Advent's second week

These first two Sundays in Advent, hope and peace, I know that they should lead on to each other, the first enabling the second. But these last weeks have been difficult where we are, and I spend a lot of time trying to still myself at all. There is such beauty in the November skies, such colour some evenings this week. There is such stark loveliness in the seed heads in the garden. There is such comfort in home and the lights and the warmth. There is such startling vitality in the skin's reaction to the Lough's now burningly cold waters! But hope and peace? I'm finding the word "faith" to be my focus this year.

Our church has folk reading a sort of advent calendar every day. (Not at all like The Christmas Mystery though!) A major character from the narrative of the Bible from Adam all the way to Christmas. Prince Charming read on 2nd December: Noah and his big boat. It was such a comforting account of the story. Noah gathering his family safely aboard and out of the way of the mean people around. If only we could do exactly that. Sail forty days and forty nights on dark waters, and send out our hope to the skies at the end. Maybe that's what this time will be this year. Battening our doors against the dangers outside, a microcosm of all we are and all we have. (A noisy and smelly microcosm - with two teenage boys this is probably accurate enough.)

Here's PC and Noah, if you need a bedtime story! And the link to all the rest is here, if you'd like to catch up x

And this was half-term!

We started in the wilds of County Down for two days. Jo has reached that part of Year 8 History where he learns about the Norman conquest of Ireland, and then looks at Norman castles. Well, we are not short of Norman castles here in Ulster, or indeed of the clear remains of original motte and bailey structures, so there was lots of mound scrambling! Then we had swimming, and climbing, and more hill-walking, and friends sleeping over, and going off to friends' houses, and walking down to church tonight with friends- by themselves, in the dark! I am reeling from it all. Although there was shelter for me in mounds of my own, of the laundry variety!

After church this morning I laughed in horror at the words of the father of two of our boys' friends. A colleague of his is, like us, the parent of a teenage boy. His take on the whole experience is that teenage boys are like dogs. You need to feed them regularly, exercise them with sticks and balls, and clean them out every now and then. I did laugh at the sticks bit. My two are obsessed with sticks and still have not forgiven me for not bringing their long-won and much prized collection from our last house. (We moved nearly exactly three years ago...) So this week they have remedied this lamentable situation. Prince Charming drew the line only at sticks that were clearly not going to fit in the boot of the car. The rest of the colleague's philosophy does also ring true for me at this stage of strawberry development!

And so back to routine tomorrow for another blast of school term. The boys' routine is well-established. Mine is not at all! I have done two weeks in my new spot, and am decided after a week's reflection to be very disciplined about how I use my time for the next few months. I'm teaching on Thursdays and Fridays until the end of May, and need to use lots of time revising my Latin, and sorting lessons that I want to teach! That and housework should keep me far, far away from on-line time-wasting, surely?

I do also need too to be more disciplined spiritually. I'm thinking of starting Lent early. Tomorrow, in fact! Have a great week, Blogland. Expect a timorous knock on the porch for a cup of tea and a quick moment between Concentrated Efforts!

End of an era

 I have been thinking that, apart from the working five days a week thing, and the looking after children and parents thing, and the being as lazy as get out thing, one of the reasons I have rarely blogged for a long while now is because I have allowed my mind to be ruined, ruined utterly, by a dependence on short, preferably witty sentences or sub-titles that require little effort and less thought, and which are usually found on facebook.

But this afternoon, writing this year's series of thank-you cards with my shining suns, it struck me that the place I really wanted to be documenting what is a big milestone for us here in the Meadowplace wasn't facebook at all. Despite the fact that blogs are much more open than social media with their supposed privacy settings, there is in blogging an atmosphere of intimacy and understanding that doesn't exist there. Here in the small nest of sympathetic readers is a small, precious space to lay down a little egg!

 Tomorrow Jo will leave Primary School. He will surge out of the red doors at 12.15 and bounce around for a while with all his friends, high on life and loud as a hoarse-from-a-morning-of-shouting thing can be. I think I started blogging in 2008, when Jo was about to start his nursery year. I was certainly blogging when he started school. He had seven years of hearing that school bell ring, running up and down that playground, doing homeworks, going on trips, walking/scooting/cycling down and up the hill, learning to play violin and protesting his hatred thereof at every pluck of every string! For most of that I was blogging cakes, books, trips, Wind in the Willows, walking down and up the hill- I'm not at all sure what!

I know that I did come to feel that I was eventually blogging all the same things at all the same times of the year. That did make me feel slightly boring! But what is life if not Autumn cosiness, winter lights, Spring emersions into the fresh air, and solo summer surviving when you have two suns and their high octane energy to channel and Prince Charming is safe in work!

Thankfully, regardless of his increasing propensity for teenage attributes, Jo has the living room floor covered in train track. Schools may change, height may change (that's definitely them rather than me), seasons may change- but some things remain to litter the nest a while yet!

Tomorrow our Primary days end, another holiday kicks off, and all will be well in the world x

My grandfather's chairs

 My maternal grandfather was a docker. In those days, in that Belfast, this meant that he worked at Harland and Wolff's. Everybody's grandfather worked at H&W's, maybe even their fathers too, if you believe them. Both my father and my grandfather did really. I'm not sure that they both worked on Titanic, which everybody's male predecessors also did. That's probably an urban myth too.

I'm sure that it is another urban myth that all these men were taciturn, tattoed and emotionally reserved. It just  happens to be really true of my grandfather, though I think the tattoes dated to his Navy days in WWII. It is true that he served on the Murmansk Convoys, and I think it's true that he survived the sinking of one ship in the Indian Ocean. I wish I'd recorded all this properly.

 This was my grandfather's chair. It sat in the living room window of his house, and he sat on it, and Max the dog sat on him, and the three of them weathered into one silent character in the story of my childhood. Sometimes Max would bark. I remember one speech that my grandfather gave. He was strangely at our dining room table, railing at God for having taken his wife so young and leaving him with six children to raise alone. I imagine this is when he left the Merchant Navy and joined Harland's.

His chair came to live with us last week, because my father got himself a recliner.I must take pictures of something in our house that hasn't come from someone else.

 But not yet, because here is the only other remaining chair of my grandfather. I remember when they bought a new dining room table and chairs- made of teak, with black leather seat covers. Very modern, very expensive. The seat came to me when my aunt sold the house. It was my desk chair all through school and university. And it has trundled along through three houses since. The leather ripped long ago but it took a Jo to demand repair.

 New foam, new material- beach boy, my Jo. X really does mark the spot now.

 No longer does he need to slide about on the hooked cushion that my mother made once upon a time. Now he has my grandfather's chair at his desk whence he can go to sea too. I'm hoping that they'll survive many shipwrecks.