denouement

Boxing Day soundtrack: I sit, motionless and still. From the kitchen - voices, mostly mother's shrill bleatings, arguments perhaps? No, not arguments, just pressing, snagging voices which rasp the stillness. These sounds certainly resemble arguments but in fact are the shifting fissures of mother's well-worked marital intolerances exercised for Boxing Day upon husband Jeff. No, we don't want the ordinary set of cutlery as today is a special day. Which glasses will we use - no - not those - put the champagne glasses out in the kitchen for when the guests arrive - no - not on the table. Other sounds too, less brittle reassuring sounds which I cling to - a fire cracking in the grate, the intermittent resonant hum of cars passing, a motorcycle's distant moaning increasing in pitch until, momentarily, it screeches passed, the tone now softly fading as it speeds away. These other noises evoke the peace-giving sound-scape of my traffic-drowned Bermondsey flat which I am now longing for with a kind of mental and physical decline.

Boxing Day story-board: An old couple, tweed cap, a scarf and stick, peer blankly over the garden wall at the newly turned clods then inspect the twinkling red lights that Jeff has strung through the silver birch. The odd jogger. The living room & dining room windows both framed in clear fairy lights, the Bassett's Allsorts, the Quality Street Celebration, unshellable walnuts, an 'emergency car hammer' (random Christmas gift - what's it for?) those sounds again: where did you put the instructions for my oven? The requirement for elaborate Boxing Day catering demands a new facet of the kitchen's repertoire of appliances. The echo: 'I don't know' elicits an exchange about uninvited rummagings in the drawer where these leaflets should be left for such eventualities.

Festive sketch: I still posses a romantic nostalgia for Christmas. This I can evoke by reading Dickens 'A Christmas Carol', immersing myself in the trappings of folklorish children's tales of the season, inhaling the fresh woody aroma, released by the central heating, of the Christmas tree, the exotic pungency of cloves stuffed into oranges... oh, perhaps there should have been a section above marked Olfactory Moments, never mind. In contrast, my family's reality is a tangled marriage of the incoherent. No resolution, normality or catharsis can be offered here.

Like the mole stumbling upon his long forgotten home, I long to skuttle down into the burrow of my London apartment leaving the blathering flummery of Christmas afroth in the deep dark wood above.

I seek denouement.