One of my sister’s best friends has married a Swede and moved to Sweden. One evening she found herself explaining the concept of the draught excluder to a group of his friends. They were absolutely baffled by the idea. After a long silence one of them asked, “Why don’t you build proper houses?”
Alas.
Do you remember that I mentioned my obsession with brass polishing? And that I was nervous about tackling the fender? Well, the month of December has seen me turn my attention to this particular labour of love.
I would like you to know that shining a brass fender is a deeply rewarding activity. Also I would have made a fantastic scullery maid.
On Christmas Eve, we went to midnight mass which starts at 9. Baffling, I know. The Princess had to sing a solo and carry the baby Jesus to the crib. Before doing the latter she had to hold him up for the congregation to view and part of me was very afraid that the porcelain baby Jesus would tumble on to the steps of the altar and break but, mercifully, no.
Christmas Day itself passed off peacefully, you will be pleased to hear. We had various in-laws for dinner and it was all very pleasant. We played some games after dinner with varying degrees of success. Least successful was “Articulate” where due to a lack of attention during team formation, the three adult men in the room were put playing together and wiped the floor with the rest of us. The object of the game is to describe a word which your team mates try to guess. My own personal triumph was when Michael, who was playing with me, said, “They used to oppress us!” “England!” I shouted triumphantly pointing at my sister-in-law’s husband who is English but is not personally responsible for 800 years of oppression etc and is, on the contrary, a charming dinner guest. The answer turned out to be “Europe”. Clearly, the anti-troika rhetoric has had an impact on Michael. After the less than happy “Articulate” experience, we played a charades type game which involved holding the Princess’s Christmas phone up to your forehead. Oh yes, she got a phone from Santa and is very pleased.
Finally we passed to playing cards where the London contingent cleaned up and between them won pretty much everything – they had complementary skills. They made up for this by inspecting several Minecraft worlds which the children had created with every appearance of interest.
Today we went for our now traditional St. Stephen’s Day orienteering trip in the Dublin mountains. Although Christmas Day was beautiful, even when we set out this morning it was overcast and shortly after leaving home it began to rain and expanding on that theme it rained more and more heavily. We got there and we ran through the mud. The children were pretty cheerful considering that they got their feet wet and were frozen.
I think we have had pretty bad luck with the weather at this event given that it almost never rains in Dublin. Really. Cork, now in Cork, it rains. Speaking of which, we are off to Cork tomorrow so fine weather beckons. I wonder whether they might like left over turkey.
And how was your own Christmas?
