Spring

Suddenly almost without warning it is spring.
After interminable weekends when the snow hung around, a dirty and unwelcome guest at a wake, the skies are an eggshell blue and the trees have burst into a million pastel blossoms.
Spring can be kind to the most inhospitable of vistas. Even in the ugliest parts of Tidewater where acres of concrete strip malls rot away in a careless 1970s timewarp, the presence of a tree full of white blossom can soften the scene.
The meanest of shotgun shacks is elvated to something more noble by a cathedral of soaring whineness in the form of a cherry blossom in the front yard.
But inevitably my thoughts turn to England, not the streets crammed full of grimy back-to-back terraces and the rumble of the nearby Tube line but the open hills and Dales.
I think of that time in Pately Bridge when we drove into the small village in the Dales to see the streams choked with daffodils and high cirrus clouds like vapour trails in the sky.
And another year we climbed the high fells over the grave, gray mirror of Ullswater in the Lake District where Wordsworth wandered loney as a cloud and was moved by a host of daffodils as numerous as the stars in the Milky Way.
But maybe the last word on spring should go to Gerard Manley Holpkins, a priest whose life was often as lonely at Wordsworth's clouds.
I can still imagine him in a country churchyard at Easter recalling the miraculous day the stone was moved from the tomb and Jesus had risen from the dead.
Perhaps because we painted eggs at Sunday School when the read the Easter story, I can never associate the Resurrection with the stoney and arid deserts beyond Jerusalem. Rather it took place on a spring day when the clouds moved in and out of the sun flitting its rays on the verdant English hillside; as if Jerusalem was built in England's green and pleasant land.
And Hopkins was with his flock but apart from it, forever a stranger, locked in his own thoughts and reveries.
Still, when he wrote his sprung ryhthm, he gave a motion and a vibrancy to nature that he often failed to find in his own life. His poem Spring is no exception.
"Nothing is so beautiful as spring—
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing."

Anthem for Doomed Condo Associations

I'd be more concerned about my diffidence if I wasn't so diffident.
But lately I've been wondering about the word I've clung onto so proudly for so long.
The online definition alludes to shyness. I'm not sure I trust this. Words were like solid and unmoveable anchors when they were trapped in the weighty pages of the Oxford dictionary. Now they float around in cyberspace.
It's less about shyness than about not giving a rats, although there doesn't seem to be a proper term for this. Existentialism, maybe.
That's not to say I go through life unconcerned about everything and everyone, just that I have given up caring about large sections of it.
Take the email we received this morning from the guy who has been positioning himself for the last 18 months to become the chairman of our homeowners' association.
I always have to pinch myself that there are people who actually want to do this kind of thing.
"The team of homeowners that actively participate on the website are fighting hard to make this a better place to live," he writes.
"We want you to be proud of your neighborhood and excited to have people visit you here. We DON'T want this to turn in to a transient apartment-like property where nobody takes pride in the fact that you're invested in this property. The more homeowners that engage in the idea, the less people that will treat OUR neighborhood like a dump.
"I'm offended by those people. They are lowering the value of a home that I purchased with hard earned money.
"Are you offended? Fight back. Get involved. Bring your knowledge to the forums and bring your complaints. Let's talk them over and formulate solutions. I dream of a neighborhood where you wouldn't dare blemish it because you know that 183 other passionate homeowners won't stand for it."
Sure C. - and I dream about a private apartment with a built in pool and umlimited supply of Ben and Jerry's and a big security guard on the gate who will ban all access to people who use capital letters in emails because it's a sign of passive aggression.
And no, I'm not offended by these people C. refers to and I have little desire to drive them out of our perfect community with an AK-47 in hand.
To some extent my reaction is driven by the fact he's referring to people who dump trash outside the dumpsters. And, let't face it, we've all been there. It's a rainy night, the dumpter's full and one faces the unpleasant dilemma of whether to leave it on the ground or to take it back home where it will be smelling even worse than before 12 hours later.
I can only conclude I need to be fighting against myself. But I'm not sure I can be bothered.
Also, if I had the energy I might point out to the Man who Would be Dictator, that property vales are more determined by the fact we were all dumb enough to buy in a plummeting market than by a few people offensive people missing the hole in the dumpster.
I'm even cynical about the idea of "hard earned money." I wouldn't be surprised if some people round here bought their dream condos on the proceeds of crack cocaine sales.
Does that count as hard earned money? Maybe it does because I'd rather be paid for eight hours making calls in an office than hanging out on the mean streets all night engaging in transactions that could end up with a bullet to the brain.
Life is relative and, if I wasn't so diffident, I'd take this guy aside and give him a synopsis of the genocide in Darfur. I'd tell him that at a poetry reading yesterday I read Wilfred Owen's Anthem to Doomed Youth.
"What passing bells for these who die as cattle/Only the monstrous anger of the guns."
Which reminds me that they probably didn't have storm doors in the trenches.
And that it's OK for me not to get excited about our new storm door. And if I don't grouch about the cost, do I really have to hang out in Lowe's for an hour while we agonize over designs that all look, frankly like doors to me?
But maybe I'm not playing this happy family, wholesome American communities thing the way I should be.
Maybe I should take an interest when my wife says.
"Dad, I'm putting all of his long sleeved ones down on the bottom."
Which is to say perhaps I shouldn't be someone who didn't even know he has long sleeved and short sleeved ones and who finds the whole thing about as stimulating as the Mutual Banking Code of Practice, which is the code of practice for Australia's credit unions.
So there.

A shot o' the green stuff

Americans seem to revel in St Patrick's Day. As March 17 approaches the radio is buzzing with the news of Irish celebrations at local bars and the stores are filling up with cutsie shamrocks and Leprechauns.
If you are called Reilly or O'Mally or Sullivan you will be expected to show up to work wearing green and hailing "top 'o the morning."
I always find it strange that nobody in America gives a damn about St Andrew's Day, St David's Day or even St George's Day, although there are surely as many Americans of English descent as there are Irish.
Then again the English don't even care much about St. George and there is considerable evidence he never even set foot in Blighty.
As someone with a last name that is Irish/Scottish I am bemused by all the Paddy Day's euphoria. Admittedly a great-great grandmother back in Scotland, who probably wasn't so great, changed the spelling of our last name from McAulay because it sounded too Catholic.
But even with the present spelling I can boast IRA terrorists with my last name, inevitably with the moniker "Mad Dog" somewhere in the mix.
I have been to Ireland a few times and have been intoxicated by the place on each occasion, usually literally and metaphorically.
There is surely no other city in the world than Dublin where an old man can turn to you as you rattle on a bus down Rathmines Road in the early hours of the morning to a half remembered B&B and tell you his life story through tear-stained eyes.
Waking up to a sunny spring morning in Dublin through bleary eyes and driving to the Wicklow Mountains is probably the closest thing you can get to a perfect morning in the western hempishere, as long as you blot out thoughts of Ballykissangel.
And Glendalough with its magical lake and monastery ruins, its towers with conical roofs and its Celtic crosses on the shore, is enough to make the most ardent atheist a believer.
Further west there is the magic of the peninsulas of Cork and Kerry where high mountains plunge into the Atlantic, and the long and lonely beaches of the Dingle Peninsula that are deserted for most of the year.
There are also a lot of Americans.
The best advice for Europeans who don't want to be plunged into the mentality of a mall in the middle of Ohio while in County Cork is don't kiss the Blarney stone.
Of course, we ignored this advice and joined the tortuous line up the castle keep to slobber on a rock that bore the spittle of half of New Jersey.
Many of the American visitors were showing signs of pathological impatience as they waited for a glimpse of the sputum rock that would make them talk even more, if that were possible. Subtle telltale signs gave their agst away such as hypperactive use of their cell phones and dangling their children off an 80 foot high castle Michael Jackson-style.
After some years of living in the US I have realized Americans are much misunderstood abroad. Either that or the loudest Americans travel to Europe, leaving the decent, softly spoken inhabitants of the USA at home.
The beauty of Ireland can be captivating but it's also deceptive. A major reason why western Ireland doesn't resemble Manchester today is the Great Famine of 1740-41, a black chapter in the history of the country and its English masters.
The famine is just one sad episide in the blood-soaked history of a country that has seen civil warfare and sectarian strife until recent years.
A decade ago in Northern Ireland I was chilled to drive through a village on the Antrim coast where the sidewalks were all painted garish red, white and blue and the forbidding red hand of the Ulster freedom fighters greeted travelers at its margins by a police station entrenched in barbed wire.
It seemed hard to believe this forbidding and shuttered up village was in the same country that boasted little pastel colored towns such as Kinsale in Cork, renown for their dancing and seafood.
In America it's easy to gloss over the bloodshed and the dark days of Ireland and think the whole place is one great big party full of smiling redheads poisted to do the Riverdance at the first invitation. It's a mentality that gave the IRA freedom fighter status Stateside for many decades, until the fall of the Twin Towers brought home the real horror of terrorism.
But the subtle irony of all things Irish in America wasn't lost on the pop group the Pogues who once wrote.
"Where e'er we go, we celebrate
The land that makes us refugees
From fear of Priests with empty plates
From guilt and weeping effigies."

Zoo hoo

I’m not sure if ‘zoo’ is Latin for: “place where miserable children traipse around in the vain hope of seeing animals in hibernation.” If it isn't it should be.
Curiously, whenever we suggest going to Virginia Zoo in Norfolk, I feel an initial bout of enthusiasm, which may explain why we’ve been there about four times in the last two years.
Last Sunday we went to the zoo for Zara because we feared she would feel left out by all the attention being lavished on Jackson less than a week after he was born.
The first time we took her there she was two-years-old and had to be pushed around in her pink Princess stroller. Our hopes she would take an interest in the animals was dashed at the first stop off, the hairy black pig in the barnyard enclosure. It probably has a proper name but, for all intents and purposes it's a hairy, black porker.
After the pig no show we gamely upped the ante, introducing her to camels, lions and finally giraffes and elephants, all to no avail. Our daughter remained listless and disinterested.
In contrast on Sunday Zara was raring to go, talking incessantly about seeing her favorite animal the zebra, because it began with ‘Z’.
Unfortunately, getting my wife out of the house and on the road at the best of times, can be about as smooth and coordinated as the relief effort post Hurricane Katrina.
With a new born baby in tow, I should have started packing the car a week earlier.
We got on the road by 4 p.m., resisting all calls to return for forgotten items.
After speeding through Norfolk we barely made it to the zoo before the announcements that the place was about to close, were sounding out.
So our zoo experience, once again, was a whirlwind tour of animals that gamely failed to present themselves on demand.
At least you can rely on the black pig. He was right on cue, sunning himself and raising his trotters in the air in a foul smelling salute to his audience. Zara was interested, this time and we strided enthuiastically on to see a big old Yorkshire pig, magnificantly obese and puffed up as as befits the largest county in England.
My wife pointed out most of the swine at the zoo were from England. It had never occured to me when I lived there that I inhabited a center of pig excellence.
Things went downhill from then on. We needed water and the Beasto was closed. Nor did the handily-placed drinks machines that dispensed water at $2 a time work.
We proceeded to the nocturnal house, which Jackson should have honorary membership of, but didn't see many of the snakes and reptiles because of the mass of kids crowding around the tanks.
By the time we got to a monkey display, the phalanx of unruly kids had grown into a bristling army that marched on fizzy drinks and Little Debbies. There seems to be an informal rule at the zoo that as soon as someone pulls a camera out to take a picture, this is a cue for a couple of people to stand between lens and subject and not to move until the sun goes down. Or maybe that's just what happens when I take a picture.
We walked on past Land of the Tiger, a half constructed maze of faux Oriental temples that is due to open at some undetermined time in 2010. Probably December 31. It started me wondering what happens to the tigers during the construction period. Does a flyer go up in the zoo cafeteria asking for volunteers willing to let a tiger sleep on their couch for six months?
The interactive praire dog habitat with viewing bubbles seemed more promising. Zara and myself took turns looking out of the bubbles to see gray mud. We persevered with more bubbles because there was a group of people behind a nearby fence pointing in our direction, leading us to assume praire dogs had been sighted.
My wife later informed us they were pointing and laughing at the stupid people who had missed the signs and were looking through the bubbles for praire dogs still in hibernation.
With the zoo announcements picking up the urgency of an woman who had clearly skimped on lunch and was manically fiddling with her keys, we headed as quickly as it is possible for a family with a five-year-old and a baby stroller up to the optimistically named Okavango Delta.
The real one is the world's largest inland delta in Botswana. The one at Virginia Zoo comprises plastic cliffs and a bit of grassland and water. I've seen worse attempts but frankly you'd have to drink sherry all day to think this resembles the real thing.
At this point Zara threw one of those Catch 22 child strops that are so hard to deal with. She wanted to climb onto the aluminium rhino but didn't because it was too high and screamed at all attempts to be hoisted up there. But when we abandoned the rhino to press on, she screamed that she wanted to go on the rhino.
The climb up the Okavango Delta display wasn't promising; the meercats and a number of less interesting animals were hibernating. Even the fennic fox that can normally be relied on to pose for the cameras had gone AWOL.
There was no sign of the zebras and the elephants and giraffes had forsaken the delights of the delta for their concrete bunkers but at least they could still be viewed.
Only the lions were gamely gathered for the visitors but, by this time Zara was so disconsolate about the rhino setback, she had no interest in seeing them.
The last 15 minutes were a race to the gate to avert the prospect of spending the night at Virginia Zoo.
I hope not to return any time soon. Virginia Zoo is a pleasant enough place compared to the bleak animal jails that masqueraded as zoos when I was growing up in Britain.
But it lacks something. More specificfally it lacks penguins. Surely no zoo is worth its salt without feeding time at the penguin pool.

Snow again

The snow was back yesterday, although I hardly noticed.
We've just had a baby boy and the last three days have been a half waking, half sleeping netherworld of nocturnal nurses' visits, feedings and alarming stops at 7-Eleven at 2 a.m. to see the winos gazing in wonder at the ageing cooked goods.
We probably isn't the right word here. Nikki endured the last two months of pressure and pain, was transformed into a human pin cushion of wires, gainfully gave birth and now gets sleep in 20 minute increments in between feedings, if she's lucky.
I can only look on in awe from the sidelines, trapped in an abstract world of admiration and befuddlement. I am like Iggy Pop's passenger, riding through the city's backsides looking at the full moon under the bright and hollow sky that Jackson was born under.
I am relegated to ancilliary tasks, skirting around the edges of the action, which is the best place to be.
That's when I first noticed the snow. On Tuesday night after we brought him home, I realized I had left a jar of formula in the car.
By the time I ventured outside heavy duty sleet was driving across the parking lot. Within half an hour the cars and grass were coated white.
It was pretty but snow has long since ceased to be a novelty around these parts. When we had our first snowfall in January we cleared a large section on the front page, ordered an extra shift and ran my online snow updates, which said little new apart from the fact that more snow was falling, every hour.
The schools closed for three days. Even though there was hardly a ghost of the white stuff left on roads for the last two of them, Hampton Roads had to prove it couldn't cope with more than four inches.
It also snowed for the next two Saturdays. The snow was soon relegated from the front to the back of the paper. It became commonplace, boring and somewhat seedy.
Even two weeks after the big snowfall you could see it hanging around at times at the sides of parking lots, like an unwelcome guest at a party, now black, stained and swept into corners so as passers-by could throw cigarette butts in it.
And now, in March, snow in southern Virginia is nothing short of ridiculous.
So the snow hasn't interested me much. Even my daughter seldom remarks on it now, although there was one chilly night when I gave in to her and went outside to make inconsequential snow balls and went through the motions of making snow angels.
And there was one day on the way down to North Carolina when I stopped by the Dismal Swamp Canal to walk through the crisp new snow and to wonder at the fresh crispy whiteness of a world in which the sun cast the shadows of the trees on the glittering crystals covering the grass.
Before I got back in my car and left it all behind.

Soooo 2006

Just when I was feeling guilty about not blogging for a week or two, along comes a study by the Pew Research Center saying blogging is for old folks anyhow.
Instead of being cutting edge, it seems bashing out a blog is something you do in between bouts of mindless dribbling onto your Zimmer frame.
Of course I have no idea what the Pew Research Center is. I assume it has nothing to do with those hard benches people sit on in church, although it's been so long since I last went into the House of God, that they probably sit on bean bags now.
Back to that study. The D.C. nonprofit think tank was designed to gauge the online habits of America's "millennial generation," a demographic group that is considered a bellwether of the nation's future technology trends.
And as someone who works in a media industry that is changing by the day, I coudn't possibly admit to not being someone who is sliding up and down on the cutting edge of technology. I'd never admit to anyone that I really don't know the difference between an ipod and an iphone, although I know a bit about the I Ching.
The results of the study indicate blogging has become so 2006, when 28 percent of the two groups studied, teens 12 to 17 and young adults 18 to 29, actively blogged.
By the fall of 2009, that percentage dropped off to only 14 percent of teens and 15 percent of young adults as blogging "lost its luster for many young users," said Amanda Lenhart, one of the report's authors.
Lenhart said one reason for the shift might have come from the rapid ascent of Facebook over MySpace to the top of the social media charts in the past year.
The MySpace format encourages members to blog, while Facebook instead features short status updates, she said.
So next time a colleague starts banging on about having to write their blog, just turn around, fix them with a withering eye and say: "Dude - that's soooo 2006."

The Great Dismal Swamp

As visitor attractions go the Great Dismal Swamp doesn't always feel like the most rewarding place to visit.
If you go to the Grand Canyon you drive into a parking lot, get out of your car and peer over the edge at a vast chasm and a multi-colored wonderland of buttes and mesas.
The Great Dismal Swamp that straddles the border of Virginia and North Carolina, doesn't have the same must-see appeal. If you wander into the Great Dismal Swamp you find a crazy tangle of trees, a maze of water filled ditches and a confused haven for nests of snakes and multitudes of tics.
People seldom come here to find something; they are more likely to want to lose themselves in the overgrown mirk of the place. During the days of slavery underground railroads ran through the swamp and slaves eked out an existence here in desperate colonies to evade their erstwhile masters.
It was so vast and so thick that some who entered never returned.
The young poet Robert Frost, despondent over a broken heart, came here to "disappear" but changed his mind. As the November night fell over the swamp, Frost was put off by the bottomless waterways that swallowed even the light of the moon and headed for home the next day.
If the swamp has a focus it's the spherical Lake Drummond at its heart. But you can lose the skin on your feet and your will to live not to mention the occasional friendship on the four mile long trudge down a ramrod staight path down the Washington Ditch trail.
But if you keep on trudging, you turn a sudden dogleg to the right and Lake Drummond opens up like a glittering jewel in the most inhospitable of places. There's certainly something magical about this empty and untouched expanse of hourglass water fringed with cypress and tupelo trees in the heart of a ragged wilderness.
A new state park beside the Dismal Swamp Canal in North Carolina now affords a new access to the swamp but it's a long haul for walkers to get into the heart of the swamp.
Fortunately the new park includes a boardwalk for visitors who want to check out the swamp without getting blisters.

Characters are welcome

Newspapers in the 21st Century barely resemble the place I was first introduced to when I worked on my local paper at school.
The Gloucester Citizen used to be crammed into offices down a narrow Medieval lane. On the upper floor the journalists bashed out copy on bulky typewriters the size of modern photocopiers and chain smoked in murky corners.
Below them the 'inkies' toiled away in a mini print works. By 2 p.m. all the court copy, minor crime and council material had been transformed, by a mysterious process from messy and double typed pieces of paper sprewed from the hukling typewriters into newspapers that rolled out by 3.30 p.m.
By 4 p.m. I were on the bus home, clutching a copy, with page 4 prominently displayed in the hope fellow passengers would pick up on my by-line.
It's one of the fallacies of rookie journalists that members of the public actually care who writes a story. In reality you could use the by-line "Adolph Hitler" and few would pick up on it.
By time I took a journalism diploma the industry was already changing. Although we showed up in Cardiff with our typewriters, which would be left in a drop zone in the middle of the "Woodie" pub during extensive after course drinking sessions, an online newsroom arrived half way through the course.
For a couple of weeks I found it almost impossible to write copy directly onto a computer. I missed those tiny pieces of paper that meant stories were segmented up into their constituent parts. But finally the small blue typewriter was abandoned in favor of new technology.
Some time earlier modern technology had hit the industry like a digita tsunami. In great secrecy media mogul Rupert Murdoch had moved his London papers to a vast East End compound in Wapping, dispensing with hundreds of 'inkies' in the process sparking a virtual siege by the trade unions.
The industry was becoming a lot cleaner and a good deal more clinical.
Still the characters from the old days lingered on.
One of them was Alan Coles, a formidable former sub (or copy) editor on the Daily Mirror, who had been hired to teach on our course.
Coles had a face that was made for East End pubs. Pitted and gaunt with dark eye sockets Coles conjured up images of darts, overflowing ash trays and the collective mutter when the last orders bell was rung.
Coles was the guy you didn't want editing your copy. Except here he was taking home all of our pathetic, fledgling efforts at news.
Unlike the other tutors Alan didn't shield us from the withering intolerance of Fleet Street. Copy was returned with so much red pen on it, it was difficult to read the original words.
If you had "boring, boring, boring" written on your story, you breathed a sigh of relief.
One of my friends had a story on a golf game returned with: "What a load of balls" written on the top.
When the course tutors posed as emergency service works on the end of the phone, the two words: "Fireman Coles" were enough to send the reporter into a fit of paralysis and to leave the conversation without getting details of the fire. Coles would occasionally break from character and burst through the door to scream: "Ain't you going to ask about the fire then?"
I knew Coles was losing it to some extent when he presented a lecture on measuring copy with a ruler. I may not be the most techni-savvy reporter, but even I realized you could probably do that on the computer.
Eventually his contract wasn't renewed. Some of the women on the course took exception to Coles. The time when he said they should smoke because everyone in the newsroom would be dragging on a cigarette seemed to be the turning point.
When I started work on a newspaper Coles lived nearby and he would call me occasionally. Although he put the fear of God into people I missed him in a way. He represented the industry back in the days when Britney Spears' fashion faux pars did not a story make.
Coles wouldn't last five minutes in today's politically correct newspaper world. I can imagine him waving his ruler around and yelling: "What the fack is Twitter?"
But in a world when we can spend eight hours lost in the depths of the internet and not talk to any colleagues before we head home, characters are welcome.
And I can still hear his voice now when I write certain things that wouldn't pass the Coles test.
"Emerge. You don't emerge. How does a person emerge into something?"

Sear hell

Over the weekend, or at the weekend as we say in the UK, I was unlucky enough to find myself in Sears.
I’m not sure how this happened. The plan was to have lunch and visit somewhere picturesque such as Smithfield so as at least we could look at some fairly old buildings as hypothermia set in.
But the mother-in-law had apparently seen a stroller system for $75 and as we only have two months to go until our new arrival we thought it was a prudent idea to check it out.
In saying that I had forgotten that Sears is like one of those vast department stores from the Soviet Union in the Brezhnev era. Somebody had a vision a long time ago but nobody can remember who or when. In the British context it’s one of those jack of all trades places like Woolworths, that recently folded because nobody could remember why the stores were there, apart from the pick ‘n mix candies.
After fighting our way through sections of ‘man tools’ and dung brown ‘man jackets’ to match the ‘man tools’ we finally found the desultory infant section. The labeling wasn’t clear but it looked like my mother-in-law had made a mistake and the $75 price tag referred to a cot beneath the stroller.
In any case the wheels had been removed from the strollers and they looked like nobody had bought one since the Punic Wars.
Foolishly we persevered and tried to find a member of staff to give us a price check, which is not a straightforward task in Sears where staff pretend to be members of the public to avoid awkward customer questions.
We finally found one lady who admitted, under heavy cross examination, to being a member of staff.
She immediately looked panicked and about 200 miles out of her comfort zone at being asked to discover the price of an item in a different department.
Had we asked her if she could unravel the Da Vinci Code we might have had a more positive reaction.
Finally she showed up by the stroller with a cumbersome hand held gadget. She proceeded to press some buttons. And she pressed more buttons and frowned. After 10 futile minutes she left to get help. She returned with the same cumbersome hand held gadget, pressed the same buttons and frowned again.
After an age of grunting and fumbling during which even my daughter got tired of pressing the buttons and flashing lights on the vibrating baby seats, the store worker went to seek out a manager.
Another 10 minutes later a harried, unsmiling woman with the complexion of a disaffected veal calf, arrived to tell us she had no idea how much the stroller was either. She disappeared into a sinister looking back room and finally told us it was $170, with the air of someone who had plucked the figure out of mid air.
My wife told me she had encountered the same manager a few days earlier in the women’s restrooms when she had managed an unpleasant blockage situation.
The woman told my wife the men’s washrooms were always a lot worse.
I was about as dubious about this information as I was at the price of the stroller.
It’s never a great feeling when you leave a store knowing you would have had a better customer service experience in Wal-Mart.

misty morning, Suffolk

This doesn't feel like Christmas

I have a sneaking suspicion Christmas used to be more exciting than this when I was a kid.
For a start it's almost 4 am and my daughter is soundly asleep while my wife is downstairs wrapping up her presents.
If it had been left to me I would just now be trying to ascertain what stores are open at almost 4 am on Christmas Day.
When I was five-years-old I don't think I'd have been asleep at 4 am. On one occasion I stayed up most of the night in fervent expectation that some old guy with a white beard would leave a few eclectic offerings at the bottom of my bed.
Of course I didn't believe that rubbish some adults told us that Santa arrived down the chimney, because we didn't have one. Nor did I believe there was one Santa for the whole planet who visits x billion kids in one night. I'm not sure how anyone can fall for that.
But I did believe in Santa, although I rationalized it. I figured every local authority employed a few Santas that went round the houses ringing door bells. Hell maybe they had a Santa budget and a Christmas Committee that would make great fodder for the local newspaper when they implemented Santa cuts.
My thought process didn't make for an easy night. For a start, I'd listen out for the bell to ring for hours on end, probaby pissing off my parents no end.
Then after I finally fell into a fragile sleep for 10 minutes, I would feel the wonder of the magic stocking at the foot of my bed and eagerly trace the outline of the presents through the fabric.
I didn't actually get stockings. My mother put our presents in a couple of pairs of her hose (tights as they are known in the UK) which is just plain wrong now I come to think about it.
Then when we were finally allowed to open our presents at around 5 am we would rip them open enthusiastially and cherish each one, even the apples and walnuts that my parents used to pad out my mother's hose.
Often there would be a book about ghost stories and my sister and I would tell each other tales under the tree.
In the case of my daughter it's different. She'll wake up at about 9 am, yawn a lot and ignore most invitations to get excited about Christmas. Then she'll matter of factly open her presents and bug me to get out my chainsaw to remove them from their Fort Knox approved packaging.
I'm tempted to use her reaction as an allegory on how Christmas has lost its excitement and meaning.
But maybe she's just like that.