5120/18040
We were supposed to be moving in January, but because the people we were buying from turned out to be wassocks we are now back to square one and today went out on another day of looking at houses. It’s been two years now since we started our quest to move and it’s frustrating to be no further forward with it all. And none of the four houses we viewed today were right for us. I enjoyed having a day out with my wife and breaking for lunch in a nice Hertfordshire town and to a certain extent still enjoyed looking round the houses of strangers and seeing the eccentric choices that they have made. But we didn’t meet any celebrities today which was disappointing and we didn’t find the place that we’re going to live in and it’s hard not to let your head drop a bit. The quest continues.
I was so sure that we’d have moved by now that our box of Christmas decorations had been one of the things that I’d driven over to our inlaws so we could free up space in our house. But today we picked them up again. Will we have moved by the end of 2017? I mean this time last year I would have been confident we’d be in a new place before 2016 had killed its final celebrity, but here we are, trapped, like Truman in the Truman Show in a bio-dome that we can’t escape. And that’s the first time anyone has called Shepherd’s Bush a bio-dome.
But when we were home, at least we had our Christmas decorations and we could decorate the tree. For the first time Phoebe helped out and though Christmas must be a strange enigma to her at the moment, she did enjoy the tinsel and the baubles and the indoor tree. She dressed me up in tinsel and tired to fix a bauble that I broke (luckily just the bit that connects the ball to the string had fallen off so she wasn’t in any danger. But the mind leap-frogged back to my own childhood and the dim recollections of fractured baubles and paper chains and long dead, dead trees. These are the memories that stick and maybe Phoebe will have some dim recall of this craziness or believe she has when she watches the videos that we made of her trying to say that the tree was beautiful.
I sometimes questioned the necessity of Christmas coming round quite as often as it does, thinking maybe it should be once every four years, like the Olympics, so that it’s special. But it’s a lovely time when there are kids around, in part because it connects you with your own childhood so solidly. Rugby socks full of monkey nuts and satsumas. There. There’s one of the memories lodged in my brain which only comes out because of Christmas’ unnecessarily annual appearance.
Where will our tree be next Christmas? If it’s not here, then I think we will have a Christmas this year that will anchor Yuletide memories in this house. If not for Phoebe, then for her Ebenezer dad.
