FILLING MORE GAPS

The Beloved has developed her annual Christmas cold which is, quite naturally, what comes of working in an environment full of "people" like she does, but at least it descended after her work Christmas outing so that, for this year at least, she didn't lose all of her prepayment.

Still, she dragged herself in for one last hoorah, and, after I dropped her off at the station, on my own way to the office to face what was expected to be the last working day of the year, (although this was by no means certain), I noticed a great big billboard informing me that Santa, at least, believes in Coca Cola which is, at least, very comforting. Personally, I've never actually seen a real Coca Cola despite hundreds of people trying to tell me that it does exist, so my relationship with this fabled fluid has always had to be ambiguous at best, until I got absolute proof.

Phew! What a relief!

It's good to finally know, though, because I really was beginning to think that Coca-Cola was something children had just made up to explain the existence of Bacardi to grown-ups.

Happily, there are no such doubts about the provenance of the one and only, 100% guaranteed genuine Santa to make this claim, and I'm now convinced enough to go forward into my life believing whole-heartedly in the existence of tooth-rotting fizzy pop…

With that matter finally settled, I sat down at my desk and allowed the day to unfold, although with so many sirens being heard during the morning, it did seem as if Christmas is beginning to become such a troubled time of the year…

Mind you, with the way people drive, and with all of that desperation in the air when it comes to completing the shopping in order for everyone's expectations of perfection to be met, perhaps it's not surprising that there's aggravation and impatience in the air and tempers get more than a little frayed during the run-up to the so-called "season of goodwill..."

Meanwhile, the drudgeries of life go on. I got an irritated telephone call from the Beloved, mostly to ask when I was finishing work for the day, but also to grumble a little about the latest call she'd made in response to another stroppy and demand-filled letter we'd received with regard to mum's Estate. Of all the people we've had financial dealings with since mum's death it turns out that the bank is the one which is most unreasonable when you telephone them which is ironic given that it's they who actually have much of mum's money still parked in limbo...

Everyone else is actually very sympathetic and understanding, but I'm prepared to believe that the person she happened to call had already been hitting the sherry because, if there's one thing I remember about the Christmas when I'd been offered my first "proper" job and was waiting for my January start date, the bank I went into to set up my nice new current account was falling over themselves to hand out the sherry and mince pies which were, incidentally, the only thing I remember ever getting from a bank which didn't actually require forms to be filled in and a fee to be paid.

The day plodded to its natural conclusion and, if the email we got a few weeks ago was to be believed, we finally finished for Christmas, although first we had to enter that strange hinterland where it's not quite certain precisely when we would be finishing…

Once upon a long ago, a call would come through at a ridiculously early hour and basically tell us to go home. In those good old days I would depart in a mood of utter dejection and then would most likely have popped around to see my mother on the way home if we finished early enough, but obviously that's no longer an option any more. Anyway, as it turned out, that call didn't come so I ended up driving home in the dark as usual and popping into a supermarket to get the Christmas Lilies, a visit which brought me into direct contact with some Christmas spirit as a passing stranger offered me his parking ticket to save me a quid...

Hey, you've got to take it where you can find it.

In the meanwhile, as an aside, I utterly failed upon my mission to find the Beloved some cheese-related Christmas carols for some reason which now escapes me… I think it was to do with a message she was writing to a fellow cheese-lover but my own experiences of cheese-related punnery (see "Henry Brie" in the "MAWH - Light Under A Bushel" blog) were not quite suitable.

Anyway, I spent no time upon writing such a thing myself, and a quick internet search proved that there was little in the way of cheese-related carol lyrics out there, although I did discover that Leeds has a very promising sounding monthly meeting of a cheese club, and, from a list of Christmas carols I found, the following few seemed the most promising, if you budding copy-writers feel like having a cracker at continuing with any of them...

"We three Kings of orient are

Bearing cheese we've travelled quite far…"

"Good King Wensleydale…"

"Yarg! The Herald Angels sing!"

So… In the manner of a slightly Christmassy game that we could play, what precisely are the rest of the special "cheese" lyrics to those Christmas carols…?

I look forward to finding out...