Christmas 1999

Stratton.
Cirencester.
Gloucs.
U.K.

4.12.1999.

Hi! Merry Christmas, Folks!

As we rush headlong into the season of enforced cheeriness, despite the deep grey clouds, the icy blasts of wind and the horizontal driving rain (where, oh where is the faraway holiday of yesteryear?), I shall attempt to rise above the mid-life ennui and Seasonally Affected Disorder to bring you.........the Irving family missive! (Aaagghh! No! Anything but that!.........Sounds of wailing and gnashing of teeth, and scrunched up paper hitting waste bins!!).

Cough! cough! (Much clearing of frog in throat!). The Prologue.......It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.........If you’re sitting comfortably, then I’ll begin..........(Pick a style - any style!).

The state of the house is usually ever present in our minds....but not usually too high up the scale of consciousness to overcome our inherent state of laziness..........nice ideas, but zzzzzzzzzz!!! Bleep! Bleep! House restorer’s overload! The circuits have crashed! Early millenium bug! Can’t cope! Aaagghh!!! We did manage to persuade Ed. Boote, our friendly carpenter, to replace two of our first floor windows with double glazed, draught-proof, hand-made sliding sash windows. Having spent much of September and October cursing and swearing his way through the painting, Bob now knows why sliding sashes went out of fashion!! However, they do look splendid...........now all we have to do is save up for the next two! In the latest battle in the war against the Aspergillus (black fungus) we have installed fans to suck steam out of our bathrooms......cackle! cackle! (but what is the evil Aspergillus planning now!........first the bathrooms, tomorrow the world!!!......gulp!....must stop watching horror films!). There are worse things..........!! Can you imagine standing on a very large slug whilst stumbling around early one work morning in the darkness?? Ugghhh!!! Doesn’t that set your spine tingling or your teeth on edge!! Not even horrors such as these have jolted us into action! Obviously, we’re in hibernating mode (oh, so building a fire surround is hibernating, is it? - (Bob)).........it’s just a pity the house livestock isn’t!

Talking of livestock - Rupert is still with us at the grand old age of 19 (we obviously make life too comfortable for him!). Having whiled his way through two years of A/AS levels not doing a great deal, it came as no surprise to anyone that he only managed to scrape through with low passes (insert typical parental moans). Will he manage to do any better with this year’s lot?.......... hmmmm! He could surprise us!!!! We await with baited breath! Rupert’s life is music, music, music, to the exclusion of everything else - he is in several bands locally, and loves the adulation of his adoring fans so much, that he is rather afraid of leaving this cosy world, even to do an HND in Music Performance / Music Technology, which I know he would love......ho! hum! On the plus side, Rupe does sing extraordinarily well, WHEN he can find his way to the front AND find the music - at the last concert, someone had to be despatched to find the book for his second song whilst he was singing the first!! Sigh!! During the year he has acquired a small and disreputable motorbike, supposedly to take him into the wilds of Gloucs. where most of his friends live. It’s now got a puncture which is a problem of such vast magnitude for our hero that it may never see the road again. Or he may end up with an immaculately blown-up tyre and a pile of rust!! (probably feel like another sigh here!).

Late News Extra! Rupe appears to have been elected President of the NUS at Cirencester College - aagghh! faint! thump! die! Apparently, he tied with a first year student, but was chosen because of his maturity! Cough! Cough! Since he didn’t actually have an agenda, (‘if you don’t promise anything, you can’t be accused of breaking your promises’ - quote from Rupe) I reckon it was an anti-establishment protest vote, or Rupert is quite the Jekyll and Hyde character .......hmmm! Even more strangely, he’s been asked to be the student representative on the college board of governors - perhaps this is all part of a subtle ploy to ease Rupert into responsible adulthood. We shall follow this with interest!

Our other treasure (?) has her head screwed on slightly tighter than t’other in that she managed two B grades for the GCSEs she took last summer, a year early, and we have some hopes for her efforts next year. After all, she is at home quite a lot and does spend some time actually working! (even if it is at midnight, after spending the evening staring at the TV!! - sigh! teenagers!!). The midnight bit goes well with her evolution into her black period. During winter, all we can see of her is a little pale face - the gothic urge is upon her, black clothes, black hair, black lips, cobweb tights - the full Edgar Allan (apart from sleeping in a coffin, that is!!). Light relief is when the black hair erupts into strange little pigtails on top of her head, which elicits comments like ‘Couldn’t you lower them slightly?’ from her teachers - high pigtails prevent you from taking school seriously, apparently - they must act as aerials to pick up waves of ‘laidbackness’ from the College next door (see previous paragraph!!!). The trumpet is still with us; trampolining has succumbed to homework / ‘Neighbours’; percussion is showing a slight profit - she was paid for playing two nights of ‘H.M.S. Pinafore’! Singing is on the up - she is going to lead an assault on ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ in the school carol concert.

HOWEVER, all these plus points are wiped out (well, not quite!) by the awful manifestation that she inflicted upon us in October. Aaarrrgh! Cackle! Cackle! Never again! Mutter! Mutter! Calm yourself, Joy, he’s gone now! Her German Exchange Partner, Frederick, was even more picky than me (Joy) and that’s really saying something!!! E.g., only eating green grapes and refusing black ones......! (unbelievable! mutter!... mutter!) and not eating fresh cheese, just the melted stuff on pizzas! SIGH!! Ho hum, we survived with our sanity just about intact ........ ???

For Joy, this has been the YEAR (felt like it at the time) OF THE REGRADING (trumpet fanfare!!!........fading to mouselike squeak!). For days and nights, this pair slaved over the computer, documenting every minute event which could possibly be outside her official job description, just to get her the next grade up and a few extra hundred quid a year. Blood out of a (threatening and intimidating) stone - they were worried that she might gain TWO extra grades and think how much that would cost!!! (not much, actually, in the real world!).

For Bob, this year has seen the end of the gravy train (sniff! sniff! Waaaa!!) and I’ve been forced to come back to ill-paid permanent employment with - guess who?.... Blackwells (sigh!). Of course, I’d barely sat down at my ‘new’ desk when they started to merge ‘my’ division into a Dutch firm and then, while I was wondering what had hit me, transferred me back to the original bit where I started back in 1987. Ho-hum! In fact, ho-bloody-hum!!!

For us all, this has been the Year of the Foreign Holiday! (sound of accordions, clink of wine bottles, much drunken laughter!) using up the remainder of Bob’s contract money. Futurescope, near Poitiers, was the high-tec part of the holiday. This was a grown-up’s theme park, dedicated to the moving image (film, to you and me!). The buildings were beautiful and very modern - one was in the shape of a group of crystals, another like organ pipes, yet another like a present tied up with string - very French. One couldn’t imagine anything like that being built in traditional old Britain! There were more different kinds of cinema than you can imagine : giant screens, which sucked one in to the enormous landscape such that I really felt as though I was flying along the Nile - an awesome, hair-tingling experience!! : 3-D films of two or three kinds, where you really felt you were in there and could have interacted with the characters in the story : Walls of televisions, one where the seats bumped and tilted with the film’s movement, and another where there were two synchronized films showing different views of the same film, but you could have been flying owing to the film beneath your feet as well as in front of you. After dark, we were treated to an enormous laser light show on water fountains accompanied by music (echoes of Jean-Michel Jarre), which was very impressive. The whole day was thoroughly worthwhile - we really enjoyed ourselves!!

We went to the Pyrenees and stayed in a gîte - once we had found it! We arrived in the nearby town of St. Girons in the dark in a thunderstorm. So far, so good(?). The instructions were obviously designed as a brain-teaser to get the old brain cells functioning after the tedium of the long journey south. The only instructions were - ‘turn right on the third roundabout after the second bridge’. We arrived in an industrial estate. After the second time we gave up and rang the proprietor! We arranged to meet outside the post office.........but where was that? Much driving down narrow alleys following barely-understood directions extracted from people in bars on a Saturday night - this wasn’t in MY French syllabus!!!

The worst was yet to come! Following their car rather sheepishly out of the town, we soon found ourselves halfway up a mountain, around several hairpin bends, along a road which had been partially washed away by the rain-storm and got narrower by the minute. ‘At last, we’re here!’ we cried. But no, this was just a temporary blip in the long haul forever upwards (they don’t make mountains like this in good old Blighty! Madame decided to change places with her husband because ‘she didn’t like driving up the next 6 kilometres’. 6 kilometres! Surely the old car will never make it! By the time we arrived at the gîte, Bob’s poor little arms were tied in knots, not to mention his brain. We’ve never been so glad to finish a journey! Did I say we were running out of fuel as well?? Having fallen upon the croustade (a fruit pie) that they so kindly left for us, we wiled away some time by noticing that the lightning was flashing DOWN BELOW US in the valley. Just how high up were we?? Having felt guilty about dragging the owner’s son up the mountain, we relieved our battered consciences by reading in the Guest Book about everyone else’s problems in finding the place. PHEW!!!

The cottage was well worth the anguish. As Rupert remarked, ‘The first sound I heard was the sound of cowbells across the valley’. Once the mist had cleared below us in the valley, the view was amazing. It was so hot, and the crickets were loud!!! It was so wonderfully relaxing. Both children READ BOOKS and ENJOYED IT!!!! We drank wine. We ate fruit and cheese and croustade. We giggled and talked a lot and enjoyed the company of the children, having spent more time in each other’s company than we had all year! M. Bernard next door made cheese and sold us milk straight from the cows. Were we in heaven? Sometimes we drove down the mountain (godlike!) in time to find the shops closing, giving us a neat excuse to sit in cafes and drink menthe à l’eau for the next two hours!! With all this eating and drinking we should have come back VERY round and fat. After all, walking around caves looking at spectacular pre-historic cave paintings, and taking a boat trip along an underground river to view stalactite formations is hardly energetic.

But we did manage some exercise. We chose a cloudy day to do a 12 kilometre (round trip) VERY STEEP (2-3000 metre) climb to see this amazingly spectacular waterfall called the Cascade d’Arse (snigger!) that everyone in the house guest book said was well worth the visit. It was, but it had to be a masochistic pleasure! We made the big mistake of giving the lunch to Rupert to carry in his rucksack. Us crumblies being somewhat unfit, Rupert naturally rushed ahead of us, so that we had to wait for him to run out of steam before we could have lunch! We wanted to eat our lunch at the viewing point at the base of the waterfall, but we ended up precariously balanced on a few pointy rocks somewhere just below the top where there was a distinctly cool breeze and we were very cold. So we all blamed Rupert, twice over!! A thunder crack rattled around the valley BELOW us, which alarmed us somewhat, so we hurried (?!?) (or rather the children did!), back down the mountain as fast as our rapidly growing blisters would allow. If we had walked as far again, we would have been in Spain!! The next day we ached in places where we weren’t aware we had muscles!! To say it was hard to get out of bed was an understatement! And we had to drive to Spain.

Spain was different. All the bits that were green in France were brown in Spain. We’d booked to stay for one night in a Parador (one of a chain of posh character hotels in interesting locations), in a small, medieval town rejoicing in the name of Sos del Rey Catolico - known to its friends as Sos! When we rolled up at the desk (out of a rainstorm, of course), they said ‘No, you should have been here at 6 o’clock. We have given your rooms to someone else’. ‘But we have paid for these rooms.’ ‘Not us, you haven’t.’ ‘Buuuuuttttt.......’ They hadn’t been paid by our ferry company. So, after Bob stopped incandescing at them, they said that they would find us rooms in a house not far away, and that we could come and eat dinner at the Parador that night and breakfast the following morning because the house (called Casa Felix) didn’t do food. Which left us with the trivial problem - HOW TO PAY FOR THE ROOMS? We had just come from France and had no pesetas. It was Saturday and banks don’t open ‘till Monday and the one hole-in-the-wall-machine didn’t take our cash card and and and.... panic! In the end we realised that the hotel would change English quids and we had enough (having first mugged the children!) of these to pay.....PHEW! And it stopped raining!! End of total panic!......Except........we don’t know any Spanish and the proprietors of Casa Felix didn’t know any English!.........But that, dear readers, is another story............

In the morning, we tried to get our own back on the Parador by unleashing Rupe on the breakfast buffet, but he was just overwhelmed by the vision of a wall of food and only managed about five platefuls!!!! Quick scout around the medieval town - very picturesque - narrow cobbled alleyways with washing hanging over wrought-iron balconies (giving interesting problems to the local bin men and their wagon!). From the old town walls (into which was built the Parador) there was superb views over Namibia-like plains - we were reluctant to leave......sigh! But...... back to reality. Time passes quickly, and reluctant as we were to leave this idle life of luxury, we had to head westward to the coast, through Basque country where every signpost was designed to confuse the Spanish speakers and presumably unsuspecting lost tourists........aaarrgghh!!! The names on our map bore no resemblance to reality, and, of course, there was this storm........! We were beginning to feel as if we were in a film set! At one point, we had to stop because we couldn’t see the road.........in fact, the road was rapidly disappearing due to soil erosion caused by the deforestation that had been going on in the area. Well, we do choose these interesting routes off the beaten track!

We rolled into Castro Urdiales like a four-wheeled Clint Eastwood to the sight of a Spanish Torquay - quite unnerving after our previous experiences. The old parts were pleasant, but otherwise typical seaside resort. Tamsin was determined to swim in the sea, though the rest of us moved just as determinedly in the direction of the nearest shady cafe.........flop!! And so it continued until Santander and home........zzzzzzzzz!!!! Well, apart from the Spanish teenagers who drove their scooters / motorbikes up and down the road all night!

Ferries are not our favourite mode of transport. Our unease compounded when, as usual, we find ourselves in the bowels of the vessel, and sharing the lift with a Spanish bloke who was complaining about how unsafe it was to put passengers below the car decks........That night, whilst rounding Cap Finisterre, with the boat clanking and groaning, rolling and heaving heavily, and one’s imagination working overtime, it was easy to believe in the film set scenario again....... ......!! And when the ferry docked in Plymouth? Yes, it was raining again...........! Sigh!

Lots and lots of Seasonal Hugs and Kisses to Everyone

from

Joy, Bob, Rupert and Tamsin. XXXXXX

Parents don’t know this but I (Tamsin) am now putting a few words in for my defense!
It is not long until Christmas Day descends and as usual the house is looking like a bomb has hit it and minimal shopping has been done ( whispers of “what’s new” and “you call this news”!). Will we make the deadline I’m thinking, in more ways than one. A unit of Art work is due in by the end of term, and me, being me is now panicking and having to stay behind every day after school in a mad attempt to meet this unlikely deadline. Maybe this is what drove my Art teacher and tutor over the edge (Yes, really!), if so I can honestly sympathise!
Back to Christmas though............the state of the house is to my advantage.........I get to clean it and milk lots of money out of my parents for it (Money, Money, Money!). I have a certain affinity for money, if you have a daughter my age you’ll understand. Items of clothes just call out to be bought, especially when money is lacking (Buy me, Buy me!......I can’t take these voices in my head any more! Aaaaaaaaah!)
With that I leave you to have a delightful Christmas and to enjoy what ever you’re doing for the dreaded Millenium celebrations - beware Y2K!