The Cotswold Order of Druids had their winter solstice ceremony at Stonehenge. We went down, dressed up and got stared at by tourists. I love the feeling of owning the stones, being the people who can go inside the circle, by dint of it being our place of worship. What I hate is having a bunch of tourists photographing me while I do it. If I wondered into a random church and took photos of the congregation I would get chucked out, and yet it seems to be OK to video the weirdos in cloaks. Hmm.
The Oak King gave the Holly King a good thrashing and my kids handed out the food and drink. Nick called a quarter and it was about 20C warmer than last year, which, let's face it, wasn't difficult.
We were invited to my brother's house for Xmas. Mike and Ang live a few miles outside Nottingham in a lovely cottage, that they have been doing up for a while. They wanted to have a proper family Xmas there, with the kids and Mum. Nick was a little skeptical, wondering how they would fit us all in, but it turned out to be very comfortable. It looks spectacular. I was dead jealous. Why can't my house be so neat and tidy and beautifully decorated?
We drove up Xmas eve. It was a little challenging to fit seven people, a dog, presents and overnight bags into the car. Donny and Mel were effectively buried in the back, unable to move their arms underneath the packages and bags. I had the dog wedged between my knees and the rest of the family had sleeping bags piled on top of them.
I know some kids got to sleep early on Xmas Eve to make the morning come faster. My kids don't. They were just hyper excited and didn't crash until about midnight. Mike and Ang, who had an air-bed in the living-room, were woken at around 5.30am when Eartha persuaded Saskia to force-feed Angela smarties.
Meanwhile, Nick's cold had developed into galloping asthma. While the goose was cooking Mike took Nick off to the emergency clinic. I took the dog for a lovely walk down The Dumbles, which (Mike tells me) date from the end of the last ice-age, 10000 years ago. When they got back we had a delicious lunch. Mike and Ang are both very foody and great at cooking.
The kids went to play with their new MP3 players and I had a post-prandial snooze for a couple of hours (it must be my age). When I surfaced, it seemed Nick's asthma had gotten worse, not better, and that I was the only sober one fit to drive. Off we went to the clinic again, with Ang this time to give me directions. The nurse dosed Nick with nebulisers, which probably should have been done that morning, and then we went off on a scenic tour of Nottingham, looking for a dispensing surgery. It was gone nine when we got back, but Nick was a lot happier.
Boxing Day dawned at a more reasonable hour. We took the kids on a longer walk through the Dumbles and back before watching Dr Who and finally making in-roads into the massive overly creamy trifle I'd been creating all weekend. The final straw had been the wedges of chocolate orange balanced on the top. You could put on two pounds just looking at it.
We had a lovely time, though I don't know if we'll get invited again. The kids managed to break a bauble, dent the sofa and knock the end off the bedstead. Kids are just destructive. This is why my house is a disaster zone compared to theirs!
The Bikeability season is over. I have taught my last, very chilly, session for this year. Indeed, it looks likely that there will be no more bookings until about March next year, by which time I will be tromping happily all over the Karakorum, no doubt sporting a high-altitude headache.
As irony would have it, the council provided fluorescent yellow jackets last week. They say CYCLE INSTRUCTOR on the back. They are racing-fit, which means slimline and not really designed to have any warm clothes underneath them. They are also summer weight, which means not really suitable for standing around in the wind and light flurries of snow that we enjoyed last week. On the plus point, they are bright enough to be seen from outer space.
I was working with Mike, who was actually easier to get on with than I had been led to believe he would be. We managed to get some of the kids through the course. The school was in a deprived area, and so a lot of the kids had never ridden a bike before, didn't own a bike, and had the road-sense of the average hedgehog. Amazingly we managed to get a few to pass.
At the end of the first day with our new jackets, I noticed the lettering on Mike's was coming off on the back. Oh, how professional we look, shivering in our neon coats with the obscure message
Y I RUC
on the back.
In between odd days doing cycle training, I've been decorating the living room. I have painted the walls (badly) and the skirting boards (slightly better). We've had furniture in odd places all over the house, displaced from its usual spot. Yesterday, the day finally arrived. The fitters came and helped me move the sofa outside. I snuggled it under a tarp while the men did their funky thang in the living room. They asked me if I wanted the old carpet, and I said 'no' so they cut it into four. It was only when they were leaving that I noticed they weren't actually going to take it away for me. I guess I mis-interpreted their question.
The sofa came back in, just before a flurry of snow started and I spent the afternoon moving furniture back in to the lounge. I have to say, it looks fabulous. The kids keep rolling on it. Maybe they need to have that tactile thing before they can fully own it.
Anyway, I needed to get rid of the four rolls of old carpet left behind. One can go to a friend, who has no bathroom carpet. The other three? Well, I advertised them on Freecycle and within a few minutes I had three people fighting over them. In the end two rolls are going to a man who wants to carpet his 'cold house' and the third roll went to a woman who wants to keep her chickens warm with it. She took some off-cuts too. Maybe she's making them little carpetty jackets and hats? I'll ask her. She said she's going to give me her spare fire-guard. There's irony for you.
This morning Saskia and Eartha did their school nativity. It was not a cute affair with dressing-gown clad kids wearing tea-towels on their heads. It was more like High School Musical meets Britain's Got Talent. Eartha got a starring role and played it to perfection. She really is a performer. Saskia also performed her part well, making everybody laugh in the right places and singing with a smile. They were brilliant.
Unfortunately, I have no photos of them, as photos are no longer allowed in school. It is a sad state of affairs, when we are all so worried about 'bad' people that we can't photograph our own kids.
Oh yes, I titled this post "Restoring the Balance" because I was going to talk about work and the lack of it over the winter. Dave, who so often fails to return my calls and e-mails and generally hides when I come to call, has actually come up with some work for me to do. Maybe I won't be quite so destitute in January, after all.
It never seems to slow down around here. I feel like I'm working 12 hour shifts and don't have chance to scratch my ass most days.
I ordered a new carpet for the living room, courtesy of the house insurance. Before it arrives, of course, I have to paint the whole living room and skirting boards and rearrange the furniture. I started the process by painting the living room using a massive pot of industrial strength white, that must date back to our last house. It looked great until I viewed it in the daylight of the following morning. Parts of my painting look quite mottled, thanks to the contouring of the wallpaper beneath. I'm going to have to repaint a few areas that need a little touch up. I have the skirting boards scheduled for next week, when I have a dull moment.
Last weekend was a comedy night, organised by the Bowling Club. The club is trying to raise about £40,000 to rebuild the club house. The present club house dates from the '60s and is mostly clap-board held together with spit and string.
Mum had invited everyone she could think of - which allowed Nick and I to have a rare evening out together. We got Helen to babysit, which for some reason meant we had Helen's two year old, Sapphire, for most of the day before hand. Helen had gone off shooting clay pigeons. I'm not quite sure how that transpired, but Sapphire was no problem.
The comedy night was excellent fun, and we made a large party, what with all Mum's friends that she'd dragged in. I advertised, for the first time, that I'm nuts enough to try to trek to K2 next year and, in doing so, I managed to raise about £240 in pledges for the club. Hopefully that excellent total will rise, as I harass all my friends too.
Ironically, despite being signed up for a mega-trek, my foot problem means walking is painful. I have a pinched nerve in my foot. The condition is called Morton's neuroma, and everytime I take a step, the nerve is irritated. The cure for this is a bit hit and miss - an injection of steroids into the site, which works in about 70% of cases.
Well, the operation was scheduled for Friday, so I missed out on a day's work teaching Bikeability (something I can't really afford to do). Mum drove me to the hospital, as the anaesthetic prevents you from driving yourself home again. It was not the most comfortable of procedures. I swore when they injected the first lot of local anaesthetic, held my breath as they injected in a small ocean of steroids and more pain-killers, then watched as my toes and top of my foot went as white as the dead.
The anaesthetic wore off over the next few hours to leave it feeling as though it was bruised all across the ball of my foot. I can hobble around on it a bit, but I have had to miss out on the BMC's walk along the Long Mynd today. My foot currently has a purplish bloom spreading across its top, like a type of frondular fungal infection.
Still a bit miffed about missing the Long Mynd though.
I can't remember if I told you... at the Mensa AGM I was accosted by a gentleman, who had a friend who was starting up a Pagan Radio station. He thought I might be interested in it, so he gave his friend my e-mail and she got in touch. Well, we talked and I ended up offering to record some stuff that she might want to use. She sent me a little voice recorder and that's when things started to get tricky.I thought I would just read out some stuff I'd written and 'bingo!' it would be easy. No such luck. I wrote a couple of pages and discovered that not only did it only last less than five minutes when read out loud, but it was also delivered in a boring monotone, that no self-respecting radio presenter would ever get hired for using. Sigh. Back to the drawing board.
I decided unscripted was better, and sat in my car one afternoon with the voice recorder. I managed to spend 15 minutes moaning about how the kids had set fire to my living room carpet in a pumpkin related disaster. Score! I sent it off and they were too polite to tell me it was awful.
Anyway, I couldn't bear to listen to myself, so I thought I'd record someone else. We went to the Druid ritual for Samhain at the Rollright Stones. Once again, public speaking was a disaster, as I fluffed the blessing of the food. Even my son heckled me. I'm really not cut out for being the showman. So I cadged and recorded an interview with the ArchDruidess after the ritual, which came out rather well. Score two! Get someone else to do the talking!
Finally, in the spirit of getting witchier (I think my cover has been completely blown now), my friend Kate asked me if I wanted to go to the Witchfest in London this weekend. Kate is totally non-witchy. She's a member of the law-enforcement community in her day job, and they don't come much more conservative than the police force. But Kate is smarter than the average bear, and doesn't make judgements rashly.
So, Saturday saw me getting up at the crack of dawn to catch a train to London for this Witchfest. I have to say, it was a fabulous day out. We went to a whole load of workshops and lectures, saw some Morris dancing and did some shopping at the stalls there. The famous Prof Ron Hutton gave a couple of talks on Ancient Pagan Britain and the way that Hekate has been protrayed over the centuaries. He was an entertaining speaker. The other cool thing, was that the Pagan Radio people had a stall there, so I finally got to put names to faces.
We also did a short workshop on animal totems, which included a meditation. I was expecting my usual bear to appear in the visualisation, but instead I got a moose. This confused me, afterall, the moose is not even a European animal. Nick looked up the meaning for me, and it seems it is all to do with courage and self-esteem - two areas I really need to work on. So here's me, having the courage to tell the world and his wife what I get up to. And no, I didn't wear my cloak, but a lot of people did. I was definitely under-dressed.
I ended up taking the Russians to Ludlow to see the castle. After looking round the church and the market, we (Saskia and Eartha came too) discovered that the castle was shut. A little bit of surreptitious prodding and amazingly the gate was not locked. We managed to get all the way to the battlements before we got chucked out. Sergey was all for climbing the walls to get back in again, but Regina and I thought this may be pushing our luck.
Instead we drove to Wigmore Castle, seat of the Mortimer family. It was terribly overgrown, and hence an oasis of wildlife. Bunnies hopped across our path and crows cawed in the trees. 
Despite Wigmore Castle being so close, I had never been there before. It had a certain charm in the damp January air. I want to go back there in the summer.
The Russians left today. It was nice having them, but we are all very tired and in need of our own space again. Now, where did I put that vodka?
