and the holly bears a berry...

...as red as any blood
i]and Mary bore sweet Jesus
]to do poor sinners good.

That's what the Christmas carol says! I'm including these words for the benefit of international viewers, since they are fairly well known in the UK.

My day was all messed up today. I had to come home at lunchtime to do some work, then I returned to school at 4pm for a meeting. The meeting had been called to tell us that there is no news yet on the plan to save our school. For this I had postponed my massage client!

Never mind, the first batch of aromatherapy supplies is ordered; I have a stall at a fair on 30th Nov. Am worrying if I will ever recoup my expenses. Aromatherapy is not cheap, I mean a bottle of 'aromatherapy bubble bath' is cheap enough in Superdrug but the stuff I make is more expensive in terms of materials and, particularly, time. My motivation for doing the fair is to show my face in Stroud and to show that I still exist; have weathered the storms of the recession and am still open for massage, lotions, and face creams. Hanging on by a thread, but I'm still here. As long as people keep wanting to buy my products, I will keep making them.

The holly bush was blipped in the cemetery. Some days I catch the no 8 bus back from work, which drops me at the cemetery gates. I then walk through the Old Cemetery and the new part to my house. My mother lives next to a cemetery, too. In our case, though, we have a man called Steve living right next door. He is rebuilding one of the sheds in his garden so I'm guessing life will be extra-noisy over the next few weekends.