Christmas Day 2013 fell on a Wednesday but two days earlier I had sat at the computer feeling quite miserable. The previous week had seen me out three nights singing carols followed by two carol services on the Sunday and clever folks will tell me that my morbidity was because the chemical epinephrine, better known as the hormone adrenalin, had stopped flowing and so my body was out of balance.
Regular readers will know that, like TV gardener Alan Titmarsh, I love to sing Christmas Carols and also that choral singing is a wonderful way to obtain a spiritual uplift, as well as exercising the lungs and helping to make you live eight years longer than people who do not sing regularly. However, two days before Christmas I still felt a bit down.
This might have been because I knew that I had yet to buy my wife’s Christmas presents and did not know what to get. Her birthday is easy: A wheel barrow, electric fencing, step-ladders, and emulsion paint, all have set her heart fluttering in January. But Christmas; well that is different.
I set out for Ross and Inspiration. (A bit like Ross and Cromarty but closer to home) I first popped into Baileys for ewe nuts and chicken feed and then into that heaving emporium of single-minded-humanity known as Labels. There, I wandered around with one thought only in mind: How can I match the colours and style of the things on the hangers today to the picture in my mind of the lissom young beauty I had married 50 years ago. The lady assistants are wonderful but after about ten minutes they find someone more interesting and drift off. However, after an hour and weighed down with coat hangers I made my way to the check-out.
So it was with a sense of relief that I parked in Ross and strolled down to Café Eleganza for a light lunch a stab at the Telegraph Crossword and time to consider my next move. The move when it came was swift and decisive! Ruby Tuesday’s for a tapestry handbag, Boots for Chanel number 5, Smiths for a notepad and the tool shop for a car torch and jump cables for her car. Back home, I then neatly wrapped them all using the same coloured paper having found that making them all look the same saves on labels and having to compose multiple messages of endearment.
Christmas is now a memory but: and here is the reason why my adrenalin never slows for very long; there is the anticipation already building for the opportunity to sing Carols again in only ten month’s time. Until that time however, on most Monday evenings I can be found with a group of singers in Stroud where, in addition to their harmonies, they are also buyers of the eggs from our laying hens.
I am always surprised at how people who do not produce any of their own food express delight at the flavours and colours of fresh local produce. And it is a source of pleasure for when I hear friends describing their own experiences of keeping livestock and of preparing and eating local produce. In fact, only recently I was talking to a friend who is convinced that, when the Church gets down to re-examining the way in which the very early Christians emphasised the sharing of food during meetings we shall then see a great resurgence in attendance at the communion services.
Picture the scene; a thirty five minute quiet devotional service at the East end of the church followed by a genuine nosh-up at the West End. But just in case there are readers who recoil at this idea, I recall a scholarly local clergyman recently saying that some early records of the early Christian communion meal describe it as “A scoff”.
A caution however: All this talk of nutritious and flavoursome food reminds me of the poster outside a restaurant in Aurora Nebraska which reads:
When your palate is jaded with convenience food:
Come in and get fed up.
View from the Pew 