Friday morning, 6am

from my notebook 13.12.24

“Sit with the darkness and stillness around you and the darkness and stillness inside you.”

Woke at 3, one sock on, annoying me. Scratching at an itch under the ribbing. The bony bit – hard to get purchase there and knowing I’d likely break the skin if I kept going but not caring. Digging my nails in around the worst bit. A heat rash? A bite? Wanting to get up and have a look but also not wanting to because that would mean it wouldn’t itch anymore.

My favourite view from the house is from Carys’s room; this kitchen side window is directly below it. Beyond my three candles, the house next door. Its new neighbours. Their Christmas tree on. Green, blue and red I can see through the branches if I move my head about. Remembering the 1980s lights with their frilly metal skirts. Their sweetie-wrapper cellophane colours. Oh, the warm of them. These ones far colder. The light doesn’t travel at all. Just pinpricks of colour. But the thing about Christmas lights is I’m remembering them from when I was five or younger. Or I’m remembering other peoples’ Christmas trees. Ray’s? Gran and Grandpa’s? From six until I stopped going home for Christmas, we had nothing up at all. Eventually the 6x4 cross-stitch in its gold frame that I made at school one year. Mum put it on the top of the telly close to Christmas time then it was away again soon after. Where did it live the rest of the year since there wasn’t a box of decs for it to be packed up with?

That wee tree a consolation. The tiptoeing about we did as children without even knowing we were doing it. Why didn’t we put pressure on Mum and Dad to decorate the house? The two of us watching Home Alone over and over again instead. Me, reading and rereading the wee Ladybird Christmas Customs book I still have and yearning for traditions we had never even had. Hugely significant. No decorations because they upset my mother. Reminded her of the fire. She festoons the Auchengate house with them now but never again at Riverbank Street.

Decembers are hard for all the unwelcome ghosts who come to haunt us. They don’t come for our children. This December a challenge for reasons other than the ghosts, but for the girls as magical as it’s ever been. As magical as they’ll allow, anyway. When do traditions change? What prompts it? Believers becoming non-believers? Gifts taking second place to cash? The fog’s been thick over the city the past few days. Skies milky even at night. The walk home 10 hours ago when I stopped over the Clyde and took a photo to show that five hours after dusk it still looked like twilight.

Something about not being able to see clearly even when you’re really looking.

Going back to look at what I wrote in this hour last week. It was like an account I was writing for someone else. Who was running the session, who I was sharing the hour with, where I was sitting, what I had assembled. Who did I write those details for? A future me who’ll have forgotten these people, this time? Less the impression of how it felt and more the facts of the hour. Like a reporter. Struggling to write the things in my head running in parallel like the metallic smell of condensation or the oose crackling in the flame. Hand can't keep up, like I need to get all this crap down before the actual stuff can come out but will there be time. If I ever look back on these notes will I feel anything?

Been listening to Neneh Cherry’s memoir. After her mother’s death, Ari Up gifts a notebook to Neneh that had originally belonged to her own mother. How had Ari ended up with it? Had she read it before handing it over? What should we do with all these notebooks and journals? Do we need to write in our Wills who they should go to? Alan Taylor with an attic full of Alan Rickman coming to mind. A trusted custodian far enough removed from AR’s intimate life to make editorial decisions about what could be published. An honour to be privy to someone else’s intimate life. Makes me think of Ted Hughes editing and publishing Sylvia Plath’s diaries in the nineties. Whether, ethically, he had the right. The unsettling, paternalistic tone of the foreword gave me the chills, him telling the reader he had (conveniently) lost one of the two journals from the end of her life and destroyed the other. A third of her journals made it into the book. He and whoever it was that co-edited it redacted passages that exposed her as a deeply sensual, erotic person for, they both said, the sake of her children.

For the sake of the children.

Welcoming the Christmas tree, December 2017

We December for the sake of the children.

For the sake of ourselves, too.

PS: I’m making a donation to War Child this Christmas and invite you to do so too, if you can spare some cash. Just click here.