ sort! Christmas was wonderful, simply wonderful. My sis in law (presumptive) came to us this year, along with my tallest brother, and this turned out to be a stroke of simple genius. The girl is amazing with R, and a positive delight to entertain as a guest. Unfailingly charming and happy, even when under pressure, and such  help to me in so many respects. I love her. My brother was calm and solicitous and helpful and my parents were pleased with everything, relaxed and great fun. R of course ran amok, having the time of his tiny life, and was thoroughly spoiled and made much of, which pleased me no end. He deserves it all, for being such a pet and a love, and trying so hard this year, what with all the upheaval.

Our guests stayed Christmas night, and Boxing night too, which was great as it enabled us to play several very taxing (not) rounds of Triv and a simply hilarious game of Articulate, which is never going to be my best game, particularly not when toasted. My sis in law started talking like Alice from Vicar of Dibley halfway through Christmas night – I was rolling on the floor, as she had the hand movements and the weird chin-thing down to a tee as well. Priceless.

As to the gifts, well. I got spoiled. Totally. Larousse Gastronomique, boxed version. French Provincial Cooking, by Elizabeth David. Full collected works of Vaughan Williams. Jewellery. Make up. Chocolate. Yum! Best present year ever. And I’m so grateful to my bro A, for introducing me to a new author, Kelly Link, whose short stories Pretty Monsters should be required reading for anyone believing themselves to be an original writer. She’s brilliant.

So, in short, there was no stress, no panic; everyone went away full and happy, and from the very first guest arriving for our pre-Christmas party to the last guest leaving from the houseparty over the weekend itself, we enjoyed every moment, in calm and delight in our friends and neighbours, and with a real spirit of festivity and fun. Unique, in my experience, to feel no stress whatsoever. I think it may be the company I lately keep. Long may it continue.

Happy New Year, my excellent friends!

Some fool once said the secret to a stress-free Christmas was rigorous and meticulous planning, and it might well be so. However, said fool also didn’t factor in the boredom, stress and de-magicfication of Christmas that planning itself entails. So bugger all that malarkey. I have decided that things will get done if they get done, and the priority here is to be comfort and joy, not stringy hair, gritted teeth and tears before bedtime. And lists.

Let’s look at the essentials. The cake is decorated. The tree is up and sparkling. The meat is ordered, cards despatched and presents lurk in plastic crates out of view, awaiting wrappings. I’m taking a well-earned spot of annual leave from tomorrow, to prepare in a calm, orderly and enjoyable fashion for the party on Saturday. I’m not busy at work just now, and I am busy at home, so it makes sense to transfer the time allocation to where it’s needed! Who needs a list!

Against possible overadrenalisation, I have laid in a stack of magazines and trashy novels, and I’m off the darned diet till the 29th so I’m not spending brain-power thinking needlessly about what I’m eating. The things I absolutely have to do are as follows:

Finish painting the sitting room. Paint the hall, paint the dining room ceiling. Clean the bathrooms, make up the beds, dust and hoover the guest rooms, get flowers, tissues, mineral water and all that clobber. Table decorations, party prep, big shop and dye hair. Put up the new curtains in the dining room and sitting room. Hang pictures and mirrors. Supervise carpet fitters on Thursday. Make party favours, make dinner napkin rings for Christmas, wrap presents, etc.

Sounds like loads, doesn’t it? Well, I’m here to tell you that the secret to Christmas is not lists, it’s time. All us working girls who want to do Christmas like our mothers did (or not, but with the same sort of seeming effortlessness) haven’t a hope unless we give ourselves the time and space in which to do it. Being a superwoman is boring; more, it’s smug. We’re not superwomen; we’re women who work and who also want a home and can’t afford servants.

I want a happy Christmas. A certain amount of that happiness, I know, will come from seeing my efforts pay off. A certain amount more will come from acknowledging, if only to myself, that if it’s not perfect, it’s perfect enough, dammit. But most of it will come from not being ready to kill someone, or perhaps even myself, with a turkey baster and an electric carving knife, because I’m so bunged up I’ve forgotten what it’s all about.

Thank you for all the solicitous enquiries after me ‘ealth – things much better now, except for an irritating choky-point in the throat, which feels like I’ve got a mouse stuck or something. Otherwise, haler and heartier than many days in the recent past, and feeling equal to the vicissitudes of Chrimbo and the attendant hoopla.

Driving in yesterday morning, I noticed such a stark beauty to the countryside, swathed in mist, with all the trees bare and silhouetted against the sky. The light at that time of the early morning is lambent, diffused – no direct sunlight, so all the shaped are two-dimensional, starkly presented. You get the real shape of the tree, for example, without the distractions of texture from the trunk or branches. The air was completely still, and all across the valley, smoke was weaving up in rills and curlicues from the chimneys. From nowhere, two swans sailed across the road mere feet in front of the car, such a sight for sore eyes. Inexpressibly lovely.

This morning, it was so foggy it was like driving inside an opera-hat. I navigated mainly by touch – bumping off the verges and driving like a pensioner on benzedrine.

In other news, the BB has spent days turfing out furniture and items of marginal use from the downstairs rooms and slinging them into our all-purpose rec room at the rear of the house. Lucky us – we’ve got a 25′ x 25′ room which is out of the way and not likely ever to be seen by guests, in which we can put all this clobber, at least for Christmas. It looks like Pickfords Depository at the moment. Or the back end of a tram smash. But we’ve got to clear the decks or we’ll be tripping over ourselves when the guests arrive.

R has decided that he wants to know all about electricity. I’ve reached the functional limits of my knowledge of this mysterious substance, having covered power generation methods, the National Grid, step-down transformers, household connections, fuse boards and the likely effects of physical contact with live wires (gory, elicited much giggling, perhaps my message isn’t getting across), useful applications, and bodily electricity. Fortunately, his grandpapa is an electrical engineer of 30 years standing so I’m passing the ockey to him and stepping back, into the kitchen, where I feel I’m safe.

One of the mums at R’s nursery is making the most beautiful wreaths for Christmas, and I’ve ordered a custom-job. Large as she can do it, covered in yew, holly, mistletoe, pine cones and ribbon bows. I have bought a large suction hook for the front door, and I pick up the wreath next week.

R is being taken to the pantomime by his nursery, who really do give value for money. For £4, there’s the pantomime and then an apres-show kiddie’s party banquet which is being put on at the theatre. Wonderful.

All in all, feeling much better, but sleeping like Nosferatu at every opportunity. Still to do: ice the cake, wrap the gifts and send two parcels. Decorate the tree. Cater the party. Cook the Christmas lunch, ably assisted by the BB who is an ace chef. Oh, and relax, enjoy myself and the company of my dear family! Now that I can subscribe to!

Lounging, wrung out and breathless on the sofa in the dining room, in front of the fire. Waiting listlessly for my doctors appointment at 2pm. Not wanting anything at all except a new thorax, and for the feckin elephant to PLEASE get off my chest. Any time now would be fine.

Oh-oh I am feeling shit

and I’m fed up of swallowing phlegm

Disconsolate, here I sit

I do nothing but haw and hem

Let me out of this vice

Coz my chest is starting to whine

It’d really be very nice

my interior sunshine would shine

So bugger off, ye viral hordes

I’ve had enough of you

Mark my words (as if ye cared)

You’re making me feel like poo.

God, I wish the snot-fairies would bugger off and leave me alone. Been wheezing like Steptoe’s horse for the last three days, two of which I’ve been off, one of which I’ve been supervising the moving of all the furniture across to Three Chimneys. We now have a totally crammed house, which led the BB to announce in harried tones last evening that he was going to order a skip and throw away all the furniture. Well, at least, all the furniture he bought with restoration in mind, but which he’s never got around to. In turn, I will skip as many extraneous pieces of furniture as I can, until we get to a workable arrangement. Thank god we’ve got similar tastes!

If only I could stop coughing. I’ts a really deep, wracking, consumptive hack / choke which I rarely get. No runny nose, no sneezing. Just chest bound tightly like a biological corset, but without any of the contour-smoothing properties, worst luck. My Fat Club consultant sent me a ‘Get Well’ card depicting a woman standing next to a telephone-kiosk sized bar of chocolate, which wasn’t entirely successful as a motivational aid, as all I want to do in this condition is eat thickly buttered toast with Dairy Milk chasers.

Still, the furniture is over at Three Chimneys, and I do find it consistently amazing that a tiny two-bedroomed house can generate so much stuff. Three Chimneys is not a small house, and still it looks like it’s been taken over by the attics at Buckingham Palace. The skip and some ruthless culling of rubbish and / or extraneous items will solve that, in no small part. I love throwing things away (except books) so this won’t be a trial for me.

So today we face the double trial of management review meetings, in which I will endeavour not to fall asleep, and then I must take a load of washing to the laundrette, as our washing machine defenestrated itself yesterday with a bang. Ho hm. It never rains but it pours! And on that note, it’s been raining nonno-stoppo at home for a full month, and I’d like to see the sun again before I forget what it looks like, and it appears from behind the overcast and frightens me half to death. I think I’m raving. But at least I’m more interesting this way. Someone pass me the thing so I can you know.

Day 1 of the Level 5 NVQ in Quality Assurance & Management. I’m a bloody student once again!

Principles of Quality & Data Analysis is the module where I begin. I’ve got a 3,000 word essay to deliver by the end of February and the examination is in June. This is serious stuff; I am actually really looking forward to it. As the course is equivalent to 2/3rds of a Masters I suppose I should be slightly more worried about making the grade. I’m not so worried because a) I can write a well-constructed, articulate and properly-referenced paper, having been trained rigorously by a University that believed in the art of effective communication and b) I love the subject.

It seems everyone else on the course is attending night school. I am the only one doing this on a distance basis, but I actually prefer it that way; I did some of my best work at University utterly and completely alone. Group work is all very well and I agree that the spirit of competitive enterprise and collaborative team-work is valuable and necessary for so much of the business world; however, I get enough of that in my place of employ. I very rarely find the need to gain a concensus for an answer to a question from my peers. This makes for some startling and orginial outcomes – sometimes they’re too original to gain many marks, as well – but again, why stick to the middle ground?

In other news, the BB and I spent yesterday evening going outside periodically to monitor the level of the river next to the house. It’s never really come over, and there isn’t even any water in our cellar, but it’s best to check. At 10pm last night, it was about 4 foot from the top of the bank and churning along, clearly full of silt and small branches. Treacherous. I have a colleague whose relative died in this river, which is referred to as a brook, round here. It’s only a brook when it’s clear, ankle deep and soft as a kitten. Last night it was roaring more loudly than the wind in the trees opposite. Anyone unlucky enough to fall in would have been swept away in an instant.

Well, we had such a great weekend we didn’t want the two days to be over. Woo predicted we’d get on well with FP and she was right – what a wonderful person. She fitted straight  in!

I was working away at my laptop on the dining room table when I saw this raven-haired amazon go striding past, clearly bent on discovery. And I soon discovered it was she – the Grand Sophy of the piece! R was shy for all of about thirty seconds, and then this:

As you can see he’s really shy. Painfully, desperately shy! That, in case you wonder, is an Apple laptop case, and R tried it on as a sleeping bag before he realised his legs were just a bit too long…

J brought the best presents. She’s a present goddess. R received a DIYnosaur lamp, which J and I managed to fathom the instructions for and which is now assembled, waiting for a bulb. It has been christened Mr Growl, is a Tyrannosaur complete with vestigial flappy arms, and manages to look both fierce and funny at the same time. R is quite captivated, and it really is a clever present for a boy of his age. It’ll last him ages.

The presents didn’t stop there. No, no. This girl has Homeric generosity. the BB was handed a large bottle of Doublewood, spookily enough; he had reached the last dram or three in his previous bottle and was worried it was going to vanish before Christmas – now the worry is past! and I know it was much appreciated.

I got deluged, positively deluged in presents, and they were the sort of presents you’d buy for yourself if you were feeling totally unguilty and as though you totally deserved a flutter. And we all know how infrequently we feel like that. So J became my lack of conscience, in the best possible way, and spoiled me rotten. Firstly, a Nigella Lawson chocolate Christmas Cake, made by her own fair hand (how did she know I wasn’t making a cake? Magic! (and this reminds me I forgot to give her the Tupperware back – a cardinal sin. J, I’ll post it to your mum’s!!))

Then, as if that wasn’t enough, the most beautiful and exquisite book. Maggie Beer’s Maggies Harvest. This woman writes with all her strength and fervour about food, she lives food and the country she loves – Australia. She’s got the taste of Elizabeth David, the enthusiasm of Jamie Oliver, and the culture of an Escoffier. Amazing. The book itself is a thing of beauty. Those who know me know that there’s little I like more than curling up with a book about food and taking total gustatory delight in the word made, literally, bread. This elegant tome is hardback, but padded and upholstered in dun canvas, embroidered all over wth green and orange  stylised leaves and fruits. It is a thing to treasure for ever.

More gifts were showered upon me as the weekend went on – I felt quite happily overwhelmed. A white, heavy, squat candle, perfumed heavily with tuberose, is now sitting on the sitting room table, sending its scent throught the room, calming us all. Wine. A helping hand with the dinner. Cheer. Humour. Great gossip.

We had some wonderful mooching and browsing, J recommending books she liked which I had no hesitation in buying. Dodging the terrible rainstorms, basking in the infrequent but surprisingly warm sunny spells, talking about her writing course, learning about her life and her about mine.

Of course, in the end, I realise that the best present she brought was herself.

She’ll be here tomorrow! Hurrah! Coming round the mountain in pink pyjamas, arriving on her chariot, flying in HALO to land on the roof. We’ve got food. More importantly, we’ve got floorboards. We’ve got hot water and fluffy towels. We’ve got hot water bottles, electric blankets, roaring heating and dogs enough to go around. We’ve got coffee. We will have fresh bread (swansea-tastic baking morning coming my way tomorrow, juch he!) We have all the porky breakfast fare we’re ever likely to need. The coal hole and log basket are full. The weather is set fair to be dreadful, windy, rainy and cold – but this can be a good thing when you’ve the makings of warmth and cheer within.

There’s nothing quite like welcoming friends. And I think we aim to take pix and share the weekend with you all – this is really the start of the festive cheer for me. Mouse wants to start decorating the Christmas trees already, but it seems ever so slightly previous to me even though every shop, garage and public area is already festooned and caparisoned with glitz. So instead of decorations, we’re going to get into the spirit of the season and bid our friends to come awa’ in! and warm their tootsies by our fire.

With my parents, brother and close girlfriend coming for Christmas Day, and afterwards Woo arriving, and also the BBs son and girlfriend coming over from South Africa, it’s as if a flock of glorious passenger birds have come to our shores for a while. Wonderful at any time of year, but especially Christmas.