Christmas 2010

What a week.
I think I ran myself to a full stop, last night saw me in bed at the same time as my 9 year old and waking up almost 11 hours later...I really needed those zzzzzzz's!

We started the week (last Monday) with maybe 15-20 cm of snow, and I collected my baby brother from the airport (minus his wife who didn't make it through Libyan passport control as her exit visa was non existant). Ed and I spent that evening down at Lulu's with a load of expat friends celebrating a birthday and getting rowdier as the night and the drinks wore on.

Tuesday I had another trip to the airport (good job it's only 20 minutes away) to collect the parentals who were bringing with them an essential part of Christmas day - the pud.

Wednesday and another airport trip to collect missing wifey, the two of them (Ed ' Dear) then went into Düsseldorf for some retail therapy (apparently the opportunities for such exercise in Tripoli are almost none existant).

Thursday was the last day at school for Jas (Ben finished mid morning on Wed) and we went along for the carol singing which was followed by a half hour play put on by Jas's class. It was being performed in the music room, one of the only classrooms in the school to have carpet and so all the adults were told to remove their (theoretically) snow encrusted winter boots before entering - except for those parents (about half) who came after the thing had actually started and therefore missed the de-schoe-ing command.
After escaping from the school we went into Essen for the last day of the Weihnachtsmarkt, had planned to have some Glühwein, but the weather turned against us, becoming bitterly cold and starting to snow, not nice, even when you're dressed for it.

Friday was Christmas Eve, and I had a plan. Get up and get into Kettwig for 8am, in order to get the turkey from the butchers, yummy cheese from the market and whatever else I needed but didn't yet have (afterall, it is impossible to have too much food in the house over Christmas) from the (not so)supermarket.
Slight problem with the plan.
It had clearly been snowing for some time and the amount of snow outside had now doubled.
By the time I'd had breakfast Simon had seen the extent of the snow and declared that he would chauffeur me (I knew that Audi Quatro would be useful some day) and so he did, dropped me outside the butchers to wade through seemingly thigh deep drifts to get to their door and after I'd thrown the bird onto the back seat I was told to go to the cheese stall 'just across the road'*. Then to the supermarket - always a tricky venture when accompanied by a man who doesn't usually do the food shopping but who is partial to all the little nibbley things that I normally scoot straight past, at least he helped pack it all!
We then had a dilemma. The roads were horrific and friends up the hill on the other side of the river were due to be meeting us at 11 for coffee and to bring us the crackers for the 25th which they'd brought back from England the previous weekend**. A quick call revealed that we would have to go to them as they had even more snow than we did. I think Si was quite gleeful to be told this, up the steep and hairpin bendy hill in thick snow, a perfect challenge, almost too easy for Simon - although the snow plough coming down the hill didn't think so.
After the escapades of the morning we didn't venture out again, it snowed and it snowed all day, I was just glad of a houseful of guests who could be relied upon to entertain the children and shovel snow!

Christmas Day dawned bright (it's amazing the effect of a little daylight on a ton of brilliant white snow) and not too early (the older the children get the more amenable they are to the suggestion that 5am is not a happy time for parents to be woken) and we had the ritual present opening ceremony before I had to get stuck into the dinner preparations.
And then it was all over for another year, the freezer is fully loaded with turkey for pies, the garage is overflowing with empties that need to go to the bottle bank***, the bins are all full (some more than others, due to the Thursday and Friday bin men not making it along the road through the snow****) and the beer and wine levels are considerably lowered.

Boxing Day (or the 2nd day of Christmas according to the Germans) was its usual respite after the storm, no-one desperate to do anything but maybe get some fresh air. I refused to cook and booked a table at the local Italian, which was nice, but would have been better if, when I'd booked I'd asked for a non-smoking table - ho hum. And it started snowing again.

Which brings us to yesterday and the start of the exodus, Ed left first, the parents had time to try the Christmas cake, which leaves us with Dear who goes tomorrow just a few hours before the the guests arive for New Year's Eve!

I wonder how much sleep I can get tonight?


* through the deep drifts on either side of the road and then the knee high snow between the market stalls and back again.
** Christmas crackers are clearly not a German tradition as you can't easily get them here.
*** it was one of the jobs I wanted to do before Christmas (clear out before starting a new hoard) but the piles of snow everywhere put the kibosh on that.
**** apparently the various refuse collection companies have said that if they don't make it then we can take our refuse to the recycling site and they wont charge us - loving the irony.

Sunday Snaps 44

Our house on Christmas Day, although our neighbours icicle display is a little more impressive...

Book Reviews #10

Sebastian Faulks - Birdsong

I've probably read this book 3 times at least now, and still it staggers me with its beauty, and yet when I say that to people and they then say,
"what's it about?"
and I have to say that it's about the First World War, specifically the grim life in the trenches, understandably people do a double take.

I think I read this for the first time with my book group in the UK and I found it so incredible that I have since read anything and everything that Faulks has written (most of it good, but none of it has had such an impact on me as Birdsong) I also recommend it to everyone, I even got my husband to read it for heavens sake (and his reading matter of choice is either some work related business bore or Top Gear/Stuff magazine).

I've just reread Birdsong for bookgroup because that particular bookgroup meeting occured on November 12th, the day after Remembrance Day and it seemed an appropriate choice.

The story starts before the war in 1910, our hero Stephen is in France on business, he falls in love with a married woman and they run away together, leaving chaos in their wake. It doesn't work out and Stephen is forever haunted by this love. The story is mostly about Stephen and other soldiers in the trenches, the futility of war, detailing the minutiae of their lives - how the tea tastes of the petrol that had originally been in the cans it's been brewed in, how the dormant lice within the seams of their clothes can never be completely removed, the lies that the officers have to tell their foot soldiers, denying to themselves the certain death they are being sent to and the sheer infinite number of men, young and old who died and yet were never found.

There is another storyline running also, as the young(ish) grand-daughter of Stephen decides she wants to know more about the Grandfather she never knew, at one point she visits the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing and is shocked by the seemingly endless number of names inscribed on the monument,
"Nobody told me" she says, "My God, nobody told me".

That line is probably one of the reasons I keep coming back to this book, to remember, and also why I will keep on recommending it to people who haven't read it (even recommended it to a German friend last week, found the link on Amazon.de for the book in German and emailed it to her) I have toured around Brittany and visited areas where trenches have been preserved and where land is still fenced off due to the possibility of unexploded bullets and seen the memorial at Bayeux, at sunset, when the light turns everything blood red, we should never be allowed to forget the extreme lengths to which man will push himself, never forget.

If you haven't read it, do, please.

1 Rule for them,

and a different rule for me...or am I just becoming increasingly paranoid?

This is something that's been gnawing away at me for well over a week and I think I have to finally give vent.

At least 10 days ago I was dreadfully organised and started my Christmas present wrapping, specifically those presents that needed to be posted off somewhere. I then packaged them up into boxes, wrapped them again in brown paper and trotted off to the local post office. I took with me the few Christmas cards I needed to post too.

So I had 2 boxes, each a little larger than a shoe box, but not too heavy, 1 smallish jiffy bag and 6 Christmas cards, all going to either England or Ireland, just a quick hop across the canal (as the Germans call it) not far at all. And my bill? 50 euro...now I always mishear/misunderstand fifty and fifteen when spoken in German but even so, I wasn't amused to get no change whatsoever from a 50 note...

The guy commented that my cards cost 3 euro each to post because they were a 'funny size'. I don't know about you, but I choose cards for the picture/joke/message first and size second (although I certainly steer well clear of those huge padded numbers that come in their box) but these cards were smaller than the average card and would certainly fit through even the meagerest letterbox (which I thought was what the rule was - pay more if it don't fit, no?)

There was nothing I could do about it, just suck it up, I thought to myself, forget about it, at least the job's done, parcels and cards sent...but then this last week I've been receiving Christmas cards from the UK, and it was the last one that tipped me over the edge. From my sister in law, and it's A5 sized at least, just about fit into a letter box, and how much stampage did it have?

88p.

88p!

Where is the logic in that? I. DO. NOT. UNDERSTAND.

Maybe I need to be more German in my approach to this matter and either not send any cards or maybe I should argue the case with the guy in the post office, it just seems to be ridiculous to have to pay more for the postage than for the card, especially when it is only going across the canal and when I know I can order parcel after parcel from Next/Boden/M&S and pay only £6 per awkwardly shaped box....mutter, mutter, mutter.


Phew, vent over.