last blog of 2011

I have been trying to write this for days. One blog disappeared into the ether. Where do lost blogs and emails go I wonder? Christmas day started with breakfast with the Ditchling Quakers in the meeting house. Twenty of us at a long table. It was lovely. Then J and G went for a rough and stormy swim on Brighton beach with Santa lifeguards in attendance. For lunch here was a tasty nut roast and also a turkey that F won in a church raffle! It was a good day.    
This afternoon I went for a walk with my new Nordic walking poles (Christmas present from D and J) so I now have four legs instead of two. I strode along purposefully but still got a bit stuck climbing over stiles. Later I read all the round robin letters with care and attention. I tend to read them hastily when they first arrive. Luckily I do not seem to get the boasty sort about academic successes, mine were more about knee and hip replacements and memory loss.

I have all these lists. But I am not actually doing anything, just putting it down on a list. Buy Pyjamas For J, Send off Parcel to R and L. Do Cards. In the meantime I just loll about, do the crossword, watch Strictly Come Dancing. I did have a busy afternoon on Saturday at the Meeting House in Brighton.  There was an All Faiths Event with Jewish people, Sufi,  Quakers, Anglicans, Muslim, well over a hundred came to that, in another room it was an Amnesty letter writing day with people of all ages plus musicians, singers. Upstairs there was a big crowd of Ethiopians having an English class, and there was an audition for a Shakespeare play going on too, plus of course all the usual 12 step groups for Al Anon etc. I was busily trying to steer them all into the right rooms and nor always succeeding, (some of the Ethiopians ended up at the All Faiths or letter writing).
Today it is the Nativity play at the Infants so that will put me in a Christmassy mood. 

back to dizzy Ditchling

So much going on here in Ditchling, what with the traffic jams outside my cottage, the non stop social whirl of the Old People`s Christmas lunch last Saturday (delicious food, raffle, concert ,who said there is no such thing as a free lunch?) our choir`s performance last night (All That Jazz, Dancing Queen etc) and there will be carol singing outside the post office next Thursday too. It was so quiet in my sister`s village in southern Germany where I was staying last week, I found it quite eerie though it was beautiful as always and I love being there.    Poor sister J  had a terrible cough and had lost her voice so we couldn`t talk much. I read four novels on the trot. The best was Julian Barnes` Booker prize `The Sense of an Ending, a brilliant book about how our memories of the past are often distorted.  
I am on a course today: The Lone Worker. it is because I volunteer at the Meeting House at Brighton once a week, I keep thinking its the Lone Ranger and imagine myself loping across the prairie.