A damp Sunday morning

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I wonder what you are doing this morning Anna. And with whom.

I am sitting here looking through the square window at a damp Sunday morning. Funny how you can always tell it's Sunday. There's something about the atmosphere, the feel of a Sunday.
I bet I could be alone in the middle of the Ghobi desert or at the  North Pole and I would know if it were a Sunday..

A neighbour walks past with two small children. She is on her way home from church. What on earth does she think she is doing; inculcating two small children (not even her own) into a myth; getting them to believe a fairy story to be fact.

It strikes me how like Father Christmas is God: a benevolent old gentleman with a white beard, somewhere up there in the sky, ready to bestow  upon us wondrous gifts - if we are good. Ah, there's the rub, as Shakespeare might have said. (I wonder did Shakespeare believe in God? I guess you had to, in those days - or at least pretend to .Otherwise you could have been in for an early morning fry-up, at the stake.).

And who will define what "being good" is for those two children who have just walked past? Those two children who don't really understand the ritual, the bit of theatre they have just been put through? The vicar? The priest? Aided and abetted by parents; those unwitting agents of the establishment?

And by the time they are old enough to realise it is not" Father Christmas" who brings the presents, they are hooked into the myth at a deep level. Disappointment and confusion awaits.

If only the could be taught 'reality' instead.

But we must look on the bright side, Anna, and so I shall finish with a few lines that came to me from the back of my head:


She didn't respond when I kissed her -
In fact she said: less of that, mister,
I am pledged to another -
So I gave her another -
She's gone - now I'm kissing her sister.

Here's to our coming weekend

George