Quick hello from my lair

and why I love the Lull

I see from my inbox that lots of people are out and about and consider Christmas concluded. NOT ME. I am just quickly sticking my head out of my burrow to say hello before popping back down.

One lot of guests has just left and another lot are arriving this afternoon. The house is miraculously empty because everyone else is on a dog walk at the beach, and I am writing this to delay changing the sheets. Oh, on sheets - we didn’t get them back from the laundry in time, so we had to do a mercy dash to John Lewis on the 23rd, with the quite pleasing consequence that all the beds in the house have heavily discounted ‘festive’ bedding on them - dogs in hats, snowy landscapes with pine trees, etc. I actually laughed to myself making my ex-husband’s bed, he being the most stylish man alive. I gave him the set with the fat robins. A new Christmas tradition is born.

We had the nicest time. What I really love about Christmas is that it allows you to be sentimental in ways that matter. I am normally not at all a sentimental person, being entirely pragmatic - in life you do what you have to do, I think, burn the bridges, sail the ships, feel things - but I love reminiscing at vast length about Christmases past when the children were small and I love that, because of the tree and the cosiness and us all being together, said children don’t roll their eyes but instead chip in with recollections of their own.

But I love this bit too, the super-relaxed bit where you just potter about eating (more) cheese and playing (more) Articulate. And maybe watch Gavin & Stacey again because it was so spectacularly good, so funny, so perfectly written and acted - literally every scene perfect - and we all cried at the end. I was thinking this morning that I find regret the most moving thing of all, in novels or in films or in anything - the idea that someone has taken the wrong road but for whatever reason stays on it, and lives the rest of their life yearning for what - well, for who - might have been. It’s the combination of the nobility and idiocy of it that moves me to tears (I still think Madonna and Sean Penn should have got back together).

I hope you had a lovely Christmas Day and that you are enjoying the Lull in a suitably well-fed and hibernatory way, like a bear. I’ll be back before New Year’s Eve, assuming I haven’t died of cooking.