Author Archives: claire

The Meaning of Christmas – Deed Two.

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Here is the second good deed for this coming Christmas. Remember, the rule is that you cannot tell anyone your good deeds. Feel free to send on the idea of the Twelve Good Deeds to someone else, but your own good actions have to be kept a secret from them, if you follow. To business!

Deed Two: Go into a bookshop, and buy a book. 

This does several good things. Firstly, you have to leave the house and interact with the world which, I understand, they have in 3D now.

It won’t recognise Windows.

Secondly, you get to go to a bookshop and have books around you. Books of all sorts, of shapes and sizes, new ones, old ones, smart and stoopid and funny and dumb books. Think of all that knowledge and fun and stuff just waiting there for you, waiting for you to pick up and ingest and enjoy. What is wrong with that picture? Nothing! Books! Look at me, I’m giddy at the idea!

Oh, I bet they have that one I’m looking for…

And the other thing you are doing is supporting a local business, which, seeing as you are going there in person is therefore local, and you are buying a book which will make you not only smarter but also sexier to anyone with sense, and you are giving money to good causes, which are supporting bookshops and supporting your brain, and really if you need explaining on this point I can’t help you, just go to the bookshop and buy a book!

So that is Deed Two. Go to a bookshop and buy a book. Gwan gwan gwan.

The Meaning of Christmas – Deed One.

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Each year Christmas comes earlier, and as such the meaning becomes more diluted. Sure, it may seem to be about Peace, Kindness and Goodwill to All, but what it actually becomes is a hunt for presents no one remember and a panic filled feeling that conveys only stress.

The best way I have found to counteract that, is to instigate the 12 Good Deeds of Christmas. These twelve deeds convey to even the most weary soul a sense of the meaning of Christmas that can’t be denied. But I must have rules for you, if you decide to take them up.

YOU CAN TELL NO ONE YOU ARE DOING THIS.

A big factor is the avoidance of praise for doing all this. Instead, make your good gestures silently, without fanfare.

So, without further ado, here is Good Deed Number 1;

1. Write a thank-you note to someone who normally never gets thanked.

Your bin man, your post person, the lady who makes coffee each day,  the cleaner at work, the train driver, all these people do their jobs without any expectation of thanks. Go and get a small thank you card, or a piece of blank paper, and write out to them a thank you for all their hard work.

You don’t have to sign your name if you don’t want to, the gesture itself is enough. But sending thanks out there, to some of the large numbers of unthanked people we meet and rely on everyday, is a wonderful thing to do. And you’ll be thought of in the most positive fashion for your actions.

 

Got any other suggestions for good deeds? Let me know!

Cake

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I grew up with a Mum who thought all meals come with dessert. In face, the quality of her table was amazing. And one of my most treasured possessions is the Good Housekeeping cookbook of hers that I have. It is full of the type of elementary information that so many of us wouldn’t know how to ask, these days; from how to skin the chicken to how to melt the suet, and so on. It has these ornate colour plate photos in them, beautifully stylised, showing the most perfect and unrealistic food for a woman with six uncultured hungry kids. Fish chowders. Souffles.

Any way, one other thing she did was collect and gather recipe leaflets, those Bord Bia or whatever people that gave out recipes for yule logs or turkeys or what have you. One of them was a Cadbury’s Bourville leaflet, that gave out chocolate recipes, that I loved. I was never able to find it after she died, but I remember Saturday afternoons making something called a ‘Hot Milk Chocolate Cake’. The description of it was really evocative, and conveyed a tone from the writer like something from the Ascendancy; “I first recall making this cake on an old wooden stove in Kenya. Its richness defies description”.

I’d love to have that leaflet again, just to remind myself of the boring Saturday afternoons of my teenage life that I tried to fill up with stuff, having to get the kitchen cleaned before dinner would start and my sisters would want to watch Blind Date. I even contacted Cadbury’s, asking them about it, but they couldn’t locate it.  Ah well. All good things.

Some random Tuesday…

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Hey! Yeah, it’s early, but only in sane people’s timelines. Me, I’ve been awake since four am. No, not coming home at that hour, hair messed up and holding a pair of high heel shoes that I should have known better than to think would be a good idea cos lets face it, heels and me don’t mix, no matter what the magazines might say, Anna Wintour can get stuffed if she thinks I’m falling for that one again, no, but the black dress was a winner and everyone said so, even the taxi driver on the way home so go me, I rock and in a good way, No! No, I was woken at 4am, woken by my beloved child who thinks that our house is not our house, but is Fossett’s circus to play and laugh and thump and thump some more and oh my God I am so tired.

Still easier than a two year old.

Coffee only does so much, and I have stomach aches that let me think the acidity in that cup of joe is not doing me any favours. And it seems so dark when you’re tired, I’m growing more convinced that my eyes just strike at the idea of work, so my surroundings seem Gothic and dim these days. It’s just part of the price of living on this island at this far north on the planet, when sunlight becomes optional and all you can do is hunker down to the old myths and methods of dealing with the dark.

Doesn’t matter who you are, it helps, doesn’t it?

Anyway, I’ll keep on keeping on. Talk to you soon!

 

Gatekeeping the nasty stuff…

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As the last two weeks were so busy, I wasn’t on social media at all. And I mean at all, I didn’t look at Twitter until Saturday, which was when I discovered about www.thestory.ie’s getting the four ECB letters received. One thing I did find when I wasn’t on the Internet was the silence regarding bad news. Nothing, not a thing, did I hear that made me sad or upset.

I was on Twitter at lunchtime for about half an hour, when someone happily put up pictures of a man being hanged in Iran; they weren’t in the feed of a news organisation but instead were being retweeted by an author I follow. The pictures showed him waving to his daughter as he was about to be hanged, followed by his dead, lank body on a rope. No warning, not hidden, just there when I clicked into twitter. What am I to do with that image, sitting at my desk at lunchtime as I am? I have no effect on Iran, immediate or otherwise. I can’t do anything. All I can do is be sickened to my stomach by an image that gets no immediate context around it, and then try to get on with my day.

I’m obviously out of Twitter now, but it keeps throwing these images at me. There are no gatekeepers on Twitter, thankfully, that is what keeps it relevant. But there are no gatekeepers on Twitter, unfortunately, and it is that which keeps me wary. A modern problem.

Things to think about.

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Something horrible has happened to someone I know; something that is a parent’s nightmare, in that they found their little boy had passed away in the night. He was two years old.

There is nothing wrong with my life in the slightest, despite the constant whining I think I must generate.

I am now going home to count my blessings.

Blessings