(This is, essentially, a collection of random thoughts and incidents which occurred to me during the week I spent Christmas with my mother. They’re not arranged in any sort of coherent framework, just in loose chronological order. But, then, “coherence” isn’t often possible when my mother is involved … )
Arrival
I’m a victim of the Government’s transport policies, you know. In theory, this means integrated public transport with cooperation from the private sector to guarantee efficiency; in practice, it means everybody and his pet goat Maurice is supposed to have a car, and people like me who use buses can sod off. So, with the direct route from Oxford to my mother’s house no longer available, I had to change at High Wycombe bus station (you know in the Bible, where it talks about the “abomination of desolation”? That’s High Wycombe bus station.) and take the slow stopping bus back to the old home town. It passed through lots of places I haven’t seen in years; nice to know Holmer Green is the same nasty Fifties-suburban armpit it was when I was at school. I think.
The journey was enlivened by the usual crop of tension-inducing small children. Then, when I finally reached my mother’s house, I was greeted by the yells of more tension-inducing small children, the spawn of a friend of Mother’s from Sunday School. “Come and meet my little boy,” said Mother cheerfully; cue small child staring in a puzzled manner around 40-year-old 250 pound computer programmer, looking hopefully for my mother’s little boy … I think it’s interesting to note that, the last time this gag of Mother’s was funny, beer cost 37p a pint.
At least this small child got off a bit easier than the last one to pay a call on my mother … she had taken him out to the downstairs loo, installed him on the throne, and then gone back into the body of the house, automatically locking the door behind her. Fortunately, young George (recently voted Most Disruptive Child in the Class by his long-suffering teachers) lost no time in making his presence felt, and was soon released from durance vile.
So … the old family home. Scene of many a family Christmas in the past. Of course, since my father died many years ago, and my sister pushed off to Newcastle and almost never speaks to us, the celebrations are not what they once were. Still, Mother was there. And now I was. What fun awaited me …
Well, for starters, we were due to have one depressed recently-widowed neighbour round for Christmas dinner … it transpired, we might have another guest, too. One of Mother’s friends had a very old, very infirm cat, which, when it realized she was planning to go away over Christmas, climbed up on her suitcase and expressed an (ahem) incontinent objection to this course of action. So, Mother’s friend was not going away over the Christmas period after all, and might be having Christmas dinner with us instead.
The Chimes of Big Ben, sorry, I mean Christmas Eve
The first bit of fun was helping Mother wrap and deliver her presents to friends and neighbours. My fingernails are bitten to the quick, and Mother has arthritis, so simple tasks like finding the end of the sellotape (Scotch tape, in American?) took on a whole new level of intellectual challenge. Once the presents were wrapped, of course, they had to be delivered.
“Take these three round to Poles Hill,” Mother said. "You go round the corner, turn left … "I interrupted at this point. I lived here for more than twenty years. Not only that, when I worked for the district council, I spent some time studying the original plans for these streets. In short, I know where Poles Hill is, and I don’t need directions. Especially not from a woman who can get lost in her own living room … as, indeed, she demonstrated that very day.
It was kind of melancholy, going round the old place. Everywhere, familiar landmarks were being eroded by the ravages of time … I looked out over the valley, to Captain’s Wood, where I used to go walking as a child. Part of it had been razed for a housing development. The remainder of it, leafless in the winter light, was a dark brown bulk on the top of the hill, shot through with the occasional streak of grey from the trunk of a silver birch. These days, my hair looks like that.
We did a little tour of the neighbourhood, with Mother describing the current state of the residents (sick, sick, dead, sick, sick, sick, dead … ) “Poor Pat broke her arm in three places,” Mother told me. “Well, she shouldn’t go to those places then,” I replied automatically. Mother hit me.
Bad news greeted us upon our return. The very old, very infirm cat had been taken to the vet, who had discovered exactly how old and infirm it was, and had persuaded Mother’s friend to have it put down. The event was curiously echoed at a national level, when one of the Queen’s corgis was savaged by Princess Anne’s bull terrier and had to be destroyed. A nation mourned, and pondered the constitutional issues.
Christmas Day
One of the joys of visiting my mother is having conversations like this:
Mother: I thought we’d go to eight o’clock communion on Christmas day, is that OK?
Me: Eight o’clock’s fine by me.
Mother: Only if we go to the twelve o’clock, we’d be very late putting the dinner on.
Me: Eight o’clock’s fine by me.
Mother: We could go to the ten-thirty, but that’s family service, with all the kids running around.
Me: Eight o’clock’s fine by me.
Mother: Or there’s a nine-thirty service at Christchurch, but that’s further to walk.
Me: Eight o’clock’s fine by me.
Mother: If we go to the twelve o’clock, we probably won’t eat before half two …
And so on. So we went to church for the eight o’clock service on Christmas morning. Not a bad one; very elderly, very camp priest, couple of carols, man with deep flat bass in the pew behind us … I’m sure I noticed a blonde in jeans and a suede coat giving me the eye after the service. I didn’t feel it appropriate to eye her back … if I’d known that this would be the last sight I had of a woman in good health and under seventy, maybe I’d have made more of the opportunity.
Christmas dinner went surprisingly well, all things considered … Mother’s friend with the ex-cat had gone to visit relatives nearby, so we only had the one elderly bereaved person visiting, and I think she was as cheerful as she could be, in the circumstances. Well. Mother was doing the right thing there, anyway … Christmas, shortly after a bereavement, can be pretty brutal, it’s not a good time to be on your own.
After dinner: the Queen’s speech. One of those meaningless traditions that made Britain what it is today (overdrawn, mostly). After that, we got around to opening the presents. Mother had wrapped a few things up for me, just so that she could see my face as I opened a gaily wrapped parcel and found, for example, a tin of John West crab meat. Other relatives had provided the traditional socks and gloves … why gloves? Socks, I wear often enough that they wear out; gloves, I don’t. After many Christmases, I now have more gloves than Doctor Octopus. I suppose it’s possible that some of my relatives are very confused these days and think that I’m actually one of those many-armed Hindu deities. Anything is possible with my family.
Mother had reaped a rich haul from relatives and neighbours, including a book of cartoons from someone called “Lee”, which turned out to be the cat that had gone to its reward the previous day. It’s not often you get a Christmas present from a dead cat. Mother also received a blue and white plastic penguin, about a foot high. Investigation revealed that its head came off, and that inside it was filled with some fragrant but unidentifiable fluid … bubble bath? shower gel? shampoo? We didn’t know.
(Somebody is bound to be curious … Mother had been dropping hints about wanting a new Pears Cyclopedia, and a particular Scott Joplin CD, so that’s what I got her.)
After that … family phone calls, my aunts being daft, my sister being surly, and that was pretty much Christmas.
Boxing Day
“Help me with my crossword,” said Mother, throwing the Chambers Dictionary affectionately at my head. Crosswords are Mother’s way of relaxing after the rigors of entertaining. They’re not mine. This might surprise people who know of my affection for all forms of verbiage, but the explanation’s simple enough - crosswords tend to come with the morning papers, and I am not a morning person; by the time I’ve had my first cup of coffee and re-evolved into a language-using creature, someone else has usually done all the crosswords. Mother, on the other hand, likes nothing better than a Times special jumbo-sized cryptic crossword. Sometimes I think she should get out more.
“Look up C-something-N,” said Mother. “Type of bluish-grey, starts C-something-N, I don’t know what it is.”
Like the dutiful son I am, I started paging through the dictionary. C-A-N. C-E-N. C-I-N. C-O-N … there are a lot of words beginning C-O-N. By the time I’d got through them and on to C-U-N, Mother was growing restive.
“You look at the paper and I’ll try the dictionary,” she said. We swapped, paper for dictionary. I looked at the crossword grid.
“That’s a G, not a C,” I said, “it’s the last letter of LASTING.”
“Oh, sorry,” said Mother, “I can’t read my own writing.”
A word beginning C-U-N rose to my lips; I suppressed it with some effort. I wrote GUNMETAL into the crossword.
Saturday and Visitation of the Sick
Being Mother’s friends who are only sick, and not actually dead. One with the flu, her husband with flu and a bad foot, her grandson visiting with a broken ankle. They are, as you might expect, a cheerful bunch. They have managed, however, to keep their house tidy enough to meet Mother’s approval … which is something she herself never manages. Somehow, her housekeeping always seems to fall short of some self-assessed unattainable standard of perfection. I think it’s a reaction against this attitude of Mother’s that’s made me happy to live in a certain level of comfortable disarray.
The Plain People of the Straight Dope: Your flat looks like a hideout for the paramilitary wing of Oxfam.
Anyway. Afterwards, Mother and I -
The Plain People of the Straight Dope: I mean, your flat’s so bad, even the woodlice moved out.
Anyway. Afterwards, Mother and I went shopping. She’d repented, somewhat, of buying me a tin of crab meat as a Christmas present, and took me to the shops to buy me some new shoes. It turned out to be a deeply disturbing experience. We were in and out of the shoe shop inside fifteen minutes. Very strange. Normally, shopping for anything resembling clothes, with Mother, takes something like four hours, and visits to at least three different shops. I wondered if she was feeling all right. Come to think of it, it usually takes more than fifteen minutes just to find a pair of size twelve shoes. Oh well.
Christmas Sunday
We went down to eight o’clock communion again. A more traditional Church of England service, this time: no hymns, not much of a congregation, just me, Mother, a dozen palsied geriatrics, and a bored and partly intelligible vicar.
Mother has changed her usual pew, and where we were sitting, we had an excellent view of a puzzling tombstone, whose inscription began "Here lies interred part of Richard Bowle … " Which part? And why only part of him? Was this an instance of the old custom of burying someone’s heart separately from the rest of them? Or, on the other hand, since Richard Bowle (1549-1626) “served divers great lords as auditor”, perhaps this partial interment was some scheme to dodge death duties? On the other hand (I have lots of hands, why else would I get so many gloves?), the inscription also said “his soule with his body was greatly troubled” - perhaps he was troubled by some illness which made bits of him drop off? Look, I had to think about something while the vicar was mumbling through the intercession … Richard Bowle’s arms appear to have been or, a chevron between three goats’ heads erased azure. Just thought I’d mention it.
Afterwards, Mother and I walked home in the teeth of a bitter north wind. Mother, wearing a scarf, kept up a flow of light conversation. I, not wearing a scarf, was more concerned with keeping bits of my face from freezing and snapping off. Perhaps this is what happened to Richard Bowle.
On the way out, we passed the spot by the church door where my father’s ashes are interred. There’s no particular mystery about that inscription.
Monday
Nothing happened on Monday. Seriously. The good old British climate had set in with a vengeance, rain, sleet and high winds … we had adequate supplies (mostly the remains of the Christmas day turkey, and, of course, a tin of crab meat) so we didn’t have to go out in it … so we didn’t. We stayed in, switched the television on, and watched high-quality BBC entertainment. That is, tapes of old “Monty Python” episodes, high-quality entertainment being singularly scarce on the BBC this year. (Over the course of the Christmas period, I think we watched two films, one quiz show, and the occasional bit of news.)
Departure
And so, all good things come to an end, and so does my annual Christmas visit. Mother insisted on accompanying me to High Wycombe, where we dined in high style at the Octagon shopping centre (lukewarm chips and dry fish in bulletproof batter.) The Octagon centre used to be a dismal place full of tiles and white-painted concrete; these days, some of the concrete is hidden behind cheap plastic fascia … it’s amazing how little difference that makes to the place.
Home. Unpack. Reconnect to the Internet … ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. (Yes, I’m an addict. I admit it.)
So, that was this year’s visit to Mother for Christmas. I’ve promised myself that, next year, I’m staying at home with a bottle of whisky. Of course, I’ve been promising myself that every year since 1997 …