It is the thirteenth of
December. The Town House clock shows me that it is seven-thirty in the
evening. It is so cold that the chill
burns my face. The temperature is minus six degrees centigrade. The cars
parked along the main street are thick with frost and ice. An old man tries in
vain to open his car door. It is frozen
shut, so he gives up in disgust and goes back indoors. It is TS Eliot’s ‘A cold coming we had of it/Just the worst
time of year.’ The cold makes you
feel like some disaster is about to befall us, such as the electricity supply failing. I am suddenly reminded of Mr Disraeli’s explanation
of the difference between ‘disaster’ and ‘tragedy.’ He used his nemesis Mr Gladstone to
illustrate his case. ‘It would be a disaster if Mr Gladstone were to fall into
the River Thames’, he pronounced, portentously. ‘But it would be a tragedy if
he were rescued.’
My little dog, in her fleece-lined coat, is warmer than I in my flak-jacket and woolly hat. The discordant notes from Lieutenant Pigeon’s Mouldy Old Dough ring out from my headphones. I am on a mission. I have thirty Christmas cards to post and I have decided to post them in the General Post Office, not the handy little post box virtually at the end of the street. Apart from the old man with his car, there is no-one about in the town. The staff of the fish shop are given to rearranging the haddock and cod on the hot-plate for want of something better to do, for there are no customers. I look through the window of a public house. In the absence of any company, the barmaid is desultorily cleaning glasses, dreaming of the time when she can beat the boredom and go home to her warm flat. Further on, I can see the pieman making his pies for the morrow. He is wearing his blue and white striped apron and his portly body is framed in the window above the pie shop. As I walk along, I can hear the peal of the bells of St Mary’s
The
Christmas lights shine down feebly from the lamp brackets and from the wires
strung between the lamps. The display is so poor you wonder why they bother. It’s as if they are following Shelley’s lines:
“When the lamp is shattered/The light in
the dust lies dead.” On the wall of
the Town House is the legend in lights “Haddington
welcomes you and wishes you a Merry Christmas.” I am pleased that they have the grammar
correct, for Haddington is singular, in more ways than one.
For
no reason, as I pass the Royal Bank Of Scotland building, a joke pops into my head. A man and his wife are in bed. The man is reading ‘Motorcycle Mechanics’ and the woman is deep in a philosophical
tract by TLS Sprigge. Suddenly, the woman turns to her husband and says,
apropos of nothing, ‘I want to be cremated.’
The man says, laconically, ‘Come on then, get your coat.’ I laugh out loud and am pleased that no-one
else is around to watch a large pensioner guffawing to himself about nothing in
particular.
The
large Christmas Tree outside the Corn Exchange flashes out a message of hope through
its bonny coloured lights, but near there I almost slip on a pool of frozen
water that someone has flung onto the pavement, having during the day washed a
step, or a front door. I silently curse people who carelessly wash their steps
or front doors in minus nine degrees.
I
think of the friends and relatives to whom these cards will be sent. Some I have never seen for years, since I
gave up the place of my birth to seek my fortune in Blackpool, then Caledonia . These cards are my only link with a dim and
distant past. I still regard the recipients as fondly as I did thirty-odd years
ago, though all have changed. Some are for more recent friends, people with
whom I have worked, or with whom I conduct geriatric sporting activity on a
tennis or badminton court. They are the
present, and perhaps the future, if anyone can foretell the future.
Eventually,
I reach the post box. It is a huge brass
and cast-iron affair with a wide letter-box that is let into the side of the
post office wall. The only problem is
that it is sealed tight shut. Someone
has had the presence of mind to post a cursory notice that says ‘Post box full.’ I trudge wearily back to the end of my street
and push the cards through the little post box I should have used in the first
place. Such is the way of life; such is the way of Christmas.
