November 10th An Uninteresting Chimney Pot

This morning I stood outside and gazed up at our chimney waiting for the chimney sweep's brush to appear. It didn’t. Instead a little wheel contraption peeped out and disappeared, and that was it. It seems that brushes poking up joyfully from chimneys are so passé, so very Twentieth Century, just as little boys thrusting their grinning little innocent faces up out of the pots was very Nineteenth Century. Pe rhaps I was expecting Dick Van Dyke to tap dance on the tiles and lots of perfectly synchronised lithe and sooty youths in very tight trousers to prance around on all the roofs along the Common. O whisk me away Julie Andrews “ Up through the atmosphere / Up where the air is clear”, away from Covid, fog and trying to plan the impossible. Better still, whisk me away Emily Blunt.

Two years ago we saw the new Emily Blunt ‘Mary Poppins’ twice in the space of a few days so we could immerse ourselves in it with both sets of grandchildren. I can barely remember what it’s like to snuggle down in one of those modern reclining cinema seats with grandchildren pressed in with us all dipping into the same popcorn. It seems as distant and unlikely as a Ronald Reagan ‘B’ movie on a Saturday morning. Indulging in whimsy may make us happy, may make us sad but it’s an inevitable side to our thinking, and these days we’re constantly having to pair our fantasies with realities. Happy dancing juvenile chimney sweeps may seem expialidocious ,

Chim chiminey Chim chiminey Chim chim cher-oo! Good luck will rub off when I shakes 'ands with you Or blow me a kiss And that's lucky too

But there’ll be none of that hand kissing, kiss blowing and chim chim cher-ooing this year. The reality of the child chimney sweeps was vile and cruel. You may remember Charles Kingsley’s ‘Water Babes’ or William Blake’s

A little black thing among the snow

Crying ‘weep!’ ‘weep!’ in notes of woe.

We must balance our complicated Christmas plans with the reality of how they may all come unwound; matching time and effort spent in preparation against the chaos and disappointment of having to cancel. There’s the tension between lazy lockdown and walks in the pale afternoon sun shine against the new grandfather I met today who misses a cuddle and the young woman I encountered later. Her tiny cafe which had become a real community hub, was too small to enable social distancing and she was overcome with worry about how to rebrand as a takeaway.

One scene in ‘Mary Poppins’ did come true. Do you remember how the little boy started shouting when the bank wouldn’t give him his pocket money back, and caused a run on the bank – a preview of 2008 perhaps.

I’ve included a picture of the chimney pot which failed to deliver the anticipated brush, possibly the most boring photo ever, but let’s convince ourselves that it’s not a picture for the future. This is the day a vaccine was announced and this was the week America received an inoculation against a virus in the White House. Hope, Hope, Hope!.