Reflecting on Christmas

While some people are already taking down their Christmas decorations and declaring it all over bar the Hogmanay booze-up, it's good to come home to my own tree and cards that I felt I barely had time to notice in the pre-Christmas rush. Church this morning still had all the candles lit and the angels and flowers looking quite different in the morning light after the dark in which I last saw them - symbolic, in a way, of the idea examined in the sermon about the darkness that can emerge in the midst of our frantic efforts to make our Christmas perfect. 

Apart from church, I spent a hectic (and hungry) hour in the supermarket; my larder was sadly bare because I spent Christmas away and I have mouths to feed ... And we managed a walk in the near-dark along Loch Eck-side, because we both felt the need of air and exercise. (How unbelievably mild it is!)

Two phone-calls before dinner and then the start of the Trial of Christine Keeler. She was such a feature of my teens - only 3 years older than me, with both my first and second names, but a world apart in experience. I'm looking forward to its development, though I found it disturbing to see so many actors familiar from other parts suddenly translated into the leering and fondling creatures that inhabited our recent past.

Blipping the row of candles in the porch at church this morning.