Day Off Week 51 2024

There was the now usual walk and some reading (Christmas Carol). From early evening we were joined by our friend Malcolm McGregor, visiting the seminary, and my son Gwion and his wife, Lydia, who are here for the week.

Day Off Week 50 2024

A more formal day off this week. I went for a walk on the Heath, which is part of my usual routine these days. I had a coffee at Kenwood House. Two new books arrived - Jonathan Landry Cruse's Sing in exultation! (now going cheap at ICM). This is a devotional for Christmas making use of lines from Christmas hymns. It is nicely done with room to write your own thoughts (which I  have begun doing). It gives no information about the hymns themselves. I also got the 2008 P&R hardback The Incarnation in the Gospels (Reformed Expository Commentary) which turns out to be the relevant comments from the respective commentaries plus a few extras. I am also dipping into A poem for everyday of Christmas an anthology chiefly with children in mind. Good to read poems well known and obscure. Also reading Christmas Carol as I try to every year and Nutcracker which I don't think I've read all the way through before. Plus some John Fawcett for a project I have on. I also watched the Martin Scorsese documentary on The Beatles just out (more elsewhere) and then in the evening we watched the final episodes of Anthony Horowitz's Moonflower Murders. This dramatises the second of three novels he has done in the Agatha Christie style. All very clever. The solution not that good sadly but lots of fun on the way (apart from the over acting of Mark Gatiss). 

Day Off Week 50 2019

Yesterday's day off had a real Christmas theme. I did some blogging but mostly I was either reading about Christmas or listening to Christmas music. The snow goose is not really a Christmas book but it has a winter vibe. I enjoyed reading it again, especially in the edition I own illustrated by Angela Barrett. I also have a Wordsworth children's book 'Twas the night before Christmas which is a Christmas anthology. I read Clement Moore's poem, Louisa May Alcott's Christmas dream, a shortened version of A Christmas Carol done by Dickens himself and Hans Christian Anderson's The Fir tree. All full of god morals. In the evening Eleri and I went down to the Royal Festival Hall to see Kate Rusby and her band singing Christmas music. Very nice - more on that anon.

10 interesting words and phrases in Dickens' Christmas Carol

Internet Archive Book Images, No restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons

1. Bedight - Adorned (and bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top.)

2. Norfolk Biffins - Red apples (there were Norfolk Biffins, squat and swarthy, setting off the yellow of the oranges and lemons,)

3. Smoking Bishop - form of mulled wine (we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of smoking bishop, Bob!)

4. Total abstinence principle - a phrase commonly associated with teetotaling, ie never drinking any alcohol or "spirits" - it's a pun (He had no further intercourse with Spirits, but lived upon the Total Abstinence Principle, ever afterwards;)

5. Apoplectic opulence - apoplexy involves becoming unconscious or incapicaitated. Her eit is due to opulence, wealth or luxury (tumbling out into the street in their apoplectic opulence)

6. Retire to Bedlam -  Bedlam was a well known lunatic asylum in London where you would spend yoour final years if you were insane (There's another fellow, my clerk with fifteen shillings a week, and a wife and family, talking about a merry Christmas; I'll retire to Bedlam.)

7. Counting house - an office or building in which the accounts and money of a person or company were kept (eg on Christmas Eve - old Scrooge sat busy in his counting-house)

8. Comforter -  a woollen scarf (eg Wherefore the clerk put on his white comforter, and tried to warm himself at the candle)

9. Forfeits - this is a parlour game where a piece of clothing or some personal belonging is put into a pile on the floor and can only be redeemed by doing something silly, as decided by a judge. (After a while they played at forfeits; for it is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child himself.)

10 The word scrooge originally meant to squeeze.

(I also noticed reading it again in 2023 that there is a reference to a Welch wig tat Scrooge's old boss, Fezziwig, wears. It is a woollen cap, long the back).

Some More Christmas Reading 2017

Another short volume in my Christmas collection is Stuart Burgess's The Star of Bethlehem which I read right through recently - it is not long. I had expected to get a lot of science but after a brief introduction dealing very briefly with that sort of thing it's application all the way, with 10 chapters all told. Sometimes the applications seem a little remote but it is all sound stuff and (as Peter Masters would put it) very suggestive!

I have also read this Christmas (possibly for the first time - it is so ubiquitous it is hard to be sure) Charles Dickens' inimitable Christmas Carol. Again, it is not long (under a hundred pages) but well written for the most part. It is pretty sentimental and quite man centred really but not without its lessons for all of us. It was a huge hit in 1843 when it was first published and has never looked back.