2012 in review

Unusually for me it was events on the national and international stage that made 2012 particularly memorable. The 2012 London Olympics were a great triumph and proved to the world that we can run major events spectacularly well. The doom-and-gloom merchants plus those who exhibited total indifference to the whole event must be fuming! Later in the year the defeat of Mitt Romney in the US presidential election was a relief but the thought he was even considered to be a viable candidate by mainstream Americans fills me with horror.

It has also been an eventful and successful year in both my birth and extended families. Two babies, Grace and Nancy, have joined us and it has been lovely to see how rapidly they change in their first few months. Baby Firth is already overdue so there might be a third new arrival in 2012.

Eve and Ella (adult care-leavers I mentor) have also had girl babies – Nicola and Alice – and from what I read in the weekly email Eve sends me both youngsters are doing well. S, the university student who lost both her parents in a car accident, is my third mentee and she too has had a better year. Events with her vile Granddad are moving towards a climax and he should be appearing for sentencing at the Crown Court this spring. I genuinely hope that he gets a custodial sentence.

2012 will also go down as the year when I dropped out of one hobby (amateur astronomy) but returned to another (philatelic exhibiting) after a long break. I don’t regret either decision even though I accept that the first of the two decisions was long overdue!

Christmas Memories

Christmas was always a difficult time in my childhood. My Mother almost never managed to buy exactly what I had asked for – nearly but not quite sums it up - and that was what made it so stressful. It was never the cost that was the issue since Dad was in a well-paid job up in London: it was that she always seemed to be taken for a sucker by some salesman who took the opportunity to offload some slow-selling stock on her.

I wanted a wrist watch. Specifically I wanted a Timex wrist watch like the cool kids had. So what did she do? She purchased an Ingersol watch instead “because it looked nicer”. Not because it was more or less expensive (I later checked in the shop window) but because she thought it looked nicer.

It was the same story with the electric cars – “Top-On Raceways “rather than “Scalelectrix”. Her version of what I had asked for didn’t work at all over Christmas and the cars went backwards and forwards to the shop several times before I got two cars that worked properly.

And again it was the same story with “Action Man”. She came home proudly bearing some substitute product that looked broadly similar but wasn’t what I had asked for.

The final horror story was the worst. My brother wanted/needed a new bike. So his old bike mysteriously vanished from the garage only to reappear shortly after as a Christmas present for me.  Repainted to look like a new bike? – no. Rust removed to make it look less like a rather battered second hand bike? – no.  A blank denial that this was Stephen’s old bike – yes.  To my Dad’s credit even he felt this was unreasonable and in January Mother found another bike for me. A second hand girls bike for which I was supposed to be grateful!