Misrule, Madness and Magi

Happy Epiphany to you. (That doesn’t quite read right to me, but I am merely a theologian).

So it is Twelfth Night already. 364 gifts later, if you do the sums right on the song. A date I can never quite spell right, but also a play I very much enjoyed studying at school. Dad knows all I need to know about Shakespeare, so I file most Bardic wonderings in my mental ‘must ask dad sometime’ file. My own memory is almost full already, and I am doing a bit of spring cleaning therein. (Words like ‘therein’, for example, which are of no ordinary use, are hereafter banished. Forthwith.) I am wondering about compressing some of the data I have accumulated cerebrally which serves no good purpose after a cost-benefit analysis (likelihood of taking part in pub quiz, etc), but if brain-data compression feels anything like the below-freezing ice-cream headaches I got this morning when I went out of the house, I think it will get filed in the ‘action later’ pile.

Back to the madness. Today for the first time in many years I took my decorations down on the Actual Day. I heard of a friend of a former colleague who was so superstitious that she forgot to take her tree down one 6th January and had to leave it up (decorations and all) until the following year. I never found out whether she got a second tree the next Christmas, or if there wasn’t enough room. Superstition is very powerful, and when people fear consequences of doing normal things, I ache for them. They lack freedom, because of fear. My faith gives me freedom: I can act in any way I want. Reason, tradition and culture provide some healthy boundaries, but I do not act through fear, but love. I often get it wrong, but I am slowly improving, and that is evidence of God working in me. I am not trapped by fear. I am very happy to take down decorations on the Wrong Day if it suits better. But this year it helped that Lily was out of the house and I needed to get the tree ready for the bin men (it still hasn’t died, despite putting the heating up).

Yesterday the boy went back to work after a lovely two week break with the family. We all missed each other as well, which was good. He is an engineer and he works on computers all the time, but he had forgotten his password and got locked out of his PC. When I suggested that many other computer boffins at the same establishment might have done the same, he thought perhaps they had, as the ICT chaps were ages getting it fixed. Misrule? Or maybe he should have filed his password in ‘check in the diary if you forget it after a break’? It could still be in code.

Talking of madness, I am concerned this evening for my sister and her landlady, my cousin, who have no water at all, as an outside pipe has frozen. This is Not Good, when you stop and consider how hard it will be to (a) make a cup of tea, (b) make a hot water bottle, and (c) clean the microwave. For example. I am especially annoyed for them that the snow has happened in work time, and not over the holiday, when at least it would have served the function of being pretty and seasonal. Perhaps they can thaw some snow and ice and make a cup of tea?

More madness. Paris Hilton, who has no children, has revealed that were she to have children, she would name a daughter London.

London Hilton?

And then she would like to move to the UK so that her three or four children would learn ‘British accents and manners’.

Right. I can just imagine little London, Rome, Tokyo and Prague Hilton running amok in the aisles of Netto, Acton High Street, mum panting after them, ‘oi, jusyouwaittilyougethome, i’vehadituptoHere!’ raising pitch and decibel in equal measure, and wishing it were some other measure she were raising, and the darlings seeing if they could make money on the shopping trolleys. I know I would. Maybe I should file this under ‘things I expect to see by 2011’.

I’m a bit full of beans. There’s a tradition we should bring back. Except I’m also quite tired now. I had a rush of activity today and yesterday, having recovered from woman-flu. I really don’t want to be in charge and I am wondering if Obama might be thinking the same thing too. And Brown. And the person in charge of gas supplies out of Ukraine. And Andrew Lloyd Webber. Maybe we should all pass the bean. Ms Rule is off the case.

What of Magi? Let’s not get the Trades Description Act people wound up, now. Well, in all honesty, I think it is time I put on the record that I believe they were about two years late, and wouldn’t have posed for a photo with the shepherds, even if they had had cameras then. But I bet they had outstanding accents and manners.