It has been quite a while since I wrote my last blog. Other things have had to take priority. The main thing being the putting together of our virtual Christmas concert which was wonderful but took hundreds of hours. Then there were the Sixteen concerts this week that went from Tier 2 with audience in London, to Tier 3 without audience in London but filmed for streaming, to Tier 2 with audience in Saffron Walden, Essex only to be told the next day that everywhere I had been to was now going into Tier 4 and nobody should go anywhere. To be honest, this didn’t surprise me. What was poor was the delay in announcing the inevitable.
Christmas can be THE most emotive time of the year. I think back to my misty memories and a lot of these are around Christmas time. I remember Christmas at four years old my dad had a very big win at Bingo. That Christmas the present for me was a beautiful pedal police car and police helmet. I just remember that ‘wow’ feeling when I saw the pedal car under the tree. Another memory is of my oldest brother Paul taking a mandarin orange jelly in its bowl and going round the dinner table turning the bowl upside down to see if the jelly would fall out onto somebody’s head. It didn’t until he got to my brother Nick. I remember the laughter and my mum’s annoyance that he had wasted a perfectly good jelly in a flavour she had found difficult to get hold of.
I also remember our traditional whole family get togethers on Boxing day. Us seven boys with the older boys’ wives and their young families and my mum and dad. The only time of year that I saw my dad drink, and then it wasn’t much, except for one year when he and my older brothers ended up incapacitated by whisky. I remember the annual tins of ‘Imperial leather’ talcum powder that my brother Nick and I bought together as presents for our brothers. I also remember the Boxing day the year my mum couldn’t be there for the whole day because she spent the time with her own gravely ill mum who died that night. I remember the Christmas at my brother Paul’s and my dad being the most jovial I had ever seen him with his grand children. Little did I know that 4 days later I would witness him taking his last breaths.
So, Christmas this year will be memorable for all of us. The newspapers will hold the headlines ‘Christmas is Cancelled’. But is that really true? Is Christmas EVER cancelled? Of course not. Yes, so many of us will miss the ‘family’ side of Christmas this year but millions of christians will still continue to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ until the end of time itself. Yes, we will all have a different experience of Christmas this time. Some positive. Some sad. Some bitterly disappointed. But whatever, life will move on. What we may have like so many this year, is more time to reflect on our lives.
In the meantime, my small hope is that we can each find something to be grateful for this Christmas. Perhaps we will find someone to be kind to or to be kind to us. Someone to uplift or someone to uplift us.
Whatever your circumstances, I wish you a wonderful Christmas and I leave you with a recording of one of our Christmas concert pieces.