Geese flying

... over Burnham Deepdale marsh

It has to be one of the stranger Christmas days, waking to an empty house with my father's ashes downstairs. Made even more poignant by the fact that dad was obsessed with Christmas and wanting family to be together. It was a driving force for him that was set in place by his early life and circumstances which were very hard. And so being alone in the family home at this time would never have even remotely fitted into any of his conceptual framework. Christmas was never relaxing, it was a military operation with a timetable, it was obsessively driven, at all costs ... just how he lived his whole life. It felt rather sad to wake to the emptiness of the house and his still ashes, the only time he has ever been still.