I’ve just finished binge-watching the BBC’s new adaptation of A Christmas Carol. Did you see it? Victorian novels, and Dickens in particular, are my thing, so you could be excused for thinking that I’d swoon dead away at the liberties taken with the original text. Where were the cosy scenes of middle-class Victorian life? Whence the beaming Cratchit daughters and their twice-turned dresses? The Ghost of Christmas Past effing and jeffing? Mrs Cratchit as a Sweary Mary? Do me a flavour!
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Expectation Management
‘Tis the season to be – well, a bit overwhelmed and grumpy, actually, since you ask. Christmas cards, presents, food, decorations, remembering a thousand and one things for school, the same annoying Christmas songs being played on the radio over and over again – a few days before Christmas, my mind is whirling, I’m tired, and I just want to lie down on a comfy sofa somewhere in front of a fire reading the Christmas Radio Times and nibbling on chocolate tree decorations. Is that really so much to ask?
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A heavenly Christmas memory
It wasn’t that long ago that my December was a frantic round of costume making, line learning and general dashing from pillar to post. These days, with only one child in primary school and my Nativity days far behind me, that month of tinsel-bedecked craziness is just a memory.
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Life is copy
I’m sitting in A&E with my 94-year old father. It’s Sunday morning and we should be at church. Dad arrived via ambulance through the green fields on the approach to Ipswich on a bright, clear, sunny day, the endless Suffolk sky washed clean by rain storms overnight.
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