Monkey's Blog - with a little help from Alice

Raise a Glass!

It's that time of year again.
Alice and I had just decorated the trees: that's hers and mine. Click on the photo to see it full size, please.

We'd even got all the cards written and posted by Royal Mail's last date!

We'd made the trip out in the cold and wet to pick some holly and ivy to put around our home, and now half the pictures in the place have little green sprigs tucked around their tops.

So, to celebrate all this successful activity, we decided to treat ourselves to a tippple of some lovely rich Amontillado sherry and a piece of Mrs Crimble's Dutch Apple Cake, which is gorgeous all year round, with some festive-tasting marzipan on top. I also insisted she dug out the cake decorations from the back of a kitchen drawer, and lit the teeny candles too - not that they stayed as you see them (above) for very long... Yummy.

Apparently some of this seasonal feasting goes back to the traditional ways of the ordinary people, who couldn't afford to feed their livestock over the winter, so were obliged to kill them and eat or preserve them.
We're not a Christian household, or even one of any other faith, but we nevertheless love all the celebrations and know there's an ancient truth behind them. It's about rejoicing that in the midst of the shortest, darkest days, there will be light appearing again soon. It's the turning of the year at the Winter Solstice, it's the time of Yule.

That makes it a good time to remember old friends; be generous to those we love, and donate something to those less fortunate.

And I'm afraid there's plenty of such inequalities around in the world today, for many different reasons. Politics, psychology, religion and sociology all try to find explanations for it. Maybe Iain M Banks' Culture agents were right in State of the Art, when they said the human race was past redemption. (We've already written about his short story on here.)

First World War

Such pessimism isn't new, either. Alice loves Christams carols, and one of her favourites has always been "It Came upon a Midnight Clear". The music is wonderful, but some of the lines are dark, and telling:

Yet with the woes of sin and strife
The world has suffered long;
Beneath the angel-strain have rolled
Two thousand years of wrong;
And man, at war with man, hears not
The love-song which they bring;
O hush the noise, ye men of strife,
And hear the angels sing.

The men of strife still continue to make the terrible noise of war, whatever the season. Not to mention the many other ways mankind has found to despoil the earth we depend upon - like fracking or drilling for oil in the Arctic for example ...

But Alice repeats that one of the pleasures of supporting organisations like Greenpeace, or Friends of the Earth, or Oxfam, is that there is sometimes good news of progress, as well. We can make a difference - if we bother!

Enough of the homily, for now.

To end on an upbeat note, we saw the second Hobbit film this week, sub-titled The Desolation of Smaug, and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Check out the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. Not to spoil things for those who haven't seen it yet and don't want to know, we'll just say there's plenty of frolics and fun; ferocious fighting, and a simply delightful, though dangerous, dragon.