They were talking together on the phone (that is, after he’d sworn a few times about the mute button on WhatsApp and how he cannot for some reason turn it off). She heard it all, bless her, as she waited for him to resolve it, her tiny little voice chirping out in the background, ‘You’ve got mute on’. I interrupted their conversation, it being the usual ‘bollocks’, and asked him to ask her if she had any childhood Christmas memories. She reponded immediately, telling us how she used to sing carols with another of their brothers when they shared a bedroom. She said she was probably about 7 or 8. He hadn’t heard of it before, and of course, neither had I. I asked what they’d sung. Oh, the usual, she said, Away in a Manger and that sort of thing.
He’d told me at lunch over the weekend that they’d been constructed a kind of modern wire Christmas Tree outside the town’s Library. I came across another one on my early walk this morning. It’s been put up across the road from the newly named pub, The Optimist. I like it. It’s minimal and kind of constructivist in style. I wonder if they will leave it in its puritan state or over-prettify it with baubles.
