It’s New Year’s Eve. I drove home from a tea party a little after 6 p.m. It’s an annual tradition amongst the older generation of my husband’s family. It’s wonderfully Dickensian, taking place in a fine Georgian house on a fine Georgian Square in our capital city where two floors are now inhabited by businesses and the top two floors by one of the family where he lives with his wife and two small children in what, from first impressions, people might consider to be the eccentric mayhem of a socialist worker but which in reality is a mortgage-free, rather splendid existence though it’s a long way down to the basement to the washing machine and he had to survive with a chemical loo up until a couple of years ago.

But he and his wife have it looking rather funky now. Funky in the manner of a flat in Kreuzberg, the quarter of Berlin best associated with all breeds of alternative, radical and social rejects (as in those that rejected rather than being rejected). Sonja, the German wife, beckoned me upstairs with a “I haven’t seen you for ages, sit down and tell me what’s been happening with you”. I took a seat (or one of the mismatched chairs) at the distressed pine table (only this one was actually distressed and fabulous and original and probably something she found on a skip). She sat opposite me, relaxed, open, with her severe German spectacles and her sharp German eyes. I started talking. I see this woman once a year, sometimes once every two years and yet I told her all about it…my 2009.

Germans have that way about them. At least five people in the 15 minutes preceding this had asked me what I had been up to and I had trotted out the same jaded “took redundancy, stay at home mum, hope to get back to work when the recession abates” line and they had all nodded understandingly and said “ah well it’s good to spend time with the kids” and I had agreed and moved on. I mean, what’s the point in attempting to explain it all? Who among these gentle, elderly, privileged, intellectuals would be able to grasp it in the few minutes that one can devote to small-talk of this type? But Germans get to the nub of the matter and the German in me instinctively knows that they appreciate truth and sincerity. As a anglophile German once said to me “when you make the friend of a German, you’ve got a friend for life”. And it’s true.

Sonja, with her matter of fact, straight as a die manner, disarmed me, stripped me of my mask and I relayed everything to her (and simultaneously stepped outside of my body and looked down at myself and said “what are you doing?”), and she sat back in her chair and lit a cigarette and regarded me as someone whose story was genuinely interesting her and when I stopped she said “I think that’s fantastic, really fantastic” and she meant it because they do, Germans, otherwise they just wouldn’t say it. She then said something about being in control of one’s own destiny and how important that was and that one must embrace the opportunities life presents and do what feels right. I had such a nice time with her for those twenty minutes in that high-ceilinged kitchen where the sink splash-back was an ancient Dunlop tyres sign and I tripped down the stairs with renewed confidence and joined the others, smiling, effusing, embracing, sipping Lady Grey tea from a delicate china cup poured from a delicate silver teapot, and feeling great about the end of this year.

As I drove home, it started snowing heavily and my 3 year old clapped her hands with glee in the back of the car and I realised that she didn’t remember snow because she was only 8 months old when we spent a Christmas in Germany with 2 foot of snow outside our hotel for 10 days. It has stopped snowing now but I hope it freezes and I hope we have more snow tonight and tomorrow I’ll start 2010 by building a snowman for a little girl filled with the wonder of it all. Einen guten Rutsch ins Neue Jahr!

I’ve had one of those weeks. I know everyone has bad weeks but this one was a killer. My beloved football club obsession is becoming millstone-like. I’m not sleeping. I’m not eating properly, as in I haven’t time for proper meals so I’m snacking on whatever is easy and generally unhealthy. I’m seriously neglecting my family and friends. I’m arguing with my football friends, probably because we’re all too enmeshed in the madness that is our club and when people are tired and stressed, they fight with those closest to them. Money is non-existent, we’ve got debts, we’ve got to make tough decisions, cut budgets, risk pissing off lots of people and that feelgood factor that surrounded the club when we survived relegation this season has long since been replaced by despondency and frustration.

It feels a lot like we’re clinging to a shipwreck and hoping to God the tide will turn and carry us back to dry land. The problem is that the only dry land is a very bleak desert island. There might be a coconut tree or two on it but there’s not much else; not much shelter from tropical storms, not much in the way of food and I’m wondering how you could fashion a raft out of the few bits of debris lying about.

But faced with the alternative which is being swept back out into unchartered waters with no certainty as to what might lie ahead, whether an ocean liner might appear on the horizon and save us or whether we might drown, that desert island is utopic by comparison and I’ll take it.

I attended a gospel choir Christmas concert tonight, a welcome respite from my week. I very much enjoy the occasion of Christmas – the music, the carols, the collective friendliness of people. The concert was particularly joyous, the singing and the musicians spectacular. I was moved more than once, especially when a lone pianist played and sang “Have yourself a merry little Christmas”.

Afterwards, I drove through the main street of our capital city, hoping to glean some sense of festive cheer. I was sorely disappointed. Despite a very creative Christmas tree on the central promenade made completely from various sized lighted balls that changed colour, the atmosphere was muted and bleak.

The message from the concert tonight was “Discover the beauty within”. Someone said to me recently that maybe we need to stop looking further afield and look back to what is in our own community. Instead of spending vast sums of money that we don’t have on trying to create a master race of a football team, try to cultivate local talent and make a community proud of its own rather than supporting people who turn up for the weekly match and then disappear back to where they came from. Maybe it’s time to start discovering the beauty within!

I think there’s a balance to be struck somewhere. We’ve got to learn from mistakes and live within our means and focus on what’s good and vital and cultivate those things. It’s a message that transcends football clubs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x55fCkqutjU

Hello out there! Yes, the silly season it truely upon us. I  can only imagine that we are all so un-idle  at the moment that we have no time to blog?  I can even get the good smells wafting over the air waves and hear the sound of rustling wrapping paper. There must be lots of fabulous Christmas traditions happening. What’s yours? let me know.

I’ve heard it all before, “you really don’t drink enough water”.

A friend gave me a voucher for a spa for my birthday and I spent a glorious afternoon being wrapped in seaweed, being polished, being buffed, being massaged and finally lay back all cosy beneath a snuggly blanket to enjoy an hour of reflexology, which, if I’m honest, is my very favourite way of spending time. Yes, it’s true. Let’s just say I will never feign a headache when someone offers to rub my feet.

Anyway, I settled back on the heated lounger thingy, closed my eyes and proferred by freshly manicured feet to the friendly balinese therapist. She ran her hands over them and then up my calf and emitted a “tut tut”. Had I not showered off a piece of dead sea mud or was I a bit remiss about exfoliating? Was I heck? “Oh dear, you really don’t drink enough water”, says she. I craned my neck forwards and levelled my best offended expression in her direction and she levelled one of those superior “I know what I’m talking about” expressions back and repeated the accusation but this time added “look, you can see it in your legs. You are retaining water. They are puffy. Your skin is so dry”. Humph!

Well, I don’t really pay very much attention to the things therapists say because invariably they are followed with “we have an excellent cream/soap/moisturiser/rehydrating gel/capsules of frangipani oil with tahitian lotus extract that will have your skin looking 10 years younger if you apply it twice daily. It’s a bit pricey at €300 but you only need to apply a tiny amount and it’ll last you for a year”. So, I simply allowed her her moment of superiority and sank back into the folded towel in the dramatic manner of someone sinking into a plump, hand-harvested, hungarian goose down pillow.

The reflexology was exceptionally good. I woke myself with my gentle snores twice.

I went home to my waterless world.

I used to suffer from quite bad cystitis/kidney infections which, if any of you has had them, are excruciating, debilitating and you would do virtually anything that would be guaranteed to prevent them. Drinking lots and lots of water helps, a lot. Ahem.

And still I went on my merry way. It’s not that I don’t like water. I just can’t be bothered. It bores me. And I’m very easily bored. I need things to stimulate me. I’m a bit of an adrenalin junkie. Water just doesn’t do it for me. If it’s there, poured for me, with a delicious meal, of course I’ll sip it. I’ll even take it with a headache tablet but only enough to lubricate my throat to get the tablet down.

But mainly it’s because I don’t like my life to be ruled by having to go to the toilet every few minutes. I am told that if you drink your recommended quota of water each day, your body adjusts in time and you don’t need to cross your legs or do a little jig in order to get the key into your door lock in case you can’t make it to the loo. Frankly, I’ve never given water the benefit of the doubt so I really couldn’t tell you whether this is true or not.

But that was before yesterday.

I deposited my two eldest girls and two friends at the cinema and, with a few hours to kill, I decided to browse around a large shopping mall.

At this point it’s fair to add that my recent crossover into my 5th decade (ok, it’s going to remain recent for quite some time) has prompted me to regard myself very critically in the mirror each day and I swear that these fine (oh yes they are!!!!) lines around my eyes are starting to resemble the Nile delta in my very paranoid mind.

Anyway, as I travelled up the escalator to the ladies clothes department, I saw him, his eagle-eye scouring the floor for prey, ready to swoop in for the kill. I had about 5 seconds to prepare my strategy. I understand PR/marketing. I know that you can’t even let them make eye contact or you’re finished. He was a tall version of Charlotte’s gay friend, Anthony Marentino, in Sex and the City. I don’t know why I didn’t just obey my own rules and fix my gaze on some imaginery item of clothing and head ruthlessly for it. Maybe subconsciously I decided that I needed a challenge or wanted to pick a fight.

So, I glanced towards him as I skipped of the escalator. “Madam, allow me to change your life”. Oh crikey. I gave him a look that bore not just a small resemblance to the look that that balinese therapist had given me a few months ago and then I cocked my head to one side and raised my right eyebrow as high as it could possibly go and said “go on then”. Half an hour later my nails were shining, my hands were as silky as, well, silk and, as my daughter called me to say they were out of the cinema, I was being led to a stool to make myself more comfortable. “I’ll be there in two minutes”, I whispered into the phone as the half Israeli/half French ex-footballer, who had to give it up because of an achilles problem (oh yes, we were well past skin pleasantries at this stage), ran his fingers over my fine lines and shook his head in disbelief. “What?”, I snapped, pressing the red key on my phone. “We don’t drink enough water, do we?”, he said in the kind of voice that even I wouldn’t get away with using on my 3 year old.

Well, the nail buffer wasn’t too expensive, the cuticle oil is rather nice, my husband remarked on the lovely smell when I came home so the lavendar hand and body cream was definitely worth the special offer price of €35 Euro and the eye cream and serum do seem to have natural face-lifting properties. The problem is I won’t really know whether any of them really work because the free water may well be the reason why I’m going to have glowing skin, silky hair, baby soft hands and sparkling eyes. I’ll just never know.

I’m sure that my body will adjust in time and I won’t always have to get up twice during the night, seek out the ladies as soon as I enter a shopping centre, gauge it so that I go to the toilet just before getting into the car to make a journey that takes 15 minutes. And make sure that I know there’s somewhere to stop on the way if the journey is any longer than that.

And if my middle daughter makes one more remark about dripping taps and fountains and the like when I am hobbling on the front door step frantically digging around in my bag for my keys, I will, er,  not be responsible for my actions though I may be very embarrassed.