Today I’m sitting listening to rain on the roof and imagining the mud rising and yesterday’s sunshine flowing away. There won’t be a lot of solar lighting brightening up the evening. There’s not much chance of a conversation with Deirdre at the moment, as she is engaged with Alexa whom she has asked to find her phone. So I might as well blog. The curtain is coming down on 2020, a year which I welcomed in because it wasn’t 2019. I can’t even remember now what was so bad about 2019 but in January I premiered a poem hoping that 2020 would provide no events worth remembering. Between grunts and pints the pub murmured something which I chose to take as agreement. The poem, like most of our 2020 plans rapidly became obsolete.
One family I know have had a fire, broken neck, amputated leg, divorce and business closure but have lit up their house with a festoon of colour and twinkles. Someone else told me he wished 2020 had never happened, had been scammed of a large amount of money and lost considerable business, but had at last been able to cuddle his first grand-daughter. Families in financial distress, others contributing generously to support them, angels and scammers, viruses and vaccines. The community has a heart, systole and diastole, the heart contracts and the heart relaxes, we are sometimes heartened, sometimes disheartened. We book places for outdoor Christmas functions, they get cancelled, they might happen after all. The vaccine is winging its way from Belgium and we’re trying to believe it won’t succumb to the same chaos as track and trace, testing and school examinations. It’s not inconceivable that government Brexit policy will cause it to be delayed at Dover for a week or two.
This evening I was subject to an Archdeacon’s Visitation. Disappointingly this does not mean the spectral manifestation of some spooky prelate but a Zoom service in which I am sworn in as church warden. This confers certain arcane duties upon me: I have a staff with which I can tap on the head worshippers who aren’t concentrating and I think I could command disorderly women to be placed in the ducking chair, which could be quite time consuming. I’m not sure about the scold’s bridle, but I wouldn’t dare anyway.
But I have ensured that church will have a Christmas tree and it will be lit. It came today carried through the rain and it’s two feet taller than I ordered. This Saturday Crich will be ablaze with lights. The lights won’t dispel the darkness but it will celebrate that this Christmas we are learning to manage their co-existence. By extension we can be confused and still survive. An unlikely book I’m reading has provided me with a quotation that sums things up for me today, as I’m trying to organise a few things: “We wouldn’t remember that we’d remembered and have to remind each other of our forgetfulness.” (Milkman – Anita Burns) Deirdre seems to have found her phone and I need to search for the list I made so I wouldn't forget the things I need to remember.