It is a far, far better thing

Over the past couple of decades, what passes for Christmas television programming has bemused me.  As far as I can tell, some underpaid minion, saddled with slapping some sort of viewing schedule together, had assumed that, since Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, anything connected with Dickens is Christmassy:  Great Expectations, Bleak House or even A Tale of Two Cities.

With that in mind, I can pompously intone:  "It was the best of times; it was the worst of times . . . . " when talking about this year's Christmas, can't I?

(Well I can.  You weren't there.  Lucky you.)

It was the worst in the sense that I knew it was going to be stressful, took steps to prepare and plan against that eventuality, and it was all exactly as stressful as I feared anyway.  

A house guest (delightful, courteous, and omnipresent).  

Extended family with temperaments diametrically opposed to the introverted temperaments in our household. 

An unusually deaf Demeter, plagued by a small and stubborn ball of wax in her so-called "good ear", and totally bamboozled by aforementioned temperaments. 

A daughter on the autistic spectrum, to whom Christmas is vital, abandoned for a few heart-wrenching minutes, by her panicky father on a holiday carousel.  (It's a long story, please don't make me repeat it.)

And the Resident Fan Boy, whose instinctive defence is shutting down his brain, whenever something emerges from left field, which happens a lot at Christmas.

It was the best of times in the sense that I didn't kill anybody.  I didn't yell at anybody -- except the Resident Fan Boy, and only a couple of times, at that.

The shopping was done on time, and the presents seemed to go over well.  There are still three Christmas cards to mail.  (For those of you not resident in Canada, we had a postal strike from mid-November to mid-December.). What food I managed to produce has been edible, even marginally festive.

So I really have nothing to grumble about.  My expectations weren't overly great, and my house is, in no way, bleak.

Besides, there has been very little Dickens on the telly - apart from A Christmas Carol.  The specialty channels are jammed with scores of Christmas-themed romantic movies, in the vein of Harlequin and Mills & Boon.  They play them year-round now.

Oh, joy.

Merry Eighth Day of Christmas, to you and yours.

A hell of a place to find heaven

This has been one strange Christmas. Not awful, but not one we'll forget in a hurry. Details later.

In the meantime, here's one of the odder Christmas songs I've encountered. It's called "Joseph, Better You Than Me", by The Killers, released in 2008.

The vocals are provided by lead singer Brandon Flowers, with guest vocalists Elton John and Neil Tennant (of the Pet Shop Boys).

 

[Vocalist: Brandon Flowers] 

Well your eyes just haven't been the same, Joseph 

Are you bad at dealing with the fame, Joseph? 

There's a pale moonshine above you 

Do you see both sides? 

Do they shove you around? 

[Vocalists: Elton John & Brandon Flowers] 

Is the touchstone forcing you to hide, Joseph? 

Are the rumours eating you alive, Joseph? 

When the holy night is upon you 

Will you do what's right? 

The position is yours 

[Vocalist: Elton John] 

From the temple walls to the New York night 

Our decisions rest on a child 

When she took her stand, did she hold your hand? 

Will your faith stand still or run away? 

Run away 

[Vocalist: Elton John] 

When they've driven you so far 

That you think you're gonna drop 

Do you wish you were back there at the carpenter shop? 

[Vocalist: Neil Tennant] 

With the plane and the lathe 

The work never drove you mad 

You're a maker, a creator 

Not just somebody's dad 

[Vocalists: Brandon Flowers, Elton John & Neil Tennant] 

From the temple walls to the New York night 

Our decisions rest on a man 

When I take the stand, will he hold my hand? 

Will my faith stand still or run away?

And the desert, it's a hell of a place to find heaven 

Forty years lost in the wilderness, looking for God 

And you climb to the top of the mountain 

Looking down on the city where you were born 

(Oh, the years since you left gave you time to sit back and reflect)

Better you than me  

Better you than me, yeah 

Well, the holy night is upon you  

Do you see both sides, do they shove you around? 

Better you than me, Joseph

Making waves

There are waves of fatigue, and waves of fear.

The Resident Fan Boy was awash in a tide of terror in the wake of a too-close-for-comfort encounter in the park. 

While I was mixing flour and lard for tourtières this afternoon while battling off the fatigue of a slowly healing arm, elder daughter hastily did some last-minute Christmas shopping through a haze of jet lag, then met up with her father and sister for lunch, followed by a walk in the park, where younger daughter loves to feed the ducks.  She told me this story first, with the Resident Fan Boy and younger daughter supplying details later.

As they walked along one of the small lakes in Beacon Hill Park, a man approached, bellowing at all he passed.  Sadly, this is not that unusual an occurrence, but usually shouty, deranged people in Victoria are not screaming at people we can see.  This guy was making eye contact.

Swearing vociferously and continually, he observed the Resident Fan Boy looking anxiously at younger daughter, and spat, "Don't look at her; that won't protect you!"

Elder daughter and the RFB closed ranks, and guided younger daughter past. Younger daughter, her high clear voice ringing out from the spectrum where she lives, declared:  "That was unacceptable!!"

Her father and sister gently hushed her, and she protested:  "But he shouldn't be using those bad words!"

The deranged bellower was now walking away, but with each of younger daughter's comments, stopped, turned, and glared.

Walking steadily, and speaking softly, elder daughter and the RFB explained that the man wasn't well.  Younger daughter accepted that, but when I asked her about it on her return a couple of hours later, she repeated solemnly:  "It was unacceptable."

"I know," I nodded, "but his mind isn't working very well.  Every day must be pretty scary for him."  Perhaps even as scary as it was for the Resident Fan Boy and elder daughter for that one awful moment of being taken for the enemy.

Fading

Elder daughter shows up tomorrow. 

This is fabulous, of course, but I'm nowhere near ready, so seized the opportunity today to locate the box with the Christmas wrapping bags and stockings in it, which I stored under several boxes in a corner of our bedroom.  My rationale was that, instead of having to retrieve it from our storage locker, it would be more accessible.

I hadn't factored in the possibility of a fall, and the consequent pain and fatigue.  Oh, I'm getting better.  By centimetres.  I find that every time I tackle a project requiring actual energy, I'm reduced to a quivering mass in less time than it takes to accomplish the task.  This is a heckuva problem, considering Christmas is coming, and this requires finishing gift-shopping, wrapping said gifts, preparing Christmas tourtières, and cleaning the damn house.

It's still a shock when the fatigue wipes me out like a chalk drawing.  It's a bit like being pregnant again.  To what am I giving birth? (I have a nasty feeling it's a much older version of myself.)

Meanwhile, the Resident Fan Boy has noticed more people are asking him to speak up.  He didn't think much of it until younger daughter, who has the hearing of a fruit bat, and can hear what we say from her bedroom with the door closed and our television on - particularly when we're discussing her - also starting asking him to speak up.  His fellow cathedral volunteers opine that this is wide-spread, and a result of a combination of isolation and ZOOM meetings.

I guess that, along with everything else, our diaphragms are atrophying from not having to talk boisterously to one another out of doors.

No wonder I find the cyclists at the coffee shop so loud and obnoxious.

I'm dreaming - oh gawd, I'm dreaming...

 Struggled awake from one of my "failure dreams" in which I've failed to prepare for something, my injured arm aching dully.

I don't need an analyst for dream interpretation.  I'm terrified and frozen, as Christmas bears down on me like a bright SUV -- or a horde of cyclists.  I'm healing, slowly and steadily, from my fall two and a half weeks ago, but I tire easily, and find myself slow to attempt even the least labour-intensive tasks.

Elder daughter arrives in two days; American Cousin arrives in a week.  I'd so hoped to have everything prepared by then.  I haven't even finished the damn online shopping.

Among the things I have been doing is uploading my favourite Christmas videos on to the Resident Fan Boy's YouTube channel, so we can watch them on the large screen television.  In doing so, we've discovered that the RFB really needs to sign into his YouTube account, rather than just watching without doing so.  Apparently, if you don't, the algorithms decide what might appeal to you, and put them into your "Watch Later" file.  The RFB was horrified.  I had to show him how to delete stuff. I'll spare you.

Most of my favourite Christmas offerings have shown up on my blog at some point, but I don't think this one has, probably because it's usually viral during the holidays, and is customarily shared without giving credit to the animator.  Mind you, it's not that easy to give credit where credit is due, because there is surprisingly little information about Joshua Held online.  I gather that he is an animator, film-maker, and writer.  He was born in 1967 in Tuscany.

I leave you with this, as I've got a lot more procrastinating to do.  (I'm sure you've already seen this anyway.)

The abyss of Christmas

Look, I love Christmas.

I really do.

This year's is shaping up to be somewhat of a challenge.  One of my American cousins is coming up from California to pay her respects to Demeter.  She's coming five days before Christmas, and will depart on the morning of Boxing Day. This is because she's American, and, as far as she's concerned, Christmas began on the American Thanksgiving and will end abruptly on Christmas Day.

This means my deadline for getting Christmas ready has moved up sharply.  It also means a Christmas of fire signs, because, naturally, Double Leo Sister and Jolly Not-So-Green Giant Brother-in-Law (an Aries, like my American cousin), plus, possibly, my younger nephew (another Leo).  All wonderful people.  All exhausting people.  All people who dwell in a different world than mine. And I will be picking through an emotional minefield of expectations and extra effort - with my injured right arm.

It'll be lovely to see them.  My daughters will be thrilled.  

And I'll be looking forward to Boxing Day, which is, after all, the second day of Christmas.  Americans don't observe either.

I've been avoiding the preparations I should be making, and doing genealogy and watching YouTube videos.  I've shared this one before.  It's about British Christmases.  They understand something about darkness and depth, even in a festival of light.

Pencilling it in

Christmas got more complicated when I became Santa's liaison officer.

I may have mentioned this.

This year, I managed, for the most part, to stay on top of things, but still found myself nipping into the new book store in the Cook Street Village on Christmas Eve.  It's like a Tardis -- way bigger on the inside.

I found about half a dozen treasures for stocking-stuffing, a job that Santa delegated to me some years ago.  One thing I spotted was a package of delicate pink pencils, perfect for younger daughter, who, I am reasonably sure, still thinks Santa is fully responsible for Christmas stockings.

I checked in with her mid-morning on Christmas Day, asking what she like the best.  She liked a lot of things, showing them to me proudly --- except for the pencils.  They had, she informed me, "swear-words" on them.

To my carefully-concealed horror, I noticed, for the first time, the delicate gold letters on each pencil, forming short and sometimes, quite long variations on expressions containing the F-word.  I quietly took the pencils to my room and have spent some time scraping the lettering off.  It's embossed, of course, and is taking some time.

Merrying @&%ing Sixth Day of Christmas.

Lost and found

I do this every damn year. 

I start buying Christmas presents and stocking stuffers in September and October -- which is a good idea. 

I hide them promptly -- which isn't such a good idea, although it is a good impetus for cleaning out closets and drawers. 

I spent a chunk of today shifting summer clothes out of the way, and was relieved to find four presents. 

After I re-hid them in a more obvious place, it occurred to me that some stocking stuffers I got months ago are still missing. I guess I'm still not off the hook for the drawers in the highboy. 

Back in the heady days when I wasn't responsible for Christmas -- i.e. being Santa's liasion officer, not the giving birth to a deity -- my mother would take me for pre-Christmas outings: pantomimes, ballets, and one memorable afternoon, a clutch of Christmas cartoons by the National Film Board of Canada. 

 This was one of my favourites.

(The gag about the dancer and the pianist hasn't aged well.)

And beauty shall reign alone

No doubt the pandemic has robbed me of many experiences, but it has made many experiences possible, simply by the shifting of much of day-to-day life online. 

For example, I'm not a huge fan of queues, and hence, my attendance at festivals is somewhat curtailed.

This past winter, the Victoria International Film Festival, a great progenitor of queues, made itself available online. In the past, I've attended exactly one film at the VIFF. Now, I took in half a dozen films, and that's only because I didn't subscribe earlier and ran out of time. 

The films were available via your computer, laptop, or phone, and could be watched at any time within a two-week period. I could watch half the film, and finish it later. 

I missed being surrounded by a reacting audience, and being able to eat popcorn (the stuff I make at home doesn't quite cut it), but damn, this was convenient. 

 One of the last films I squeezed in was one I wouldn't have ordinarily have chosen (another plus), and it turned out to be my favourite. 

Echo (Bergmál) is a chronological collection of fifty-six vignettes, that take place over the Christmas period in Iceland. 

Some of these scenes reflect Icelandic Christmas and New Year customs: embracing as the bells ring in Christmas Eve, shooting elaborate fireworks for the New Year, visiting family graves at cemeteries lit with electric crosses. 

Other glimpses illustrate the joys and tragedies of contemporary life: the plight of refugees, child custody Christmas arrangements, the loneliness of the elderly. 

The movie opens with what appears to be a very sparse and modern store Christmas tree display. It turns out to be the brushes of an automatic carwash. 

Of the fifty-six mini-dramas that follow, the one that stays with me is that of a young girl, aged about ten or eleven, who arrives at the home of her father and his new girlfriend for a Christmas visit. Waiting for her father to return, she practises a Chopin piano piece that she's prepared as a surprise for him. The girlfriend's daughter, slightly older, greets her cordially; they're clearly meeting for the first time. The older girl asks if she can try the piano piece, and plays it perfectly, as the young girl's face freezes. Her father reappears, and putting an arm around her shoulder and listening with pleasure, tells his daughter that the older girl is one of his most promising students - that's how he met his girlfriend. 

The scene is understated and heartbreaking, as are vignettes showing a calm emergency operator gently talking an unseen eight-year-old through a wait for police, while his parents fight, or a young woman in her twenties encountering her high-school bully at a bus stop, and enduring a painfully awkward apology, before she flees in embarrassment. 

The film ends with a ship's view of a stormy, swelling North Atlantic, while gorgeous choral music plays. Enchanted, I slowed down the credits to find what it was (because I could) - not particularly helpful. I checked IMDb; nothing. 

It took a bit of digging, but I found it: it's the fourth "act" of an opera called Der Klang der Offenbarung des Göttlichen, which apparently means something like "The Explosive Sonics of Divinity" (yikes). The composer is Kjartan Sveinsson, who used to be with the Icelandic rock group Sigur Rós. 

The lyrics of this "Teil IV", however, are in German. In English, they mean: "You are the light of the world/ Soon the sun of the day of resurrection will shine on the bright paths where she awaits her poet / And beauty shall reign alone".

Boast of Christmas presents

For the past four or five years, I've been taking an annual snap of selected Christmas presents. 

I resisted this for years -- Christmas isn't about the gifts, I told myself.  

However, when I try to remember Christmases past, I find I have little memory of what I received.  I tend to write the lists of what I intend to give in my notebooks, so, with a bit of digging, I can find those, but what did I get?  With a few rare exceptions -- usually the occasional fulfillment of childhood or adolescent longing, I've forgotten what was presented to me.

The gifts we receive are little snapshots of who we were, or thought we were -- or who other people thought we were.

This year, I seem to be a music-lover with an interest in social history and marital law, living in a cold climate.  

A chilly genealogist.

Sounds about right.

Naturam erante

Cineplex has just charged me $33 to view, within 48 hours, a National Ballet Production of The Nutcracker. From 2008. (I thought it looked familiar.) 

Compare this with the Royal Ballet, which is charging anywhere between $5 and $25 (depending on how recent the production is, so far nothing older than 2017) for viewing within three weeks. 

Oh well. I guess the National Ballet is probably in more serious trouble, and I want to encourage Cineplex to "live-stream" ("live" clearly being a relative term) more theatre and ballet, so I'll swallow my indignation and irritation and watch free stuff on YouTube. 

When the King's Singers came to Chamberfest a couple of years ago, elder daughter got every one of them to sign their latest CD for me. 

I've been a KS fan for a long time, through several personnel changes. That Christmas, two of the singers were singing their last concerts with the group. This is the latest line-up, four of whom elder daughter has met. They're singing one of my favourite Christmas pieces, "Gaudete", which dates back to the sixteenth century. They could give Steeleye Span a run for their money. It was "Gaudete" that first introduced me to Steeleye Span. Here they are, back in the days when Maddy Prior could sing very high:

Lettuce, carrots, and ranch dressing

I set out early this morning to do some last-minute Christmas "burgling", crossing the quiet streets and singing this carol to myself -- although not quite these words, nor this rhythm.

Just another day in paradox

The light is ebbing from the westward horizon, and outside, vehicles, clearly with somewhere to be quickly, streak eastward.

We in the middle, with just a few small tasks to do, are finding the stillness.

The Resident Fan Boy is on his headphones, attending Christmas Eve services at the Cathedral virtually.  

Elder daughter has wished us good night from London, where it has been Christmas Day for a quarter of an hour.  Just before we turn in this evening, we will join her again as she wakes at seven in the morning to open her stocking.

Younger daughter has stashed away the cat's Christmas stocking that she assembled this afternoon.  I can hear her warning him away.  He can smell the catnip.

Demeter dropped by to deposit her Christmas packages at the base of our tree, hurling them from her walker with soft plops on to the aluminum foil we've put down to discourage the cat, so I'm guessing we're not getting breakables.  She'll be back for Christmas lunch, ordered from the local Japanese restaurant, probably the one eatery staying open tomorrow.  (Christmas dinner, our usual tourtière, is waiting in the freezer.)

It's a Christmas like no other -- which is much like other Christmases.  

Christmas is kinda like that.

Misalignment

The Resident Fan Boy and I ventured out on to the roof between laundry room visits, and there, dangling above the western horizon, just clear of wispy bands of clouds, was Jupiter, and the pin-prick of Saturn hanging to his upper right.  It wasn't the climax of the conjunction, but it wasn't bad!

As the RFB and I returned to our apartment, he muttered: "A conjunction, a comet, and Mars - what's going on?"

"'S'plains a lot," I replied.

We had no idea.

Settling into the couch, I checked my messages and found an e-mail from our sociable neighbours upstairs.  They had been out for their morning walk, when a slippery patch left over from Monday's sloppy precipitation caught the wife off-guard, and they spent the bulk of yesterday in emergency.  Multiple fractures to both wrists.  Surgery in the new year.

This morning, elder daughter texted from South Wimbledon.  Her COVID app informed her that she had been in contact with someone with the virus.   (Hardly difficult in London at this moment.)  She's now required to self-isolate for five days.  Her plans to spend Christmas with her second cousins in Greenwich are out the window -- probably not a bad thing, considering Tier Four.  A comfort is that one of her flatmates and her husband had to abandon their plans for a holiday hotel stay, due to the new restrictions, so at least elder daughter will not be alone.

These darn things usually come in threes,  don't they?  Should I stop the star-gazing?

Bright illusion

 This year, our online Advent calendar has a Nordic theme, so we're particularly aware of Santa Lucia Day. 

So, yesterday evening, after my daily drop-in to visit Demeter, I decided to make my way deeply into darkened Fairfield, the sun having vanished by 4:20.  

The further south and east I ventured, the thicker the illuminations, bright arteries of colour spreading out of both sides of Linden Avenue.

A fashion this year appears to be multicoloured nets of bulbs, draped over shrubbery, or the sides of porches.  Others have taken long strands of lights and wrapped them several times about bushes.

As I passed one house, I seemed to see an animation at the top of a side entrance -- a man of dots of light, rather like the final moments of Peter Gabriel's famous 1986 video of the song "Sledgehammer":

 

I soon realized it was someone hanging a criss-cross mesh of lights up, the colours following the contours and extremities of his body as he reached for the hooks.

After pausing at the intersection where Linden meets Chapman, I turned further east, passing simpler strings and angles.

Looping homeward, I encountered explosions of decorating dynamite. Here cars were stopping -- headlights, unfortunately, left on high-beam -- and children, barely tall enough to make a sillhouette, chattered excitedly and gazed.

Dazzled, I returned to the relative dark of Fairfield Road, where I was cheered to see our single string dangling above the patio.

Algorithm altercation

An old friend has been posting his response to Spotify's "Your Top Songs 2020", which purports to be one hundred of one's most-played tracks on Spotify during the last year (not counting December, of course).

I say "purports", but who am I to argue with an algorithm?  

Well, there is the small matter of "Garbage In Garbage Out".  

Not that I listen to garbage, but I often put a playlist on, then get to work on something, which means if a given track appears on a playlist -- which Spotify has generated in the belief that I'll like it -- it will get played, and racked up amongst my favourites, even if I haven't actively "liked" it.  It's more likely that I didn't dislike it enough to wipe my hands and press the "skip" button.

Nearly a quarter of the tracks on this so-called "Top Songs" list are items I haven't marked with the green heart to designate my approbation.

I don't think there's anything on the list I hate; I do recognize the tracks, for the most part.  In the "top ten", six tracks could be categorized as classical (early music, really), and of the remaining four, two are songs I do love, and the other two --- I'm okay with, but really, there's stuff way further down the list that I would think is more representative. (HAIM, Dawes, Mott the Hoople, Annie Lennox, Vampire Weekend and Mozart, if you must know.)

Of course, if you're dealing with algorithms, sometimes you do need to get hands-on.  Last Christmas, I made myself a Christmas playlist of about two hours' worth of songs that have special meaning to me, or call back specific memories.  One song I considered was the Swedish ditty "Nu är det jul igen".  My girls were fans of Arthur's Special Christmas when they were little, and it's a catchy little song.

Unfortunately, after listening to about a dozen versions on Spotify, I couldn't find one that wasn't a bit on the precious side.  After Christmas, I realized what I had wrought; I spent the next few months banning Scandinavian pop songs from my feed on Spotify, which had decided, based on my searches, that I was crazy about singers of whom I'd never heard, singing in languages I don't understand.  (My apologies to all you Danes, Swedes, Norwegians, and Finns out there; your mastery of many languages puts me to blushing shame.)

My friend, posting what amounted to an essay on Facebook (well, he is a music therapist and a professor, to boot), was perplexed to find Justin Bieber heading his list -- apparently his more recent stuff.

The trouble is, if you let any song by any artist into your Spotify feed, the algorithm will assume you must want more.  

I pray that Spotify never finds out that I rather like "What's the Name of the Game".  That's a Swedish invasion I can do without.

O schadenfreude

For the third time since we returned from Hades, we accompanied Demeter to the Butchart Gardens for Christmas tea. The first two excursions featured heavy downpours; Butchart's has its own micro-climate:
it's either hotter, colder, or wetter than what you'd expect in the Victoria area.

But this time, we were blessed with a semi-sunny day, although a thick cloud of mist had been trapped in Brentwood Bay, like a bowl of meringue.

After the ritual ride on the carousel - I rode the zebra this time, while younger daughter rode a deer with a nose reddened for the season, and the Resident Fan Boy sat astride a medieval charger - we feasted on tea, scones, sausage rolls, trifles, and real gingerbread.

Demeter, who has reached the age where every experience might be the last opportunity, wanted to stay and perambulate, because the Christmas lights come on at 3 pm, an hour before sundown. The Resident Fan Boy escorted our daughters to the bus home. Demeter accompanied me with her walker to the Five Gold Rings in the Sunken Garden, then made her way back by the wheelchair route. She's in this picture, dressed in gold. (You may have to click on the photo to enlarge it.)

Excited little boys pelted by me, pursued by their parents, past flowerbeds planted with electric lights, and I climbed the stairs out of the sunken garden, to meet Demeter by lanterns hanging from the bare branches.

We caught the bus, which took us past a kilometre or so of headlights, hundreds of cars headed in for a rare rainless Christmas season night. And there we were, headed swiftly and unimpeded in the opposite direction.

Yuletide treasure

The rainy night, with its sinister swinging shadows, created by high winds, has left a shiny new day and new year.

This morning, the pavements were littered with twigs and chunks of bark blasted off the aging trees of our neighbourhood.

It's the eighth day of Christmas, so we're still exchanging a few gifts, and enjoying the last precious hours before elder daughter flies away back to Hades.

I thought I'd hastily leave a record of some of the treasures given me this Christmas - aside from time with family.

Eating crow for Christmas

No one does a rant quite like David Mitchell, and we've been favoured with two Christmas rants this year. The first is as himself - or the grumpy public version of himself; I like to imagine that he is more cozy and affable in private with his wife and family.

The second is in his role as William Shakespeare in The Upstart Crow, a BBC comedy series which has been described as "Blackadderesque", mainly because it's written by Ben Elton, who also wrote Blackadder. It's witty, and more accurate than you might think.

However, I would like to point out a flaw in this latter rant. January 6th is Epiphany. Twelfth Night is actually January 5th. And today is the Fourth Day of Christmas, so make merry.

The usual snowfall for Christmas Day in Victoria

Younger daughter was so disappointed that there was no snow this morning, she refused to accompany the Resident Fan Boy to church. Elder daughter fled out into the morning, and surprised her father at the cathedral. (He was so surprised, he didn't initially recognize her. This will take years to live down.)

Younger daughter recovered, and diligently participated in our other rituals.

The Snowman, by Raymond Briggs, is about an unexpected snow on a Christmas Eve, like the Christmas miracle we had a year ago. The Christmas special, based on the book, continues to be a poignant favourite with both my daughters, now no longer children.

The song "Walking in the Air", which features in the special, was sung by a boy soprano named Peter Auty, but it was 15-year-old Aled Jones who made it famous. This video, made twenty-five years after Jones' recording, is already more than eight years old, but I'm tired and my resistance is low.