To Call My True Love To My Dance

The word carol derives from the word carole- which is a word for a ring dance- and- listening to the Service of 9 Lessons and Carols from Kings as it played itself out in front of my mother the other evening- it struck me how odd it was that the ritual should be so static and solemn- with persons of the male gender (but in gender-suppressing robes) standing in line in wooden stalls (how the word speaks entrapment) moving nothing but the muscles of the face.

Carols were never intended to be sung in church- but in halls and inns and out in the open, by people on the move, by people with a drop of good ale inside them, by wassailers, by waits, by people swivelling their hips and tapping their toes and waving beer mugs around. By people dancing. They aren't seriously religious but playfully so. They belong to the people not the ecclesiastics. Monks didn't sing them but barmaids did. Or perhaps naughty monks did- monks who had snuck out of the monastery after compline to be with the barmaids on Christmas Eve...

Supplementary To The Previous Post

It's four o'clock on a late December afternoon in 2011- and the BBC has taken possession of Kings College Chapel, Cambridge (see their van on the forecourt) in order to record The Festival of Nine Lessons And Carols.

"Nomenclature"- What An Awkward Word That Is!

I had thought in advance that I wouldn't want to be looking at food today but as it turned eleven o'clock I found myself reaching for a mince pie.

The mince pies are home made. Even the mince meat is home made. Ailz did a tremendous job.

We had a quiet Christmas Day. My sister and her husband were here- as was my mother's principal carer. We ate curry and trifle.

My sister came equipped with some Christmas quizzes from the Guardian. They occupied us in the fallow time between lunch and tea. I particularly liked the section called Projected Image Nomenclature Challenge which required one to identify famous films by the names they had been marketed under in foreign languages (translated into English of course). The distributors in Hong Kong sold "The Sixth Sense " as "He's a Ghost" thereby obviating any need to actually see the movie. My favourite is "The Young People Who Traverse Dimensions While Wearing Sunglasses" which is (allegedly) the French name for "The Matrix" (and I guessed it right!!!)