Everything’s peaceful, everything’s nice. It’s Christmas Eve; there’s magic in the air. While my mother dusts Delia’s cottage-cheese mince pies with powdered sugar and gets into the Rumple Minze, snow dusts the shi-shi (or is it schee-schee, or even chee chee?) London street we live on.
Already, Iris’s house is a picture of Edwardian loveliness: Snow on the roof, snow on the topiaries, snow trimming the limbs of the ginko biloba. It’s not what I’d call a ‘dandruff’ of snow. It’s more than that. It’s more a ‘desquamation.’ (Desquamare equals Latin for something to do with fish scales and skin conditions). Whatev. I just mean the snow is falling a bit heavier than usual on this titsy little island, and because it’s Christmas Eve and because snow happens here about as often as Venus transits Sun, everyone's pretty pumped; everyone’s saying how perfect it is.
Iris is perfect. I can see her in her house. She has on her party dress (that wretched carmine bow), and she’s carrying a tray of mini quiches. Befitting of our S.W.19 zip, it gets quite posh at Iris’s at Christmastime. Her parents – who, compared to mine, are normal people (i.e. kind and pleasant to be around) – entertain friends (huh?). This is always interesting because in preparation for the parties they host, the house is reconfigured. Furniture moves about; rooms take on new roles. The downstairs toilet becomes a wet bar; the kitchen, a Downtonesque scullery of steaming fish kettles. Thrillingest of all (tectonically so), the door to her father’s study is unsealed for the night, and guests – though definitely not this one – are invited in to bounce on the gleaming green sofa. Lucky.
It’s a bit less posh at ours. For starters, we live in a mod glass and concrete box which isn’t entirely unposh, just posh as IKEA would manage it. For instance, scholars of Peculiar Architecture come to tour, and we have things our neighbors don’t. We have something called a carport beneath which my mother’s bat-black, destroyer Mercedes rests for the night, and a ‘disability ramp’ which is a destroyer in its own way. Fortunately, though, the ramp is the only accoutrement to handy-cappidness we have, and she hates it with every fiber of her glittery sweater from Biba. We have skylights in our flat roof, and when the rain comes (which it does every minute of every single day and night) the noise of it hitting the fiberglass can almost drown out my father’s bangarang.
But tonight – because it’s snow and not rain which (softly) falls – that bangarang has the run of the house. And it’s riding a wrecking bull.
So what’s the problem now? Christmas lights, that’s what. In this particular moment, those are what have him up a tree. And it’s not just any old tree. It’s a silver tree. And not from Asda or Boots. No, this (my mother is lightning-quick to clarify) is a silver tree from Italy. Hearts stop to see it. Actually, mine does. But only when it’s lit, which it won’t be this year because my father is down off his bull and is French-skipping the lights in spike heels. Look at him go! There’s glass everywhere.
My mother, meanwhile, has moved on from mince pies and is strangling bacon around prunes, then stabbing them violently with toothpicks. Some prunes have multiple picks, like she couldn’t stop stabbing. Like she just couldn’t stop driving stakes into their miserable, name-me-one-person-who-likes-prunes bodies. These things she makes, believe it or not, are called Devils on Bullback. And while there’s an ‘Angel’ version made with scallops or water chestnuts (and they ride kittens), she’s never felt inspired to make them.
So decorum has prevailed (it is Iris’s parents we’re talking about) and we, in actual fact, have been invited to the party. Soon, I’ll get on my Xmas muscle-T; my mother, the bushy white tail of a silver fox (wha?), and we’ll roll across the street. If my father has finished cricket-batting the tree (and the presents under it), he’ll be there as well, still in spikes on the off chance some kind unsuspecting person says something nice to him.
We do have street lamps in London, but I really want to say that on this night, they had winked out. Perhaps there was a beam of soft light coming from one of Iris’s windows. Perhaps the moon was there somewhere, glowing faintly through a snow-swollen cloud. And maybe the beam cast out into the night where it glittered the snow, which then glittered other things – the trees and roofs, the gate posts and lamp posts. And I want to say the flakes were lighter by then, silvery and fine; and that they were falling gently – like fairy dust – into my mother’s hair.
AB - 15.12.22
Love. Love. I will never forget handy-cappidness.