My Middle-Aged Gap Year
Where has the time gone? Down a festive plughole, that's where! Although that doesn't sound very positive. I thought about a festive wormhole but that sounded more weird than positive so plughole it is.
It's been two weeks since my last post which I thought would be fine because I could tell my avid reader(s), L, not to bother logging on until I'd got round to writing it. Imagine my surprise when I viewed the analytics today and appear to have achieved 4 whole views on certain days! Very surprised let me tell you.
This Christmas we did something new. In the months running up to the aforesaid event, perhaps when feeling particularly ambitious and hopeful, or more likely pissed, we decided it would be a great idea to spend Christmas in Cornwall. It turned out that L's side of the family also thought this sounded like an excellent idea. Or they were visiting family in the area and couldn't think of a good reason fast enough to get out of it. So come Boxing Day, we had 19 in attendance and sleeping over as well as various branches of the family staying before and after.
Like I suspect with every family, there can be tension, differences in expectations, differences in what people think we should all be doing. Competing organisers and those reluctant to be organised. I therefore anticipated there was a reasonable probability that this coming together would be an unmitigated fucking disaster. So I regret to say (from a reader's point of view) that it was generally fine. How disappointing!
There was the obligatory playing of games. Evenings would typically end with finally conceding to play Jackbox with the teenage children. Jackbox for the uninitiated, is a playstation game which involves writing 'funny' ends to various suggestive sentences on your phone. These answers would then be displayed on the TV with participants voting for their 'favourite'. I was hopeless until I resorted to writing the most inappropriate things I could think of - hairy beef flaps etc. L's Dad quickly (as quickly as an 80+ year old moves) left the room when reference was made to Grandpa's pubes and dental floss - and that was an answer from one of the kids.
This year we went with a secret santa approach to presents for L's side of the family. The limit was set at £10 which very much goes against my approach to gifting. When in doubt, throw as much money as you can afford at it and then some money that you can't afford. Surely more money equates to more love. Also at least when they take the unwanted/inappropriate gift back to the shop, they have more to spend on an alternative.
L vigorously and wholeheartedly disagrees with my approach. She prefers the much more difficult task of buying 'thoughtful', 'personal' gifts that show how much you care for and know someone. So when L thought my first attempt was a bit shit (a book priced at £9.99 called 'Unruly' by David Mitchell about the Kings and later Queens of England that I wanted to read), I tried to rescue it with a bar of soap (also deemed a bit shit) and finally a £20 box of brownies from Gower Cottage (amazing brownies but now clearly miles over the limit and still something I'd also requested for myself for Christmas).
Then on Christmas Eve, when panic buying some nice wine for Christmas Day from Old Chapel Cellars in Truro, I ventured into Oxfam and bought a pink wooden 'calendar' elephant and a pair of toucan shaped earrings. The elephant has wooden blocks in it for the day and month of the year. I'm not sure who has the time to change the blocks each day but likely the intended recipient, a working mother of two small children, isn't one of them. As for the toucan shaped earrings, I left the shop wondering if they'd need wiping down with antiseptic before gifting them.
The one upside of secret santa I reckoned, was at least the recipient wouldn't know I had bought her the shit presents. Unfortunately later on Christmas Eve, my son revealed to said recipient that I was their secret santa buyer. She was very polite about it and hopefully she will realise in time that she also wanted to read about King Aethelstan of England. We returned home with the pink elephant still in our possession as it was deemed too shit to gift.
There are many things you can say about Cornwall - mostly good and the odd bad. But one particular highlight is that it's a really good place to go for a walk. We had a lovely walk with friends from Mylor Bridge to Mylor Posh Bit. Along the way I was presented with various ideas for how to occupy the rest of my year off although the only one I can remember is to write a book about lichen. We also walked to Polly Joke beach with members of L's family and finished with a drink at the Bowgie. I was left to speculate whether it's the only pub in the country who thought the solutions brought in to meet social distancing rules during COVID times were so bloody fantastic, that they should carry on with them post COVID. You can't order drinks at the bar. You have to use an app or a McDonald's style electronic screen. Someone had to help us navigate around the complexities of the McDonald's style screen so I was left wondering whether they could simply have been pouring us the drinks following a verbal request. But for those still wanting to socially distance the Bowgie is perfect because it is also empty.
We returned home with the prospect of New Year looming. More about that in the next post.