A Christmas Card from through the (looking) glass

Anniversaries and Angels.....

Three tiers for Christmas!  London is abuzz.

Visitors abound.  Loving themselves and each other.  They so belong here.....

Though Churchill's brazen memory still leans towards FDR's ear in the drizzle.....

And anti-socially distanced queues line the dark streets eager to part with their valueless inheritances.

While the most important thing is to make contact with those who are not near.....

And receiving such is a lonely drag on an unhappy cigarette. 

Though for some everything Rolls on so easy....

Stop the bus!  I want to get off.....

Help me up?  It's a cold cold world....

Meanwhile, back home in the country, I fail to celebrate my 36th wedding anniversary.  It's a question of memory, I guess.....

But we walk across the muddy, watery landscape, sniffing the sunlight and clouds....

It is what we do.  Every morning.  36 years, and counting.  Whatever else, I still love the trees, and the light.....

The land's sharp features seemed to be

The Century's corpse outleant,

His crypt the cloudy canopy,

The wind his death-lament.

The ancient pulse of germ and birth

Was shrunken hard and dry,

And every spirit upon earth

Seemed fervourless as I.

The Darkling Thrush

Thomas Hardy

Of course, some days, some mornings, are brighter than others.....

Some are misty....

And some, perhaps, are sparkling.....

Clouds beyond clouds above me,

Wastes beyond wastes below;

But nothing drear can move me;

I will not, cannot go.

Spellbound

Emily Bronte

There was a time, for me, when the world was beautiful, and full of hope.  It is harder now to feel so confident.

The dreamed Christmas,

flakes shaken out of silences so far

and starry we can’t sleep for listening

for papery rustles out there in the night

and wake to find our ceiling glimmering,

the day a psaltery of light.

Snow

Gillian Clarke 

Though not impossible.....

The roads are still there, to travel down.  And I sometimes think I could ride off, into the horizon.....

So, though the skies are dark, there's light behind the trees and maybe not all is lost.

Imagine how it must have been, aeons ago, when there was no Regent Street full of Angels, no Prime Minister's Question Time, no such place as Barnard Castle.  A time when a bed of ferns in a mud and sapling hut was luxury.   Imagine how limited hope might have been when life had no expectancy and Accident and Emergency was the rhythm of the day?  No Sage could decipher the pandemic and a plague was on all our houses.

The brilliance of dementia is that none of this has any meaning.  

Come on, baby, take a chance with us

Come on, baby, take a chance with us

Come on, baby, take a chance with us

And meet me at the back of the blue bus

This is the end, beautiful friend

This is the end, my only friend

The end

How she told me that one day we would meet up again

And things would be different the next time we wed

If I only could hang on and just be her friend

I still can't remember all the best things she said

Isis

Bob Dylan