Happy Christmas everyone

Our Christmas Hearth

Yesterday we went to Rae and Malcolm's for mince pies, and now it is Christmas Eve. Edwin and Andre are here to share Christmas and prepare for my grand 80th birthday bash. A large number have said they will come, so we hope the weather holds out. If the snow returns, we may be limited to a few local people. Christmas is upon us, meaning more work for Ann and not much change for me, now I am mostly retired. We have a large box of fruit in the kitchen, and Ann has been so busy she watered the pineapple. As always, the hearth and its warmth take the centre of the room, and Ann has decorated it in beautiful simplicity. It is surely no coincidence that the hearth contains the heart. Christmas shopping this week, Edwin was next to a young couple with a pile of wrapping paper in their trolley when an older man walked past. "Oh," he said, "are you only just doing it? I have a wife and four children and a full-time job, but I got all my presents wrapped a week ago!" 

I always welcome the winter solstice with its hope for longer days and a promise of regrowth. We have passed the turning of the year, and "as the day lengthens so the cold strengthens," as my mother used to say. We must hope we don't get the weather they're experiencing in the US, or our boiler will never cope, even without an energy crisis. It has been quite a year, with three primeministers, a change of monarch, a major European war, and a cost-of-living crisis, all additional to the passing of sentence of execution in my own case. 

I have been watching His Dark Materials, the third part of which is now being broadcast by the BBC. Many have criticised it as blasphemous, but I interepret it as only anti-organised religion. I have always thought it a gross arrogance to presume that any one religious doctrine is the absolute truth and all others are a lie. No one person, surely, can have no more than a glimpse of the unknown. So many glimpses give us a hint of a shadow of truth, but the whole truth is hidden. I attempted to explore it in my book, Girders in the Sand, suggesting that there is a reality beyond that of which we are conscious, His Dark Materials chimes with this, Suggesting as it does that organised religion seeks to control the minds of its adherents, yet beyond it is a deeper truth, wherein there is a mysterious connection between living beings and the universe that created us. It is a book of great depth and thought-provoking subtlety.