Christmas Thoughts III

It’s Christmas Eve 2011, just minutes away from Christmas Day, and things are quiet in the house - there's not even the sound of a mouse, but as we don't have mice in the house that's hardly surprising!


I've just come back home from collecting my daughter from a friend's house and I've now settled down for the night with a pot of tea and am composing this last-minute post. 


My feelings about Xmas have waxed and waned over the years from the nonchalant to the religious, passing through the various gradations in between. I suppose as I've aged I have become more respectful of the institution of Christmas and more circumspect of its significance, while continuing to question its historical factuality.


That aside, there is one Christmas tradition that I have come to dislike with the passing of the years, that of frenzied shopping and perfunctory present-giving, and I suppose these two acts go hand in hand more or less: if we didn't have to give presents as a rule we wouldn't have to do so much shopping. Or would we? Would we then just buy ourselves more presents instead? Hard to know without putting it to the test, but then we're opening a whole new can of worms.

I'm quite happy about sending Xmas cards but it's the buying and giving of gifts that I find comes in the way of a more relaxed and fulfilled Christmas. If we could find some way of doing away with this millstone of a custom and perhaps  just preserving it at the very most for one's children and closest family members we might be able to enjoy this important festive season, as it would automatically remove the stress and strain that it inflicts on our minds and bodies and on our pockets! It also reeks of materialism, as it seems to put the emphasis on material objects rather than spirituality. And the argument that one is giving to others cuts no ice with me, as we're also expecting to receive (except in the case of children) and if we don't get we don't give next time round.


The thing that really rankles with me is where people who make no attempt to see you all the year round and care not a jot about whether you live or die suddenly turn up on your doorstep laden with Xmas gifts, nearly all of which you don't like, don't need and would never miss. They drop the presents off (they always just drop them off, as they're in a terrible hurry and they have someone waiting in the car outside). You then realise that you haven't bought them anything in return, panic sets in and you are faced with rushing out to the shops at the eleventh hour to spend more money and make amends for your terrible oversight.


So, like it or not you're locked into the treadmill of gift-buying, otherwise those who give gifts to you may never forgive you for your failure to reciprocate and may shun you for the rest of the new year. But wait a moment, you think, that's what they've done anyway in the past. I haven't seen them since last Christmas when they deposited a carrier-bag of cheap shoddy prezzies on my doorstep and rushed off mumbling some excuse, not to be seen again until now! So what have I got to lose if I don't reciprocate? OK, so they'll be miffed, badmouth me for awhile and call me a few names behind my back but I'll be free of the drudge and expense of having to buy them Xmas presents every year.

The reality however is that you don't have the guts to do this and you drive yourself mad racing around the shops in an attempt to find suitable last-minute presents for your yuletide tormentors just so they can think well of you for another year. I recall one case where we had a tardy 'delivery' of Xmas gifts and when we failed to reciprocate, mainly because we were caught on the hop and with little time to correct our sin of omission, there were no more presents from that source when next Christmas came. And we didn't see them at all during the year - exactly as for the prior year when we were still in their good books. So no change there!


I find that devout Christians are the worst. They take the exchange of gifts so seriously, cannot forgive a lapse, and their subsequent vengeance is terrible! They seem to think that the spirit of Christmas is embodied in the buying and giving of gifts and cite the biblical Three Kings or Magi who brought gold, frankincense and myrrh for the infant Jesus. I sometimes wish there were special outlets selling these three items at Christmas at knock-down prices so we didn't have to rack our brains about what to get John and Jill. But alas no such luck! So it's the inevitable rush for that after-shave and that deodorant and that tin of biscuits and that set of toiletries and the odd bottle of cheap booze.


Well, anyway, enough said of that. As I mentioned at the start, this is Xmas Eve, all the buying  of gifts is over and any omissions are irreparable and the consequences must be faced up to in the coming months. It's time to turn one's thoughts back to the Christmas fare tomorrow and the abuse of one's body from an excessive intake of food and drink. It's the only way to soothe the pain of money ill spent and an empty purse or wallet. Oh woe is me!


As I write this, I am preparing to watch the midnight mass on the telly so I can once again assume the mantle of piety as befitting the occasion. A few rumbustious carols and hymns and some suitably humble praying and pleas for forgiveness should redress the balance and make me pure again. Well that's the theory. The truth of it is probably more like I'm riven with sin from end to end and irrecuperable! Or is that irreclaimable? Or even irredeemable? But whatever it is, it ain't good. 


Still, I do wish there were less spending and less giving of objects at Christmas and more giving of time. To give of one's time to another is the most precious gift we can give: time cannot be bought, cannot be extended, and is finite. Making time for someone is the giving of ourselves, not the giving of objects, it is the offer of our personal presence and company. Time given cannot be seen but its passage is very noticeable; it cannot be touched but its effects are very palpable. Perhaps people would do well to give more of their time and less of soulless objects which are often deposited in a hurry with the recipient for lack of.... time.

They were such times...

It was such a time, such a world, with such places, sights and things, and we were such people as once knew and moved through such a world.

It was also a world deep-scarred by the cruel hand of war.

But was it really as we are now pleased to remember it? Were those places and things as we recall them so many years long past? Were we those people, those fresh young faces? Did it happen as our memory has fixed it in our mind’s eye? Was it in this same world, in these same places and spaces where it all went on? Was it here that we lived a life that was of that time and of that world, never to be so again?

Does this happen anymore?

Was it for these times that we strove and for these things that we longed and for this state of being that we dreamed? Could we have imagined how it would be, how we would fare, and how our lives would run their course far into the future? That future is now this present, and this present is also our future and... our future end. The hopes and dreams of years to come are the memories and souvenirs of years now gone. The fresh waters of the fast-flowing river have slowed to the stagnant water of a turgid lake and we did not see when one became the other.

They were such times whose rich promise matched and stoked our desires, such days as stretched out to infinity. The world was always as we had come to know it and would forever be so. Family and friends too continued seemingly unchanging since first we knew them and would always be such. Our universe was stable, predictable, constant, slow and knowable, and we had it in our hand and under our control. So we thought.

Were we the last generation that would feel the undiluted promise of the future? Were we the last of the innocents, the dreamers, the hopefuls? Was the world we knew breathing its last while we opened the doors of experience that loomed limitless before us? In a time when the instantaneous and the global promised more than they delivered, could we have imagined our existence otherwise? We the hopeful, the gullible, the naïve, the children of the war generation scarred by savage conflict and full of terrible memories.

The Beatles will forever be identified with the 1960s

But either way it did not matter. It did not depend on us. The clock ticked on, patiently marking the passage of time, the days altered in colour and meaning, our certainties grew less certain, our values and beliefs grew dimmer and less reassuring, and our lives became imbued with a sense of apprehension we could not understand. But we were young and simple and confident and brash, and we had the wind in our sails and the sun on the horizon. We had youth and strength and energy and resolve, and we would not be told.

Yet even as we had youth in our bones and hope in our hearts, our era, our world, was nearing its end and it was not the world that our fathers had fought and died for or even imagined. As the old generations passed out of this realm and we took up the baton of life, stepping diffidently into the breach, we could not know we would be the first generation that would be shaken to the core by a tide of change that would sweep away all certainty, stability, conviction and self-assurance and leave a void in our hearts and anxiety in our souls.

They were such times as shall never again be seen and we were such folk as could glimpse the limitless possibilities of a world that was on the move, set in motion by the past and driven forward by the future.  Glimpse them we might but understand them we could not. The fast-flowing but tame river of life was turning into a raging torrent that would burst its banks and hurls us all into an unknown landscape where nothing was as it seemed, where the transient would replace the constant and the fast and furious would dislodge the slow and steady.  

Those unmistakable bell-bottoms of the 1970s!

The past was ours, the present is everybody's, and the future is out of our hands. So it is and so it has always been. The world we came into was black and white and grey and grim; the world we leave behind is a kaleidoscope of colours and a confusion of sights and sounds. We lived and we died and were reborn and must die again. We are you and you are us. You lived in us and now we will live in you. You are our future and we are your past.

In us you see yourselves and our hopes will be your hopes, our laughter and tears will be your laughter and tears, our joys and fears will be your joys and fears, our dreams will be your dreams. We once gave you life as you yourselves now give life, and some day to come you may say to those that follow: “It was such a time, such a world, with such places, sights and things, and we were such people as once knew and moved through such a world."

(Dedicated to my beloved mother who passed away so many years ago and whose passing changed me forever. She has lived in me as I may hope to live in my children. God bless her!)

Blog terminated for being too popular!

I recently came across a defunct blog (the Internet must already be littered with the corpses of blogs cast adrift for a variety of reasons, including death of the blogger!) which had been terminated, it would seem, for having been... wait for it... too popular (!) and taken up too much of the blogger’s time. It appeared that the blog in question had a large following (how large this was, I cannot say, as the list of followers was concealed and no indication of its size was given). The blogger gave no personal name, not even their sex, and of course no country of residence (although from the posts, Scotland would be a good candidate!). All that there was in the ‘About Me’ section was a cartoon picture of a female and this gender was reinforced by the tenor of the posts. The Blog had apparently began in June 2009 and by September 2010 it has already been shut down. Not a very long time by any Blogger’s estimation, I would think.    
 

Damn! This blog of mine is much too popular!

What aroused my curiosity most of all were the various reasons given for closing the blog: ‘...fast disappearing waistline.’; ‘...the whole time my waistline bulged.’; ‘The hours put into this anonymous diary (why anonymous, I wonder?) have to be put to something more ‘real’,’; ‘It’s time for me to wash off that face mask, get rid of the hair band and let my hair down for a while.’  The issue of being overweight was a constant theme of this blog, one post going so far as to say: “Please God, if you can’t make me thin, make my friends fat!!” More tellingly, the writer added: ‘In the beginning I begged for followers and comments, now there’s too many to respond to.’ and ‘I have outgrown this space – in more ways than one.’



It seems that the author of this particular blog was closing it down essentially on two grounds: that it was increasingly stealing her time which she could ill afford and could better spend on other activities and that the time it demanded of her (and therefore obliged her to sit at the computer) was adding to her waistline! The growing popularity of her blog had made it all the worse and things had now got out of hand for her, as she was having to devote more and more time to it, responding to the many comments it elicited. (The complaint of most of us is that no-one is reading our blog!)



And so, after about one year and four months of blogging, the author brings the curtain down on her blog for being too popular, and therefore time-consuming, and for ruining her waistline (!), although she does add as an after-thought at the end of her farewell post: “It was so much fun while it lasted and maybe one day you’ll see me disguised as another.” Remember that there’s no photo of the author, just a cartoon figure, and no details about her in her profile. She does however make one concession in this last farewell post, signing herself off as Kerry. This could of course be a made-up name, although I rather doubt it, as there was no real reason to break with her constant practice of anonymity and give a name as she made her exit.



Despite giving reasons for her having brought her blog to an end, I cannot help feeling that there might be more to this than meets the eye, that there are other factors at play here, other motives. It could even be that the blogger had already decided to start up a new blog, under a new identity, make a fresh start, gain a new and different following, change the whole ethos of her blogging. It could be. We have no way of knowing. It just seems strange to me that someone who has been blogging for just over a year, won a large following, is attracting lots of comments on her writing, has made a success of it (where many others falter and fail), is now bringing it all to a close because, supposedly, it’s preventing her from having a ‘real’ life and from losing weight!



It's time to kill off this blog!

But maybe I’m too suspicious, too distrusting, and that the author of the blog in question is sincere and honest and is genuinely giving up blogging. Maybe. Or maybe she's just giving up that particular blog and wants to start up a new one, as I've said above, and prefers to make a clean slate of it? Blogs are being started and closed all the time and for all sorts of reasons and causes. I suppose the most common reasons for abandoning a blog are death, illness, failure to attract a following, a wish to start afresh with a new ‘skin’, a new outlook, a new take on the world, and not because the blog has become too popular or that it is causing the blogger to put on weight! And yet who is to say these are not this blogger’s true reasons?

Thus closes another blog as a hundred others start up. The Blogosphere is a curious place and its very anonymity gives rise to a whole host of peculiarities, eccentricities and excesses. There is often sadness when a much-loved blog is closed down and the author melts back into the infinity and anonymity of the ether which makes up the Internet. Sometimes there may even be a feeling of betrayal on the part of the follower who has given his support to someone who now shuts shop and vanishes leaving them in a defunct blog. This is of course acute when the posts dry up, with no reason given, and followers are left guessing as to the cause. Has the author been taken seriously ill or even died? There’s no way of knowing. At least the author of the blog concerned has made a final farewell posting, given her reasons for terminating, and taken her leave in a proper and decorous manner.

I suppose the moral of this little tale (if there be one), is that even success can have its down side. Somehow I don’t think I will ever have to worry about my blog becoming too popular or my disappointing my followers, or being missed by anyone in Blogland if and when my posts dry up one day. But maybe this is a blessing in disguise? There’s no pressure to please or play to the gallery, no stress to write often and well, no strain from having to respond to lots of comments, and no urgency to, well, do anything really. Yes, maybe I’m fortunate after all...

Causa Absentiae

This is just to inform my many loyal fans out there (yes, you know who you are) and readers of my blog (me, myself and I) that the current gap in my blog posts is due to a very heavy workload (that's me opposite slogging away) which leaves me no time to enlighten and entertain my large and dedicated following. I have several ideas in the pipeline for future posts but have not yet had the opportunity to fully develop them, let alone put them on here for your edification and delectation.

So I'm just letting you all know, every man jack of you, that I will be back with another apocalyptic post very shortly and that you should be patient and not despair or worry yourselves sick over my brief absence, understandable though it is. Let's keep hope alive, shall we?

 

In the meantime I must dash, duty calls and work beckons and there's no time to lose if I'm to stay viable. My upcoming post will more than make up for the time lapse and the crushing vacuity of this post, once I've had the time to bring it to fruition, of course. And one more thing, please don't flood this site with appreciative comments, singing my praises and all that, the shock of it all would be too much for my system. After all, I've sort of got used to the unbroken silence...