Social Time
30 December

I find the time between Christmas and New Year is always an odd period of the year.

It's like an inter regnum, a trough between two peaks, the eye of the storm, a space out of time.

The rest of the world appears to go mad with sales shopping. I can think of nothing more like a painful torture than the idea of pushing and shoving among crowds of people in order to acquire more possessions.

It was good to see the back of my parents on Sunday night. Nutkin, particularly, was relieved to be able to come back into a house not populated by strangers. I simply felt that it was nice for Ross and I to be able to drop back into our own routines without having to take two other people into account.

Albert and Grace also remarked by telephone that they liked being back among familiar environs; their own beds, their own bathroom, their own kitchen. We felt the same. I don't suppose that we shall ever find the fork that we have been using for the cat food. It disappeared sometime on Christmas Day and hasn't been seen since.

Still, it's a small price to pay for a delightful Festive season. Monday, we simply splanked out. Ross was quite exhausted by all of his culinary activities. So, he spent most of the day inactively whilst I did a little housework and generally relaxed.

We're also going through the process of gradually emptying the larders by a series of throw together meals using left overs and over-purchases. It's good to see the over-crowded shelves becoming freer.

Back in April, I started taking a partwork which offered an operatic DVD every fortnight. Mostly, it's offered performances of a generally high standard - some exceptionally so. Some of the works presented would not have been among my first choices to buy and some of them have been the greatest revelations.

The current issue is a case in point. I wouldn't have gone out and purposely bought Tchaikovsky's Queen of Spades but, watching it a scene at a time, it is rather good. It's been over twenty years since I was bored rigid by the work at English National Opera. So, maybe, it's about time that I gave the work another chance in the live theatre.

Tuesday afternoon I spent a very pleasant hour over a pint in the Edinburgh with Roland and Colin chatting about the year and making plans for the next. Roland's friend from New York, Michael, is coming to visit in April. Roland suggested that we all went out for a meal together. I suggested that Ross and I host the three of them for a meal at our house. He's going to think about that one. And I'm pleased that I felt OK about opening our house to guests.

On Wednesday, we visited Sue and her family after Ross received a text saying that she had been assaulted by a drunk female teenager on Boxing Day evening. She looked reasonably fine until she moved some hair and the collar of her jumper aside to reveal the scratches and bit marks which she had cunningly concealed. Sue will get over it (though I have to ask myself why she is prone to such things - is life telling her something?) but I wonder about the young woman - what has placed her in the position where she habitually behaves in this fashion? The answer would probably worry us all.

That evening, we drove over to Aigburth for a meal with my work colleague, Mitch, and his wife, Laura. We had a lovely meal and a game of Scrabble with them. We're hoping to return the complement later next year.

Conversation turned to recent world events. They spent their honeymoon last September/October in Indonesia. Whilst they weren't actually based in Phuket, they recognised many of the places that have been affected by the earthquake and subsequent tsunami.

Two years ago, Ross's family were on holiday there and would have been on the beaches on Boxing Day when the tidal wave struck. This year, they have been in Kenya. They travelled to Mombassa on the coast on Boxing Day evening arriving after the devastation had occurred. They are fine although their holiday has not been quite as conceived. Ross's brother, Sam, is there. He is wanting to study medicine and I wonder if his experiences are leading him to consider working for an organisation like Medicins Sans Frontières.

I've spent quite a bit of time reading. I've been following Amazon's electronic recommendations for me and, consequently, tried out Donna Leon's Death at La Fenice and Magdalen Nabb's Death of an Englishman. Neither rates more than two stars . They're alright but I won't be racing to read the other books in either series.

More promising was Yann Martel's The Life of Pi which is a strange tale of hope, survival, truth, myth and memory. I'm quite happy to give this three stars.

Best of the lot, however, has been The Adventure of English by Melvyn Bragg which Rod was reading in Edinburgh when we visited him and Dale there. It is basically the story of the English language from its beginnings to the present day. It's a fascinating insight into cultural shifts and identities as demonstrated through vocabulary, grammar and spelling. The approach is summed up in this quotation.

...language is no respecter of persons in that it will find birth wherever and whenever it can. There is often something wonderfully anonymous about the whole process; a pimp can coin a word as lasting as that of a poet, a street hawker as a statesman, a farmer as a scholar, a foul mouth as a Latinist, vulgar as refined, illiterate as schooled. Language leaps out of mouths regardless of class, sex, age, education: it sees something that needs to be said or saved in a word and it pounces.

As ever, I found myself more interested in the earlier chapters than in the post eighteenth century stuff. But, all in all, it has been a very good read which I am pleased to award four stars.