Collected thoughts about Christmas by Emily, Trevor, Susan and Angela
The Christmas debate according to Emily I had a rather robust discussion with my three fellow bloggers recently about Christmas. My outtake from it was that the learned trio don’t believe in spinning the myth of the fat bloke in the red suit to kids, and that lying about it to children is wrong and will inevitably lead to disappointment. I got quite annoyed about it and tried my hardest to think of an argument to put forward to explain why I don’t mind perpetuating the Santa clause, which to my mind,… Read More
The two sides of Christmas by Angela Caldin
I was in Newmarket a couple of days ago with my elder daughter doing a little Christmas shopping. In the streets the decorations glittered in the sunshine while in the shops the Christmas songs warbled over the festive wares. That’s when it happened, or perhaps I should say more correctly, that’s when it started. It washed over me like a wave, took over my body and mind and turned my heart into a heavy stone. It’s a malaise, a melancholy, a disquiet and a discontent. It’s called Seasonal Curmudgeon Disorder. The Christmas… Read More
It’s a Mad, Sad World. But Maybe Not. By Angela Caldin
It really is a mad world. That’s the only possible conclusion I can come to. This week in the UK, the prime minister of all people has spoken up in support of the egotist Jeremy Clarkson; Rona Fairhead, a non-executive director of HSBC, has as good as admitted to the Public Accounts Committee that effective governance processes were not in place at the bank, but has not resigned; Ian Duncan Smith continues to extol the virtues of the Universal Credit welfare benefit system while so far only a little over 1% of the… Read More
Back in Blighty by Angela Caldin
Six months in New Zealand have passed in a flash and now I’ve changed the Land of the Long White Cloud for the Land of the Rose and its teeming capital city. My fellow blogger, Emily, often refers to her homeland as Blighty and that rather old-fashioned term, so evocative of a bygone era of derring-do and Britishness, always makes me smile. Apparently, the expression was first used by soldiers in the Indian army and was an Anglo-Indian alteration of the Urdu bilāyatī, which means ‘foreign or European’. From there, it developed to be a… Read More
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