Weeknotes 6

Following last week’s beginnings of a cold for the newest member of our family, both E and I also succumbed, all three of us sniffling and coughing though none more pitifully than C. I took to using a large muslin square as a handkerchief which gave E great amusement every time I would unfurl it from a pocket while she relied on the restorative power of Felicity Cloake’s perfect hot toddies.

With little desire to leave the house while recuperating, we found ourselves drawn to the neverending stream of made-for-TV Christmas films shown during the day on Channel 5. An early highlight was 2017’s “The Sweetest Christmas”, which featured the following classic line:

I have to tell him how I feel the best way I know how: with gingerbread.

A bonus mention has to go out to 2017’s “Four Christmases and a Wedding” for its title.

All of this reminded me of Alonso Duralde’s “El Mero Mero De Navidad Christmas Minute” on “Who Shot Ya?” where the film critic would review as many Hallmark Channel Christmas movies as possible in a minute.

E baked a large batch of Helen Goh’s black treacle gingerbread with the treacle left over from our Christmas pudding adventures and, what’s more, even managed to use up the blight on our household that is greaseproof paper to wrap them up as gifts. The combination of large quantities of biscuits and a daily ritual of tea in the afternoon is proving disastrous for my waistline.

We voted by post for the very first time which I found rather exciting having only ever been to polling stations in the past. I was particularly intrigued by the design problem of explaining exactly how to fill out a postal ballot; not least because it involves two envelopes and not tearing off a slip of paper. Perforated paper seems like a classic affordance and the temptation to tear it, even having read the instructions multiple times, was huge.

I’ve been using FaceTime more and more so that distant family members can see C and have been startled when calls have been answered with unfamiliar faces present. It’s not quite David Foster Wallace’s predictions about video telephony from “Infinite Jest” but there’s something odd when you expect to see a loved one at the other end of a call and instead find yourself suddenly showcasing your child for a stranger.

Continuing the theme of things for which I lack mental preparation: we visited two nurseries for C as there are waiting lists of up to a year in our area. I was a little caught in the headlights as we were given tours and heard about the various facilities on offer (even being reassured that any information technology used in the nursery was divorced from social media).

Finally, our year-long nightmare of not opening a tiny cardboard door every day is over: it’s advent calendar season!

A former colleague of mine really made me question what is sacred when he took up happily consuming entire advent calendars as a snack in the run up to Christmas a few years ago. As I pleaded with him that such a thing was just not done, I realised that I had become a character in a Mitchell and Webb Look sketch about starving Antarctic explorers:

Lieutenant, there are some things that a true Englishman will never countenance. That is a Christmas pudding and we are saving it for Christmas, is that understood?