This seems more like a quarterly news sheet than an annual letter. It scarcely seems a matter of a couple of months or so that I sat down with my mind still spinning from wedding trauma, delirium and overload fatigue, and here I am again pecking at the majick writing machine.
owever, how different it is this time. Oh, not in tone. I have no great disaster to beat your senses, just a great deficit of suitable, news-worthy material to peddle. I’m not saying we’ve been in suspended animation for the last twelve months, but you don’t want to hear about the funerals we’ve brushed up against, and if I fore-go boring you with verbal holiday snaps, and just tell you the newly-weds are as happy as we could ever wish them to be, and John is living the life of Riley, then you have all our most important news.
hat leaves us in the category the insurance men call ‘Social, Domestic and Pleasure’, and we open with the fact that we are just completing our first year in full, joint retirement mode, and jolly nice it was, too. I still managed a bit of trade, with two retail outlets, and my own stall in three county shows, finishing with my own usual Christmas Annual exhibition, at home, last weekend. Over the year, I was hoping for half-pay, but not really expecting to make it, so I’m quite happy to settle for a near miss. As I once told a tax inspector who queried the modesty of my earnings, when you have a life like ours, you can’t expect money as well.
alerie is at last free to concentrate her energies on the things she enjoys most- sewing, cooking and gardening, in any order, combination, or multiple thereof, whilst my greatest delight is seeing her enjoy herself, happy, content and stress free. For myself, I’ve set up a work camp in one end of John’s old room; I paint, mornings, when I need to, and go downstairs to play, inside or out, in the afternoon.
with this letter getting the Christmas post into motion, and with Valerie baking the cake this afternoon, that will leave us both free, tomorrow, to fire up the Festivity Engine good and proper, with the purchase of a tree. That will give us a clear week to finish the shopping and decorations, in time for Miriam, Simon and John to come and spend Christmas with us.
I keep meaning to check on the Camel Hitch - it’s in Ashley’s Book of Knots. As you will be aware, camels are great slobberers, which can make their ropes hard to untie, but the true camel hitch won’t jam up, no matter what. And you’ve seen pictures of shepherds with little lambs draped round their necks- well that’s alright for a photo shoot, buts it’s a sure way to dislocate their hips. The right way to carry them is astride your forearm, with your hand up under the head, but it’s as well to swaddle you elbow with some sacking to soak up the ‘green gold’. The angels are a clannish lot; they tend to keep to the blue cedar and the spruce, where the collared doves roost in the winter- a bit like the tourists abroad, seeking out the ex-pats.
’ll probably sit up and wait to have a ‘wet’ and a mardle with the Ould Feller, when he drops in. Piece of that Christmas cake, mayhap. Won’t have to let him settle too well or he won’t want to budge. Then, when I’ve eased him on his way, I’ll take a minute or two to settle my band of happy ghosts into their snug pockets in the yew garland, around the crib, over the mantle.
so off to bed for a brief sleep of busy, crowded dreams, before waking in the not quite dark anymore, to squint and try to guess the time, without too much shuffling. So, on deciding it doesn’t matter about the time, anyway, I’ll lie still and listen for a sound of the birth of the morning. It’s a small sound, a frail thing, but like a silver dart, it passes through two millennia, and its note or cry is a feeble as a new-born child’s mewing, rising through the lamp-lit, cattle-steamed fug of a stable.
It’ll be ‘Business As Usual’ at Barneybees, and we wish you the same.
With love from Valerie and Neil.