By the time you read this, it will be Epiphany, and the New Year will be well underway. Today, young men will be diving into the waters to retrieve the cross, there will be church services, and the waters will be blessed according to tradition. Meanwhile, up here, I shall be working on a new novel, tidying up an old one, promoting existing publications and later, giving a piano lesson. Everything will then be back to normal. Kind of. Thanks to the generosity of Santa, I may well be spending the next three months building the Titanic and learning to play the guitar.
To tell you about the last two weeks in detail would take pages, but I will let some images out now and then. This may mean that Christmas lasts until February, but so what? I’m already planning for this year (not). I have a wealth of images of us and the logical family spending time together, but they aren’t always the right images to share – some moments must be kept private, for example, when I dressed entirely in Temu clothes on Christmas Day and avoided naked flames. However, a list of keywords to take us through our Symi Christmas might be this:
Last ‘Boys’ Night’ of the year involved a spotted dick, there were carols at Scena, Christmas Eve prep at the kitchen table, Gremlins, memories, feasting, an air fryer, guitars (both broken and fixed), silliness, feasting, new coats, old jokes, rain, a microwave, massage machines, other orthopaedic contraptions for the elderly, sunny views, more rain, shopping, pink skies, piano recitals, curry, late-arrival presents, fireworks, jollity, and feasting.
Let me start the year off with three separate incidents. First, the incident of the spotted dick. Thanks to Neil bringing some suet back from Scotland, I was able to feed our boys a large bowl of mild chilli with dumplings (because they’d never had one), followed by a highly successful first go at a suet pudding, a ‘spotted dick’ because the boys had never had one (as far as we know).
The next was an evening at Scena with Jenine and Terri, plus lots of other folk, for Christmas Carol singing and fundraising for the Rhodes orphanage. Well done, Dawn, George and everyone else involved.
Then, there were some good-weather days that gave us the usual view.
I’ll fish out some more images for tomorrow. Welcome to 2025!
