New year, new start
And so it is that I’m back. After leaving you on a cliff hanger in May last year, promising Irish holiday snaps and Chelsea thoughts, I’ve fallen off the edge of the earth, swum my round and have popped up – ta da – in the new year. I am, once again, your loyal blogger, here to rescue you from an online malaise like a St Bernard appearing to fallen climbers with a barrel of brandy around its neck.
The big news is that I have moved from my beloved Brixton to the heart of Gloucestershire, in order to take up a lovely job in a town which I’m sure has the highest incidence of Barbour jackets in the land. And Hunter Wellington boots. And jodhpurs. And riding crops. Actually, I think I’ll stop there before my fella gets any ideas.
[Have you noticed that I have started a lot of sentences with 'and'? This is because I know I would never get away with that at work, so I am taking as many liberties as I can this evening before the frisson of grammatical rebellion wears off.]
I have intended to overhaul this blog for sometime now and part of what was putting me off posting was my complete and utter failure at mastering CSS – not something to which one can readily admit given the current taste for social media. Every time I looked at my dashboard my heart would sink and I’d sign out faster than you can say Twitter. If you blog yourself I am sure you will recognise that feeling.
However, onwards and upwards as they say. This is a new year abounding with virtual possibilities, even if they do come via Elance. So in that spirit I leave you with a few shots taken over the past month or so, to keep you going.
Firstly Christmas in beautiful Suffolk where at this time of year the landscape seems to exist in a series of horizontal planes, both inside 17th-century cottages where right angles are few:
And out on the fields, where, if it is not reeds, it is barley and wheat that grow on the county’s expanses (can you sense my shivering in the blur of this picture?):
And even in the vegetable garden…if you squint your eyes a bit:
And then onto a hoar-frost, taken before Gloucestershire received buckets of snow and while I was still enchanted by the ice and the cold.
And another couple for good measure:
Fruits of the Year
I’ll not deny it: in the context of Bloglandia it’s been an age since I last posted. I’m not sure how the past month went by so quickly, but it did and, by gum, we’re almost at the end of the year. Apologies if you’ve visited recently, especially if you came here from my post on the Guardian gardening blog, and found no-one at home.
Being away from home is not that far-fetched a metaphor, actually. At the moment I’m a hemisphere away from wintry Brixton, in the depths of the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands, South Africa. My soundtrack this evening isn’t the perpetual scream of south London’s emergency vehicles but rather a summer chorus of bats, frogs and night birds. To my delight, my feet, legs and arms are bare, even though I’m outside on the veranda.
What, then, does a picture of marzipan fruits and well-worn cake decorating accoutrements have to do with anything? Well, I’m home for the holidays, and this afternoon it fell upon us to decorate – admittedly rather belatedly – the Christmas cake. No matter that it was 32 degrees outside and that it would have been more appropriate to spend the afternoon in the swimming pool – there are some traditions that must be maintained at all costs.
We mutter about this, of course, because we know that eating vastly calorific food intended for northern winters, rather than southern summers, is peculiar, to say the least.
It’s also true that most ritualised practises shift over time and space, and I doubt our simple Christmas bears much resemblance to the original English variety, just as our childhood diet of fabled England – cream teas, If, the Famous Five, country houses, Colin Firths and Hugh Grants – leaves modern England wanting.
This year our wire tree is decorated almost exclusively with Zulu beadwork and I don’t think a Brussels sprout has ever graced our diningroom table. The timing of our meal was based entirely on the weather report and whether it would be cool enough at midday for a heavy lunch. Earlier in the week our neighbourhood carol singers arrived wearing Father Christmas hats and sang in beautiful Zulu harmony.
Yet to abandon our annual Christmas ritual, handed down over generations, would be unthinkable. At the very least it would loosen the roots that anchor us in the soil of our past, and link us to my family’s ancestors, who packed and unpacked their bags in India, Australia and most of southern Africa, and, in the spirit of that time, took with them and adapted to local conditions the small, comforting traditions of ‘home’ wherever they went.
1 comment