HOW WAS YOUR TIER 4 CHRISTMAS?

So how was your Tier 4 Christmas? The one thing that saddens me about my ancient blog is that I no longer receive comments….I’d love to know how everyone got on? Things would have no doubt been very different from your usual Christmas and we had to cancel my mother coming to stay. Thankfully she was able to go and stay with my brother who was in a lower tier, so she wasn’t on her own, but the risks were too high anyway for her to come and stay with us – you really can’t guarantee you’re fully safe when you live with young adults who are out and about.

Me in my miserable Christmas jumper:-

Accidental selfie that basically says it all:-

“We’re just going to have to drink our way through this,” I told my daughter, who responded by telling me that I’ve already been saying that for a whole year now. She’s not entirely wrong. What else is there to do? We’ve been extracting all those tiny support bubbles from sparkling wines to stay as buoyant as possible. However, you know you’ve overdone it when on Christmas Eve, your youngest son somehow manages to vomit in the mug cupboard as well as in the sink, halfway through your celebrations. Ditto, when your two grown up boys start wrestling because they’re so bored and not only break a chair in the process but also an ankle (almost). THEN when my son tried to clear the table by balancing absolutely everything on top of a chopping board, it inevitably all crashed to the floor (amazingly nothing broke), but he attempted to sweep up the mashed potato that had gone everywhere with a dustpan and brush. There is no question that human behaviour is very strange at the moment, but can you blame anyone?

Christmas eve with my kids:-

Check out the chair in the background:-

Christmas morning – all surprisingly perky:-

Showing his new Christmas “loafers” to his interested brother:-

It was also my firstborn son’s birthday a few days before Christmas and sadly for him it was the day London went into Tier 4 lockdown, so he too had to cancel all his plans and stick with the family. Thankfully, my daughter is very good at creating a party out of not much and she baked him his favourite carrot cake and managed to find sparklers et al. The death of spontaneity is so hard for us all, but especially for the young. It’s such a tragedy that they have to do a careful risk assessment before every venture and then, having weighed it all up, decide to stay in with their mum.

Birthday walk:-

Birthday takeaway (from Oka – excellent):-

Her carrot cake always lifts the mood:-

We all had to go and have a Covid test, having been exposed to someone who’d tested positive, which proved thankfully negative all round:-

The news is horrendously depressing at the moment and we’re certainly in the bleak midwinter right now. We’re going to have to extract even more resilience in order to hunker down and get through the next few months in order to (hopefully) stop the NHS being overwhelmed, before the vaccine kicks in for the Spring and before many of us on furlough get made redundant and job losses hit an all time high. My recommendation would be to order in lots of alcohol and turn off all the news feeds. Don’t even read the papers and maybe start buying gold and hiding it under the floorboards if you have any money left after Christmas. Brexit will add further woes for us all as we manage our way through the confusion. I’m considering not renewing my passport. I don’t want a blue one and we’re not welcome anywhere at the moment anyway owing to our huge infection rates and mutant variant strain of C19. If all else fails, I’m just going to hide myself under the floorboards.

SO, what is there to say that is positive at the moment other than to remind ourselves that out of a crisis always comes opportunity? I haven’t yet put my list of new opportunities together, mainly because my liver is not in agreement with me, but I’ll have a think. In terms of New Year’s resolutions, all I can strongly recommend is that you don’t go for Dry January this year. All those I’ve spoken to, who did it last year, now really regret it because it was one of the last month’s we were still free.

Sunrise walks help:-

Books have made a massive comeback in Lockdown and I have read LOADS. This is my latest favourite book – highly recommended and written by John Boyne, who also wrote “The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas”. Really excellent:-