The White Feather

Yesterday morning, as I opened the back door to cut some sprigs of oregano from one of the planters along the side of the house, a fluffy white feather floated across my line of sight.

Instead of ignoring it and carrying on, I paused and watched as it gently criss-crossed on thermals of warm air before settling on the ground at my feet. Then I picked it up.

I had a friend growing up who would take things such as this feather as a ‘sign’. She believed in them. Almost as though her life depended on it. Maybe it did. She wasn’t very good at making decisions (not good ones, at any rate) so perhaps she liked to rely on these spiritual messages from God or the Universe or wherever because if whatever information these ‘signs’ delivered her turned out to be wrong, she could blame the sign, sidestepping personal fault.

Clever.

One time, she and her three daughters visited the house I last lived in (and had originally owned) at the tail end of the separation from my last (and final) husband. The atmosphere in the house—which had already been sold, and packing boxes littered the downstairs rooms–was strained when my husband and I occupied the same space, but we’d decided at the outset we’d be grown-up about our split so we didn’t make visitors feel uncomfortable which might cause them to think they’d need to take ‘sides’.

When she came through the door, my friend was flustered and couldn’t hardly speak, so one of her daughters explained that en route to our house a bird had been hit by the car in front of theirs, and they’d watched its body drop to the ground.

My friend, her daughters continued the story, had stopped the car in fright and sped over to where the bird had landed (no one mentioned dangerous parking or disrupting other traffic but these things crossed my mind). She’d knelt down beside it, lifted its still-warm, bloodied body in cupped hands and stared at it, probably (knowing my friend) whispering the sacred last rites and hoping her words caught its soul before it floated to bird heaven.

‘It’s a sign’, my friend said in a breathless panic. ‘The bird was black.’ She was pacing, patting her chest.

I’d wanted to laugh but knew from experience to humour her. ‘A sign of what?’

‘A sign that it wasn’t flying high enough to avoid getting hit by a car,’ one of her daughters suggested sardonically, which earnt a fierce glare from her mother.

‘You mustn’t say things like that,’ my friend said, pale, and shaken. ‘It’s a sign.’

 ‘A bird got hit by a car, mother,’ another daughter tried. ‘It wasn’t a sign.’

 ‘But the bird was black,’ my friend’s eyes flashed.

‘A blackbird then.’

‘No, bigger than that – a raven or a rook. Honestly, I’m telling you, it’s a sign.’

I’d taken a deep breath and sighed then, detaching myself from the reality that was unfolding before me–which is how I cope with overwhelm–and stared around at the piles of ‘His’ and ‘Hers’. Things that my husband and I were splitting for our imminent separation. The cat, a two-year old rescue and wary of visitors at the best of times, was pacing in confused loops round the various packages that smelt of her safe places but which were now boxed up and unreachable. God alone knew what must’ve been going through her feline mind. But concern over a dead bird, whatever its colour, would not have been part of her thought process.

It struck me then (as the car had doubtless struck the unfortunate bird) that my friend coming in here and launching breathlessly into this portent of doom tirade, was insensitive. Because, despite the room clearly screaming at her from all its occupied-by-cardboard-boxes, that her supposedly best friend (Me) had once again failed at another marriage; had spent the past few months trawling through the vestiges of said marriage and dismissing emotional attachments for the sake of maintaining shreds of dignity and sanity; who’d been systematically—alone at night because neighbours had stopped coming round not wishing to be seen to be taking sides and the puppy they’d bought in the hopes he might save their floundering marriage the year before had already been given to people who would love him and treat him like a member of their family and not as quick-fix Band-Aid—had been emptying the contents of the 1930s-style drinks cabinet down her throat and wondering if she had strength to go to bed let alone wake up the next morning…. my friend had thought that bringing the death of a bird—this portent of doom—into my already doomed world today was a good idea.

No, she hadn’t ‘thought’ at all.

I didn’t say any of this because why make an already bad situation worse? I busied myself trying to placate my friend who hadn’t read my room. This room which was screaming that her friend (again, Me) was not only hanging on by the shredded quick of her fingertips, and was so hollowed out that any form of kindness from anyone could’ve filled her spaces like a gasping lung and drowned her. No, my friend had been too blinded and blinkered to see anything other than a ‘message’ that some kindly, otherworldly deity had seen fit to send her in the form of roadkill.

I don’t remember the outcome to deciphering this ‘sign’ that my friend had been sent. I do know, though, that a lot more energy and care was expended over the comforting of my panicked friend who had witnessed this calamity and transformed it into a sign from somewhere. And once we’d brought her down from the flustered heights she’d flown to, we’d made inane small-talk about how we couldn’t believe my husband and I were splitting up after such wonderful beginnings, a magical wedding and where we’d all spent many happy evenings in this idyllic place in the countryside with views of fields from three sides.

And so I considered the white feather which had drifted softly across my path yesterday morning and which I now held in my hand.

I stroked the fine, fluffed strands and raised my eyes to see if I could see the bird it had dropped from, but the blue, cloudless sky was empty. I couldn’t remember if a white feather was meant to be suggestive of surrender or peace.

So I brought it into the kitchen intending to keep it to one side and show my daughter and her partner when they got home. And then I wondered what on earth I would say about this thing that I’d clearly th0ught could be a ‘sign’ of some kind or another. Only I still hadn’t decided if it was Peace or Surrender.

And when these thoughts reminded me of my friend’s black bird episode, I shook my head, on the verge of disappointment in myself.

I took the white feather back outside. I held it high above my head—the way it had been before I’d walked into its path and let go—to let it drift back to the place it would have settled had I not interrupted it.

Then I continued on to collect the oregano I’d originally come out for.

Ho, Ho, Ho

Having a routine is nice. It gives us stability. We know where we are. We can plan our lives around a routine. And nothing shouts “constant” louder than a calendar. If we remember the rhyme correctly, we know how many days make up a month. We know how many months we’re going to get every year; how many weeks, how many days. And, as the months move ever closer to the end of another year, there’s no escaping one date in particular. Because like it or not, celebrate it or not, unfailingly, in the same place, at the same time, every year, waiting patiently in one of the squares is 25^th December, Christmas Day.

Like a lot of things in this frenetic world we live, people have forgotten or fail to recognise the roots of this tradition they celebrate. They’re more concerned over when and what decorations to put up, what present to buy who, how much it’s going to cost them and which set of families they’ll have to spend the day with. And, with the prevalence of social media and the barrage of commercials online, on TV, in magazines, insisting we must have whatever they’re selling otherwise our day will be second-rate, the pressure placed on adults to conform to these high expectations are being hurled at them from every direction.

‘What are you doing?’ ‘Where are you going?’ ‘What do you want?’ ‘Are you prepared?’  It turns into a competition like no other; with everyone competing against everyone else. The sidelines are made up with adverts hurling enticements at us, and jolly Christmas tunes are set on a continuous loop to help get us “in the mood”. Which doesn’t sound like any kind of fun to me. In fact, the reason for Christmas Himself would have difficulty seeing sense in it.

What’s happened to us? Why do we do have a need to do this bigger, louder and brighter every year? Is it because we actually want to give gifts to people? Is it because we have a surplus of funds we’d like to spend on expensive new clothes, decorations and a table laden with enough food to halve third world hunger in one day? It’s become a treadmill with humans as the beleaguered creatures perpetuating its motion.

Does anyone actually stop and ask why? I do.

I discovered this year that the reason I ask why? a lot is because I’m neurodiverse. I have one of those brains that has an absolute need to know how, who, when; and why. And until I’ve settled my mind, I can’t move on; I get antsy. I used to be told it was because I was attention-seeking, or I was being difficult. Turns out it wasn’t that.  It’s because I like to know things. I have to know them. It’s why I went vegan overnight; I discovered things that hadn’t been explained to me before; things that I’d—essentially—been lied to about; been encouraged to ignore for the sake of conformity and tradition. But, once I educated myself, made sense of things, I made more considered choices.

It’s the same with Christmas. I just don’t ‘get it’. It’s like a habit that nobody wants to break.

As a child, we—I—didn’t know any different. I was brought up to believe in God. To believe in Father Christmas. The Tooth Fairy. Eating animals (my dad was a butcher, so this was more than OK; it was his livelihood). Our way of life. Everything simply ‘is’ for a child; we accept what we’re taught by our earliest teachers: our parents, then we accept what our school teachers tell us. We comply. I complied.

And then we reach an age where we’re free to explore our own minds. We allow thoughts which might have been suppressed through our childhood, those living-at-home years, to fly and see how strong their wings are. We branch out and discover things for ourselves, re-discover things that were not based in fact during our formative years and were—however innocently—negligently passed onto us as such. But this doesn’t seem to happen at Christmas-time. We still, rigidly, follow the ‘rules’ that were set down for us years ago—decades for some—it’s a time to have parties, to buy new things to wear to those parties; to buy people presents who already have everything they need; it’s a time to eat too much, drink too much; get into debt and worry about it next year. Which sounds SO far away, but is, in fact next week.

None of the original warmth and compassion of this day has endured unless you believe in The Real Story behind it and heed the values and compassion of it. And even then, I know some religious people who STILL worry over what to buy who, how much things will cost, and where they’ll spend their day. Do they consider Jesus might think it reasonable to snog Damien under the mistletoe because Christmas is a great way of explaining away the embarrassment? Do they really imagine Jesus would find a shouty two-for-one deal on an Yves St Laurent shirt absolutely necessary when there’s a homeless person at the doors to whatever store they’re in?

Christmas, says Wikepedia, is an annual festival commemorating the birth of Jesus Christ, observed primarily on December 25 as a religious and cultural celebration among billions of people around the world. It is preceded by the season of Advent or the Nativity Fast and initiates the season of Christmastide, which historically in the West lasts twelve days and culminates on Twelfth Night. 

The actual word, “Christmas” is a shortened form of “Christ‘s mass“; remember?

Wikipedia also states that Santa Claus can be traced back to the Dutch Sinterklaas, which means simply Saint Nicholas, who was a 4th-century Greek bishop of Myra, a city in the Roman province of Lycia,  in southwest Turkey. Among other saintly attributes, he was noted for the care of children, generosity, and the giving of gifts.

I mean, I could be persuaded

Did you know (I didn’t) that Christmas was prohibited by Puritans when they briefly held power in England (1647–1660), and that the  Parliament of Scotland, which was dominated by Presbyterians, passed a series of acts outlawing the observance of Christmas between 1637 and 1690; or that Christmas Day did not become a public holiday in Scotland until 1958? 1958!

Of course, the only sector which meaningfully (and not in a compassionate, altruistic sense) benefits from the festive season is retail. But you didn’t need me to tell you that. I was fascinated to discover the term ‘deadweight loss’ which is used to describe public (that’s YOU) spending at this time of the year. In fact, one economist‘s analysis calculates that, despite increased overall spending, Christmas is a deadweight loss under orthodox microeconomic theory, because of the effect of gift-giving. This loss is calculated as the difference between what the gift giver spent on the item and what the gift receiver would have paid for the item. I mean, seriously! What are we doing?

And lastly: does anyone remember what the vast majority of the UK public were doing a mere four weeks before Christmas day? We were digging our hands deep into our pockets to give to Children in Need. We were giving and expecting nothing in return but easement of the suffering of children.

THIS is the meaning of Christmas.

It’s what St Nicholas was doing all those centuries ago, at the advent (unbeknown to him) of this season. Where now, Goodwill has a price tag, trite greetings are tossed about like so many other false platitudes, and comfort and joy can only be achieved if an animal who was brought into life, suffered, and was then killed, is morbidly, ceremoniously brought to the centre of an already heaving table and sliced into. A table around which people who have every opportunity of catching up with one another on any day of the year, given today’s technologies, are seated and variously nursing a hangover, masking discomfort, money worries, insecurities and a desperate wish to be anywhere else.

Jolly, red-faced Santa chuckles a commercialised, controlling Ho, Ho, Ho, and it’s quite clear who’s being laughed at.

Cheers

My relationship with alcohol must have begun in the womb. I remember a very lit fag hanging out of the corner of my mother’s mouth as she changed my younger brother’s nappy once (I think there’s even pictorial proof somewhere) so I’m assuming, in those halcyon days of the sixties where the medical profession hadn’t considered either form of recreational habit a ‘drug’ as such, that she might also have continued drinking during both our nine-month tenancies.

We had a lovely, plump-fronted, very glossy, walnut drinks cabinet in our living room at home. Even now, just remembering how the two front doors being opened (at the same time using both hands) delivered such a heady waft of alcohol-imbued wood is enough to catapult me back to Christmasses, Birthdays or any-other-days where it automatically followed that—once open—the adults would smile more, laugh a little and relax a lot; our very own Pandora’s box.

And aren’t we guided by these innate, formative lessons? I absolutely connected the pink-cheeked mother—as opposed to the pinch-lipped, pale-faced one—with cheerfulness, Christmasness and, yes, the drinks cabinet doors having been opened at some point. So for me this veritable theatre of varying-sized bottles containing different-hued liquids (where also resided a tempting jar of cocktail cherries in juice and an assortment of plastic fancy-headed sticks with which to impale them which is making me salivate just writing this) meant happiness. We’d seen the proof.

Add to this the fact those adults—especially if the liquid interior had made it onto a fancy-doylied covered tray on TOP of the drinks cabinet for the duration of the festive season—made it perfectly clear that this stuff was only to be imbibed by special grown-up humans at special times of the year meant that the cabinet was further embroidered with magic-dust. Even Unicorns weren’t allowed. God, we wanted it so badly. But because we knew we couldn’t have it (and yet often teased by a sherry-dipped finger in secret) until we were much, much taller, it became a kind of goal; dare I say Grail?

In our double-figure years, my brother and I were sometimes allowed a watered-down (again, schooner) of something alcoholic, which, after sipping, we’d screw up our faces and say how disgusting it was; another five or so years and we’d be doing the same with some Benson and Hedges until we’d perfected a way of smoking which didn’t accompany heaving. No, we didn’t like it, and yet we still loved the way it altered our parents’ personalities. They became friendly, more responsive, they’d urge us to join them in a game of darts in the sunlounge, or play Newmarket (with borrowed pennies) with them at the table; sometimes we were even allowed to listen to the racy lyrics of the Benny Hill LP. I know.

I vaguely recall us having ‘home cocktail’ sachets of powdered something or other which, when added to lemonade or Tizer or whatever was handy at the time, was meant to resemble an alcoholic equivalent. There were a lot of vodka-doodaghs and a couple of pineapple coladas which I fondly recall and it gave me the taste. I even feigned placebo-type responses to drinking these sugar-infested drinks: twirling around in a state of drunkenness and being giddy with… well all the twirling I suppose (drunk on the idea at least).

My brother might have been slightly under but I was definitely at the legal age (he was taller than me, so that cancelled out any conjecture) when we visited our local hostelry like the rite of passage. We’d known it to be.  Together. I know; it makes us sound like two Waltons or loved-up siblings in American sitcoms but we weren’t, not really. We bonded over the previously forbidden fruit that was alcohol; now we were the Knights Templar sitting across from one another at a Space-Invader-screened-table-top in the Fox and Hounds and life would never be as thrilling again.

Kids in candy shops? Yep, pretty much. And once I’d learned you get double the impact from a combination of things like… let’s say Brandy and Babycham (with a cocktail cherry sunk to the bottom) then you’d think I’d discovered my personal version of The Wheel. Or Fire. Maybe Penicillin but you get the idea. Life was good. Life was even Gooder when alcohol was involved. And when alcohol was involved there came with it a kind of Get Out of Jail Free card, meaning that whatever rude nonsense I spouted or crazy antics I got up to whilst under the influence, it could all be explained away because of The Alcohol. I couldn’t believe I’d lived all those years without its presence in my life (well, secondary drinking is hardly as effective).

I danced better, I had better ideas of which I took great pleasure expounding; I met a great deal more handsome men who also danced very well (and sang in tune), and either I had a larger circle of friends or else I was seeing double most of the time. Who knows? What actually cared? Not me. Not any of us, not really.

And now let’s fast-forward to today. Not specifically the 18^th October, 2019, but… y’know,more generally.

With age arrives a certain degree of wisdom. Perhaps it’s hindsight, but when you get to your mid-fifties and you only recently (4 years ago and counting) realised that to pet one animal and yet eat another is cruelly hypocritical, then it seems only fair that recognising self-harm should be the next logical step.

I gave up smoking overnight. I gave up eating animals and their various secretions overnight. I have ‘given up’ drinking overnight on several occasions, which begs the question that if it harms nobody other than myself then I’m ok to do it.

The other day (Wednesday, if you’re interested) I had a day out at a place I’d never been to before: Tyntesfield. It’s a “spectacular Victorian Gothic Revival house and estate near Wraxall, North Somerset, England. The house is a Grade I listed building named after the Tynte baronets, who had owned estates in the area since about 1500.” And it exceeded expectations. The weather on Wednesday (for those who follow that sort of thing) was nothing short of glorious: blue skies, little whisps of cloud and a stillness that had us remarking on it. I went with somebody who has a passion for these places; whose interest in them means they are never dull, always fully involved and perhaps the best company I’ve had in my life.

We spent five hours there. Once home, delighted with the day, I made myself something to eat, singing tunes we’d been discussing in the car on the way back. And then I thought what could possibly round the day off any better than a nice glass of crisp, chilled wine? Like a celebration. Such a great day, let’s finish it off with more delightful things (I also watched ‘Moonstruck’ again and forgot how much I loved it) and went to bed a tiddly, happy bunny.

Yesterday I woke with—not so much a taste of regret in my mouth, but—a knowledge that not a lot would get done during the next 24 hours. My head hurt but that was alright, that’s why God invented Panadol, I couldn’t concentrate but that was alright too because I might find inspiration watching the ‘Away to the Country With You’ or similar tellyprog.  And so I had a ‘dry’ (unless you count copious glasses of cranberry juice with sparkling water) day and went to bed feeling lacklustre in the extreme when compared with the previous nights’ humour.

And today I hear you ask? Well, let’s draw up that chair on which Hindsight has sat himself down, shall we? What does he want to tell us? I’ll tell you: he wants us to know that it’s great to feel happy following a delightful day out in excellent company, but sometimes cherries don’t need plopping on top of an already-beautifully-iced cake; it’s already lovely enough as it is. And if that analogy doesn’t work or make any sense then if you give me a few hours and a trip to the Tesco Express, I’m sure I could find innumerable ways of describing precisely what wisdom it is that I want to impart at the conclusion of these, my ramblings.

And afterwards, you can laugh at me, but it won’t matter because I’ll be drunk and expect to be teased.  I’ve a feeling it’s why I enjoy drinking in the first place: so that a lot of the time, other real things don’t matter—or hurt—quite as much.