Slumbering dragons
An iPhone carol. Shrimp accountacy. A ginger disaster.
The iPhone was dead to begin with.There is no doubt whatever about that. The battery was dead, and the battery port was dead, and no charge could get in despite 6 years of pocket lint being scraped out of it. My old iPhone was dead as a doornail*
‘I am not going to Reading in peak shopping season’ says the host of Christmas presents yet to come, with the confident air of a man who knows he’s about to go on a trip to Reading in peak shopping season. My brother suggested I fix it, because another brother ‘reversed over his and left it in a puddle overnight and managed to fix it for £30’ but as I said, it’s very old, running on an out dated operating system with insufficient g’s for the modern era and along with the battery being broken, and the charging port not working, the back was smashed in an unhappy incident where my son lobbed it off the stairs. Not gracefully on step at a time, but the 8 ft or whatever drop from the landing to the hall below, leaving it with a unfortunate tendency to take abstract psychedelic photos when you’d really rather it recorded a core memory.
In a shocking turn of classical literature, the people Apple Store managed to Frankenstein the phone back to life with a super powerful wireless charger, which horrified my husband who’d have bought the most expensive wireless charger if it meant he didn’t have come into Reading at Christmas. To be honest, I’d forgotten about wireless charging, it doesn’t seem to be a particularly useful feature if you have a charging port that works. Anyway, in a little Christmas miracle they managed to get my phone alive enough to transfer my data. If you are paying that much for a phone they have a fella there to transfer everything over for you including the SIM card.
Cormorants and shrimp
Good winter things: Crows pooling in the inky crevices of barren fields. The sound of a flock of pigeons over head; a sort of whiffling that defies description. A sunset after about 3 weeks of half lit gloom. ‘The lights come on at dusk’ the national trust lady had told me at Waddesdon ‘but I don’t know when that is’ I told her I thought it had been dusk since a week last Thursday at least, and that was week ago now, so even the last fading light of sunset is a delight.
Four cormorants at the lake, the most ever. One on each silent fountain head, which have been turned off for the holidays. One swimming near the dead tree, and one sitting on the far shore (until my experiment to see how close you can get to a cormorant. Even hiding behind a tree it is not very close, hence the lack of photographic evidence.)
I was supposed to write a lot sooner, when there was still time to post things, to say that this is back from exhibition and available for sale. But somehow the words would not come, probably because all the underground dragons are asleep for the season. I already have to worry whether so many packages have arrived, if people have not mentioned them arriving, is that because they hate it and are disappointed? Or has it not arrived and are they waiting till Christmas Eve to ask me what can be done to get it there on time (nothing). I’m actually very busy worrying, and counting shrimp.
‘I think’ says my husband in a measured way ‘you are not the right disposition for shrimp keeping’. I had just told him how one of the shrimps new habit of sleeping on a leaf upside down with her legs in the air was gradually eroding the tiny nub of sanity I was still clinging on to. I had tried to fish out her tiny dead body when she swam off leaving me anxious I had fatally injured her with tweezers. ‘I just need more shrimp than it’s possible to count’ I assure him. ‘An impossibly large amount and I’ll be fine’
But about the dragon
Still, it is the last copy and it was a weird size to frame so the frame is actually worth it, so if you have an inordinate amount of Christmas money and a desire for dragons, then maybe just buy it for yourself? I mean you’re probably bored of buying things for other people who are hard to buy for when there’s loads of great stuff you’d like. For instance, I was charity shopping with my friend Stacey and she discovered (she’s a genius at shopping and does most of the finding of good things at bootsales) that someone had donated an immaculate collection of Kipling bags they were selling for £4 (or less) each. I found some other good things I cannot mention yet at the next shop, and had to make room in my tote for it by taking out the Kipling bags and wearing three Kipling bags like a lunatic, which the cashier said was a lot. I did not mention that all the bags had more bags in them. Do I need christmas presents? Probably not. How many Kipling bags do I own? More than I do shrimp, that’s for sure.
And what have we been making this week?
When my son was little, he did not like cake, but other small children at his parties would expect something cake like, including his best friend with an egg allergy, which is why I started making gingerbread houses. Thankfully he likes cake now, but we still get an Ikea flat pack gingerbread house at Christmas time. I got reasonably good at making gingerhauses, but one thing I never mastered was making piping icing, which is fine because you can just buy the stuff in shops … except this year, apparently. Undeterred, My son and I created a magnificent substance new to science that had none of the desired properties- it both was too runny to hold its shape and too hard to fit through the piping nozzle. I call it non-Newtonian icing. Normally we ice the house and then assemble it (using molten sugar as a dangerous but very effective glue). Sometimes a joint fails, but you can just redo it because it’s not a dribbling gooey mess of molten icing. This is what they look like:
This time, though, my son decided piping ‘the bastard non-Newtonian icing’ was more hassle than he was prepared to endure, and we should make the house first and then just spatula the icing all over it ‘like they do in bake-off with the cakes’. This caused a little structural deformation, or if you are less optimistic, a total collapse.
As I said, normally I can reglue a failed joint, but by this point it seemed easier to just swiftly move on to consumption.
I think it’s one of my favourites because we had such fun making it. Isn’t that what Christmas is about? Making memories. Being grateful you have a family that, when you shout ‘time to be jolly and joyous’ are as excited to watch a muppet Christmas Carol as you are. I have all the things I need: love, friends, an excessive amount of bags with monkey keyrings and a tank of shrimp.
Cathy
Very grateful this week to my friend Cathy who sent me this wonderful package despite the Royal Mail floating her package from me down a river instead of driving it there. I have never seen such a wet looking thing. Despite fully dissolving the postal tube they had the audacity to suggest that it had got ‘a little damp’ because of rain falling on it when they walked it to the door. I’ll have to sort out something waterproof to send her. A duck, perhaps.
Look at this cute little bird jug! Don’t tell the other but I think it’s my favourite. I am still saving my ghost stories for some crisis; it’s winter so theres bound to be one.
Anyway, congratulations to me for managing to write a post this week! I’m sure you haven’t missed me but I will be back in early January. Merry Yuletide, one and all.
*apparently ironware was expensive, so you would salvage nails and reuse them, but with door nails the end would get bent over in the door making process meaning that they could no longer be used, so was ‘dead’. I don’t think my door has any nails in it. It does have a rodent that likes to poop on the doormat (if you don’t leave a little bit of used kitty litter nearby to scare it away) that I would like to impale on an iron spike - its very rude to poop on doormats.
A merry yuletide to you too! Thank you for sharing your gingerbread house, it looks much more like the ones we create in our house. Ours never last particularly long anyway before they are demolished - besides they taste good whatever they look like.
I love the collapsed gingerbread house.