Decking the halls…

I have to admit I’m an absolute sucker for Christmas.  I love the preparations; making the Christmas cake (usually several weeks too late so that instead of allowing it to gently mature with the occasional tipple it is force-fed brandy practically on a daily basis), finding the right tree, going out into the woods to look for holly with berries (will do that when, if, it stops raining), decorating the house, looking for cheap presents to put in stockings  and making mince pies while listening to comedy programmes, some I’ve never heard of, on Listen Again on Radio 4.

My mother, who died in May aged 94, came out to us for nearly every Christmas for the last fifteen years so this time of year is inevitably associated with her.  She loved Christmas and was always harking back to those of her childhood which were spent at her grandparents’ large country house in Kent and trying to recreate them.  Before I was married this could lead to several pre-festivity argue- ahem, discussions since she didn’t have the requisite staff of 15 needed to reproduce her elaborate childhood Christmas’s and, as her daily was on holiday, only one household slave (me).  It didn’t stop her.  One year the slave revolted and said if she was really going to insist on using the best china which couldn’t go in the dishwasher when we were having lunch for 16 she could jolly well spend Christmas afternoon hand washing them herself.  As my mother didn’t do Washing Up lunch was served on second best plates.

I think she thought that my idea of Christmas was always a little on the plain side so she’d arrive with her suitcase full of things she thought we needed to jazz things up, boxes of lemon and orange jelly slices because they looked pretty on the table even if no one ate them, Turkish delight (ditto), a pack of gold candles she’d won at bridge, crackers, a large chunk of Stilton, even  half a ham one year.  It was all much appreciated even if we did wonder exactly why she’d felt it necessary to import yogurt covered raisins from the UK.

My mother was intelligent, amusing, could be broad-minded and as even her best

A little festive breaking and entering.

friends would admit was also, on occasions, a dyed-in-the-wool snob.  Sometimes about the strangest things too.  One year, while we still at our old house, we went out with the dogs on her first afternoon and she stopped, glaring at our neighbour’s house.  ‘Urgh!  What’s that?‘ she demanded in utter horror.  That was one of those Father Christmas’s the French seem to be so very fond of, who shin up the sides of houses as if they’re about to case the joint.  Sometimes you get two of different sizes looking like a festive Batman and Robin.  I explained that our neighbour claimed he’d got it free with a tin of coffee and said he’d only put it up for his grandchildren.  ‘Maybe so,’ sniffed my mother, ‘ but people don’t have things like that.’

It was only then that I realised that for her Christmas decorations fell into two camps; the acceptable ones were those that might have been seen in the large house of her childhood.  Thus a really scruffy tree from the garden was always OK, an artificial one was not.  Decorations should preferably be old, were frequently tatty and the lights should be the type that threatened to fuse everything in the house on a regular basis; twinkling lights and a designer themed colour coordinated theme for the decorations put you beyond the pale.  Needless to say the moment my daughters discovered this they started to gently tease their grandmother.  One year a sliver sparkly revolver appeared on the tree, another year there was a light up Rudolph pulling a sleigh in the garden.  He wasn’t very big though so could be ignored.  They yearned to get a life-size blow up Father Christmas to put by the gate and a flashing ‘Joyeux Noel’ to fix to the side of the house but, perhaps luckily, never had the money to buy them.

A couple of weeks ago my youngest daughter and I were in Casa, that paradise for low-priced presents, and there by the entrance was a large transparent blow up snowman with flashing blue LED lights in his stomach.  We looked at each other and said simultaneously, ‘Would that have been a wonderful Granny tease?’

So at least one of our family Christmas traditions looks set to run on and on.

A Booklover’s Christmas Tree

I found the reference to this on cornflower’s blog and couldn’t resist it.  Gleeson Library in San Francisco made this tree last year from their books, everything was re-shelved afterwards.

What a wonderful idea!  Not for our house though, quite apart from the fact that my daughters reckon that bling is an essential part of any Christmas tree our book loving dog (as in loves to devour a good book)  means that it wouldn’t stay pristine for very long.

Whose accuracy is it anyway?

Tags

accuracy, book groups, inaccuracy, The Help

One of the first book groups. Note the essential ingredient - the wine.

My book group discussed The Help yesterday.  Everyone really enjoyed it, which one of the members said it was one of the best book group choices she’d ever read, and we had a really animated discussion about it which doesn’t always happen with the books we all like.  A bit of hearty dislike or indignation seems to sharpen our collective critical acumen especially if there’s someone in the group with diametrically opposing views.

I wrote in a previous post about of the on-line criticism of The Help, some of which is fair comment, I don’t agree with it but that doesn’t matter it’s the writer’s opinion, some of which is ludicrously over the top.  Reading some of the blog comments you’d be forgiven for thinking that Katherine Stockett had written a How-To book for the Ku Klux Clan rather than a feel-good novel where both the black and white main characters have achieved things that are important to them by the end of the story.

Among the many things which have raised the ire of the anti-The Help bloggers is that in the hardback edition of the book there is a scene describing the shock and fear of the black community when Medgar Evans, a real-life black activist, is described as being bludgeoned to death in the front garden of his house by whites – in fact he was shot and died in hospital – and this error was “quietly corrected” in later editions without a public apology.  I’m neither American nor black so I’m not in a position to judge how upsetting this mistake really was, but I can’t see why a public apology should be made for a mistake that was hardly libellous or damaging to Mr Evans or his family., especially when it’s been corrected.  Writers don’t usually write novels with a blatant disregard for the facts, especially if they’re aiming outside genre fiction, as we all know if you write, say, that your hero checked the time on the town hall clock in Melton Mowbray while he was waiting for a bus at the station it won’t be long before you get letters from readers pointing out that a) you can’t see the town hall from the station, b) there isn’t a clock on it anyway and c) the buses don’t go past the station.  (I have no idea if any of that is true.)  It’s so very easy when writing anything, be it novels, magazine articles or essays to concentrate so hard on making sure the big things are right that you lose sight of some of the smaller details.

In any case I find that I get far more irritated by emotional inaccuracies than factual errors though as one of the world’s greatest pedants I get pretty annoyed by those too.  In today’s Daily Mail there is an article about a picture of a shoot in the 1920’s at Downton Abbey and pointing out the many inaccuracies, the men were dressed largely in the clothesof the 1890’s while one of the gun dogs was a yellow

Historically and sartorially inaccurate...

Labrador which weren’t used for another ten years or so.  The series isn’t known for its total historical accuracy anyway (the excuse for the clothes was that rich people hoard their clothes so are often out of fashion, which shows quick thinking if nothing else) and though I’d prefer a Georgette Heyer style attention to clothing detail it doesn’t worry me that much.  What did stop me from going on with the series was in one of the first episodes when Lady Mary explored the attics and the servants’ bedrooms with a putative suitor which was so wrong in so many ways.  For a start no apparently respectable girl would have gone off with a man on her own like that, definitely not to bedrooms and she certainly wouldn’t have gone into the servants’ quarters because that would have been the greatest invasion of privacy, an absolute no no.  After that I couldn’t watch any more; naturally no historical drama series or novel can faithfully recreate the times in which it is set but they should at least create the feeling of those times.  Minor factual inaccuracies I  can cope with (though I draw the line at “historical” novels like the one I gave up on recently where the naval captain hero fought at Trafalgar on his little ship Victory, mysteriously enough the writer never named the flagship Nelson commanded) but I can’t go on with those books where you find that the historical characters have got the attitudes and opinions of someone of today, or where you feel suddenly, ‘No, they just wouldn’t do that.’  And that includes those witless heroine who somehow think it’s OK to follow the trail of blood and dismembered into the attic armed with no more than a hairbrush rather than ringing the police.

Hilary Mantel apparently played pretty fast and loose with some facts in Wolf Hall but the characters felt so right and alive and of their time that even if I’d noticed the fact tweaking I wouldn’t have given a damn.  It was still a wonderful book.

Doctor, Doctor…

Tags

arthritis, doctors, French health system, health checks

I really don’t have any right to complain about the French health service, in the eighteen years we lived here we’ve been treated fantastically; our GP arrived at 7.30 in the morning to see me after I turned over in bed and put my back out (the worst pain I have ever been in and absolutely no question of being able to get in a car so I could go to Urgences), when I discovered a lump in my breast on the morning of my father’s funeral and went straight to the doctor when I got back to France he said he thought it was harmless but I was obviously worried so he’d book me straight in for a mammogram.  He then apologised for not being able to get an appointment until the next morning.  I needed a cyst removing as a day patient, done within three weeks, when the side of my face blew up a few days before I was due to go to New York I was sent straight off for an X-ray just to check whether it was anything that might stop me flying…

That’s just about it really, since we’ve been in France I’ve had many more appointments with the dentist than I have with our doctor.  We’ve been living in this house for three and a half years and until recently I’d never visited our medicine traitant – he was on holiday when I  registered and I saw his locum instead.  I’ve been having problems with my hip, something which started when I was first pregnant, and even though I was pretty sure I knew what it was (and didn’t really want to have confirmed) I decided I’d better go and see the doctor as I’d feel so stupid if I’d been patiently suffering with something that could have been put right.

So off I go.  Things don’t get off to a good start because the receptionist had told the doctor my name is Courbis – I’d spelt it out for her but I reckon that the moment she heard my English accent she stopped listening and took a wild guess instead – and the doctor said I wasn’t registered with him.  We sorted that out, he peered at my details on his screen and said disapprovingly, ‘You’ve never been to see me.’  I explained I’d been to see his locum.  ‘But that was three years ago.  At your age you should be going to the doctor every year.’

At my age?  OK, he is about twenty years younger than me but I’m hardly at the blue rinse and zimmerframe stage yet.  He wasn’t impressed by my response that there hadn’t been anything wrong with me, at my advanced age I had to have regular check ups, in fact he’d do my blood pressure immediately because at my age it had a tendency to sky-rocket.  He’s a good enough doctor not to be disappointed at having to admit that my blood pressure was tres bien though he immediately said that it didn’t necessarily mean anything and I must have copious blood tests.  In the meantime I was trying to tell him that the real reason I was there was because I had a pain in my hip.  ‘It’s probably arthritis,’ he said, which I already suspected, ‘it’s normal for someone of your age.’  There are certain phrases you get very sick of hearing.

I visited the vampires at the laboratoire and have what seems like far too much blood taken and got some X-rays of my hip taken.  A week later I was back at the doctor who looked at the X-rays and said I’ve got arthritis (which I already knew thanks to the technician who took the pictures) and scanned my blood test results to tell me what I also already knew; that all the results were tres bien and I’m in excellent health.  Which is why I don’t go to the doctor very often of course.  However he still would like to see me in a year’s time for more tests.

As I’m a firm believer in ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ he’s probably being a bit hopeful.  I asked him what could be done about my hip and he offered me a weekly course of injections in my hip and back and seemed rather surprised when I said it wasn’t actually that painful so no, thank you very much.  Were there any exercises I could do that might improve things a bit?

Not really, he said shrugging, I had to realise that at my age…

Lift Your Glasses…

I’ve been in England for the last week or so, sorting out various things to do with my mother’s estate and, more pleasurably, going to the 90th birthday party of a very dear friend.

Mary is someone I’ve known all my life; her younger son is my age, her daughter is just a bit older than my closest brother and she and my mother were friends for over 5O years.  She was, and is still, very good-looking and all four of my older brothers indulged in Mrs Robinson type fantasies about her.  Sadly for them they were never fulfilled.

If you were to ask for typical adjectives to describe someone about to hit 90 most people would probably come up with things along the lines of frail, arthritic, a bit feeble, old.  None of those apply to Mary.  Mary is definitely not your little old lady  looking forward to a quiet retirement and a peaceful life.  This is a lady who is no stranger to gins and tonics and bought herself a birthday present for her 80th – a Mercedes two-seater convertible.  Within six months she had six points on her licence.  She still has the car, she still drives from Leicestershire to Scotland, on her own, to stay with her son and his family and says vaguely that when she can’t drive any longer she’ll think about moving from the cottage where she lives alone and being slightly nearer one of her children.  Everyone thought that time might have come when she was run over by a truck in Melton when she was in her mid eighties which caused horrendous damage to her leg – the sort of injury which so often marks the beginning of the end for “old” people.  Not Mary.  After more than a month in hospital she finally came home with a nurse to look after her and her main complaint wasn’t the considerable pain she was in but the fact that the pills she was taking meant she wasn’t allowed any alcohol. It didn’t stop her pouring her guests lethally strong gins and tonics though.  Needless to say you now wouldn’t know a truck had been anywhere near her.

Her party was held at the local agricultural college because it was the only place with enough room for all her guests.  It’s a sad fact of life that for obvious reasons most ninety-year olds don’t have a huge circle of friends any longer, Mary had over 120 to her birthday party.  I’m not sure I could rustle up that number for a party for myself.

Mary said at the end of the party that she hoped we’d all come to her 100th.  I have a feeling that we all will.