and cards transported us to another land, and I drifted in and out of the twentieth century reaching back to the turn of the nineteenth. Peering at old cards with robins and snow on from people who weren’t here anymore crisscrossed with the ones who were. I still hadn’t sorted out Christmas present. The chains of the past would have to let me go.
Juggling my new found lifestyle, (don’t mention the hairstyle) tending to restored members of family, and just coping with being me was going alright as long as I didn’t plan too far ahead, like tomorrow.
Baba, apart from coughing up a day’s worth of eating and drinking, usually in the deep of the night, was sneezing up every wall in the house. Embarking on some cleaning to fend off anxiety and stress would have me follow a trail of freckles up the stairs and beyond. ‘Pack it up Baba!’ shouting relieved stress too but I mustn’t go overboard. Wonka is firm about shouting and says I am a total hypocrite. Lecturing on the harm of raised voices when I do it myself. Well.
To a small degree I had followed the advice about life coaching and goodness knows and strangely once again, I had hit on something that I seemed to need far more than the solid line up of clients I envisaged begging to be life coached. Or should I say had a vision about? This was the main message, that if you could just picture yourself in this successful state, actually doing what you had been sitting around dreaming for years on end, well, it could come true! The revelation of this alone had me motivated and completing assignments to deadline.
Wonka was extremely proud and only warned me a couple of times that we still needed feeding and couldn’t exist on visions alone. For now it staved off thoughts of Christmas gatherings and recalling dreadful meals of yore. ‘there’s no such thing as yore! Scoffed Wonka, ‘do you mean the one where you got drunk and fell asleep on the settee and missed it altogether?’ No that one was rather entertaining. It was the pressure on us all to be kind and loving and giving that was giving me the shivers. Could I keep it up?
The cupboard under the stairs doubled as a massive warehouse for storing all those household items that wouldn’t go in the household. For some years now, it had been a dark cavern without the help of a light. Taking out the old light bulb and this before the invention of the new very expensive everlasting and unfathomable light savers we have now, to replace it with one of the everlasting ones, well the light fitting cracked. No doubt this was under the duress of finally having a change of bulb, but now, now, it would accept nothing.
Baba liked to hide in here, sometimes in the cat carrier sometimes high up on the shelves laden with all the household items, including the Christmas box. With him being black, and with the warehouse cum under the stair cupboard being lightless, he could have gone missing for days. It was our Narnia.
‘Mind your head!’ warned Wonka as I delved around looking for a, yes, a light bulb. Whilst in there though, I contemplated getting the Christmas box down. Still a month to go but would a few fairy lights cheer us up? I knew what was in there. Cards I couldn’t manage to recycle, baubles that were ve