Happy 70th birthday Stephen Hawking!

Sandy was given a web cam.

IT'S BEHIND YOU!

I never remember pantos being as noisy as that one was. Maybe my ears are getting frail. The loudest yeller was my middle g'son who alarmed the people on all side of him. He really has a VERY good pair of lungs. Number One g'son laughed convulsively at the slapstick to my surprise, I thought it all might be beneath a thirteen year old. Number three wanted the white mice back again, not the least interested in the horses they changed into. All enjoyed the ice-cream interval. Another tradition observed.

Happy New Year everyone! My Angel ( chosen at the Solstice Spiral ) is Purpose. Maybe I said that already. Yes, I did. Oh well - better get used to listening to me say everything six times. Time marches on. So far my only purpose has been to set the house to rights and return the earth inside to the outside (amazing how it clings to small wellies.) Any more weighty purpose will have to stand in line.

It was a good holiday, if exhausting, great to see my son, his wife and the Terrible Two. I miss them now, whilst glorying in getting my bed back. Each time they come up their resolution to move north gets a little firmer. Cornwall has many benefits, including employment, surf beaches and warmer temperatures but I am confident Scotland will win in the end!

No time or headspace for reading has left me a bit crazy, so lots of that going on between the mucking out sessions. Howl's Moving Castle is next on my list as I was given it for Christmas. It was a favourite of the children when I was still reading to them and Chloe christened her wood burning stove Calcifer recently, reminding me to ask Santa for a copy. Diana Wynne Jones was the best children's author of the pre-
Potter era IMO. Best for magic anyway. I loathe writers like Michael Molpurgo whose books are so harsh and ' real' and darkening.

Unnecessary to darken children's minds with horrors of war. They need respite. Cynically i suspect a novelist's or publishere's cany eye has
been caste toward the schools who want starters for history lessons and discussions.

My morning has just been cheered by our window cleaner, a very likeable good- hearted ex- Foreign Legion guy who always has adventures to relate. He spent Christmas Eve and Day in a cell because he inadvertently overstepped the exclusion zone set by a certain woman who is out to get him. Personally I think the polis enjoy having him inside. He kept the other prisoner's spirits up by loudly demanding paper and pencil to write a love letter, because he thinks he's in love (with another fair damsel needless to say,) yelled at the young first- timers who were weeping a bit because it was Christmas and all they got was mince an'tatties when they should have been at home by their own hearths etc.etc. He told them it was nae sae bad, mince and tatties were his favourite anyway and he'd buy them all a whisky on Boxing
Day.

One way to have fun is no' to let'm get you down in his opinion.

Getting back to work seems to have finished off the frivolity in me for the time being. I will return when I have refound my frivol!

'Tis the season to go mad and spray everything gold. I made so much marzipan for other people that I couldn't face another batch so covered the house cake with apricot jam and nuts which then looked dull so got gold spray for the edges but once spraying I couldn't stop and I fear the result i rather like Miss Faversham's wedding breakfast - it looks as if it started to decay some time ago and is reaching the luminous stage.Ah well!So many things to do to prepare. I can't imagine how I spend my time when it in't Christmas, also, more importantly for us witches, the Solstice. C, S and I went to walk the Solstice spiral at the FF last eve. We picked Angel cards after. Miraculously Sanders got 'Support' which is brilliant. We explained he has the angel with him for the year and he is to think on the meaning of support - to offer it to others as well as hoping for it for himself. Amazingly, because it sounds so prissy and moralistic put like that, he seemed to take it seriously. Chloe got 'Joy' which I feel she is due and might not recognise if it bit her! I got 'Purpose' which threw me. I've drifted into the comfortable belief that a sense of purpose is for the young and it's far too late in my life for me to worry my head over.I might not re-appear here for a while so - have a very happy, warm and cosy Christmas everyone and may 2012 bring you only good things.

Oops! I mean Miss Havisham of course. Don't like Dickens much so it's a long time since I read about the sad old wrinkly.

How to love life.

In between bouts of snow-scraping, marzipan making, present ordering (as much as possible I have bought mail order or internet this year) and general faffing about Christmas, I've been reading 'How Proust Can Change Your Life.' by Alain de Botton. This was given to my ex who read Proust in the original years ago. I tried to read Proust in translation years ago - but hadn't the patience, and now I see that my lack of patience is a character flaw I would feel better without. What Proust teaches me (or would if I could sit still long enough to be taught) is how to savour each moment so my greyest, dullest and most depressing day can be transcended and enlightened by a small thing like the dipping of a madeleine into Lime Flower tea. I shall put some quotations here eventually, but not today because I'm feeling too - impatient. Just this photo of one of Proust's sentences, the longest logged, in the fifth volume of 'In Search of Lost Times' which would 'if arranged along a single line in standard-sized text, run on for a little short of four metres and stretch round the base of a wine bottle seventeen times.' I suppose Button to have verified this by experiment. Certainly if I were to try to read a sentence this long I would need to have a wine bottle handy to wrap myself around.

It's a brilliant book - Botton's. I don't know about Proust's, but if I'm very bored, or possibly shipwrecked, I suppose I might give it a go.

Neighbourly times.

It's been an exciting week weatherise. Snow and ice. Wind - ferocious, with flickering lights, so I walked around the house with a maglight in my pocket and stationed candles everywhere just in case. Pity I couldn't find the matches. If that wasn't drama enough in this backwater, my wheelie bin blew away after the pick-up truck had been. I wandered around the neighbourhood searching wistfully for it until an elderly lady spotted me and knocked on her window to call me over. A Good Samaritan had taken HER bin in unbeknownst to her; she had seen mine lying alone in the road, thought it was hers and taken it home with her. Luckily Chloe had put the house number on the bin when it belonged to her - they cost £30 to replace. None of this was a dramatic as the night a friend spent up in the hills when a tree fell within 10' of her house. The drive up to it is already blocked to all but tractors. I'm glad I live in suburbia! There's hardly a tree big enough to cause damage to a Wendy House round here.

After the wind we had one day of absolute calm, roads dry and ice-free and snow totally disappeared, but we woke yesterday to white car shaped mounds in front of the houses again and urgently cheeping birds. I've already spent £20 on them this year. Don't they know times are hard for all us creatures.

I didn't have to go out, had planned a day of cooking for the freezer against the arrival of the Wreckers so it was a surprise to see my car and pathway cleared by mid morning. I went round to thank my next-door neighbour, a young electrician with the RAF, who is deeply depressed because his wife, also RAF, is in the Falklands until February. He had been posted to Italy at the same time, poised to attack Libya, but the death of Gaddafi sent them all home again and he is desolate to be wifeless. Luckily he is as unsociable as me and doesn't want to be visiting, but still I feel worried about him. He says they both hate children - so no point in inviting him around over Christmas. He's volunteered for guard duty.

There's nothing like a bit of adversity for getting to know ones neighbours, a point I wish our PM would ponder.

I dragged myself out into the weather on Wednesday to attend a lecture on stained glass, finding, to my dismay, that the Brits don't have a good reputation for this craft and the good stuff, from the 13th century onward, is all on the other side of the channel. I remember seeing a breathtaking exhibition of Chagall's stained glass on the Belgian border withFrance a lot of years ago. The lecturer was sticking to the Christmas story so there wasn't much od Chagall, whose subjects were more often Old Testament of course. I'd very much like to do a stained glass trail round France, but it seems unlikely.

I made the mistake of buying a real tree, raised in captivity so it will hopefully survive coming indoors for a while, I just don't feel I can bring it in yet for fear it gets soft....oh the responsibility!

Poor photography - not sure if it's me or my camera - but I'm pleased with the reality.