Serenity

 One of my ‘re-set’ ideas for 2026 was to foster a greater sense of serenity in my life. I have to report, dear Reader(s) that I maintained that serenity for approximately thirty four hours when I was forced to abandon my good intention because the Royal Mail failed to deliver me a pair of boots due to their own enormous incompetence. They had the cheek to send a ‘How did we do?’ feedback form, so I took the opportunity to tell them EXACTLY how they did, and where were my boots, please? 

After lunch I was still in a fit of pique, so I took myself off to a nearby garden centre for a mooch. Bad idea. 

Firstly, it was full of children who really need to be back at school because they were clearly bored and/or stir crazy with the holidays. I can think of no other reason why they should behave so badly in a public setting. Two little darlings in particular stood out, namely Boyd and Ezra. I know they were called Boyd and Ezra because the adult supposedly in charge of them spent a lot of time shrieking, ‘Boyd! Ezra! No! Come here!!’ at them in the manner of a common fishwife yelling at someone with whom she’d been sworn enemies for decades. Boyd was a boy. Ezra was a girl. At least, that’s what they looked like to me, the common bystander, although I know one needs to be very careful in making gender assumptions these days. They could have been twins because they were similar in height. I guess they were six years old, going on fifteen. 

Anyway, after Boyd and Ezra almost felled a member of the cafe staff with their manic racing around, another member of staff appeared and gave them a bit of a ticking off. I thought, good for you, madam, and prepped myself to leap to her defence if the adult in charge of the demonic duo started getting arsey. ‘I saw them being little sh*ts, too,’ I was going to say. Thankfully, I didn’t have to. 

Elsewhere, there were a lot of bored men trailing around after their wives and being forced into having an opinion about which calendar should grace their kitchen wall this year. I thought, men are never interested in calendars because they never look at them. Stop trying to engage them in choosing a calendar. They ain’t interested. Park them in the cafe with a flat white and a cheese scone and choose your own calendar in peace. 

There were a lot of elderly couples getting tetchy with each other. ‘Gerald! I told you NOT to wander off,’ and ‘Come ON, Maureen - we’re going home NOW!’ and ‘Celia, my knee is giving out.’ There was quite a lot of passive aggressive shouting in the section that was selling off Christmas food - ‘Do we NEED any more biscuits, Alan? You haven’t finished the Foxes Chocolate Selection yet,’ and ‘When are we going to use the Ultimate Spice Marinade Kit? It’ll turn you out and you won’t get any sympathy from me when it does.’ Brutal stuff, but that’s old people for you. (Talking of being elderly, I think that now I am over 60 I shall buy an enormous car which I don’t have the confidence to drive, and I shall roam the local roads in it doing no more than 27 miles an hour EVER just to see how big a queue of traffic I can build up in my wake. And I shall have my half of the road in the middle. Just saying.)

I made two purchases: a half price calendar and a pair of hand towels for kitchen use. I showed Andy the calendar when I got home. ‘Lovely,’ he said. I dare you to ask him what was on it - I bet he couldn’t tell you. I rest my case re: never try to get a man interested in a calendar. 

This is the problem with having a two week Christmas and the New Year break - it ruins the human need for structure, boundaries, order and purpose, and makes everyone tetchy, aimless and definitely not serene. I vote that this year we have Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Boxing Day and then New Year’s Day on 27th December. Four days. Plenty. Then everyone back to work/school/normality. 

I leave you with a photo of the almost Full Moon, taken from just outside the back door earlier this evening. I apologise for its fuzziness - I could have got a closer view but I was in bare feet, it was freezing outside and I know for a FACT that if I had ventured up the courtyard steps I’d have stood on the place where Nell the Poo did a sliding bum wipe and that would have been DISGUSTING and definitely NOT serene. 🤢