BRING OUT THAT FESTIVE CHEER

I had been stuck in the doldrums of zero motivation and the garden had been beckoning me. After our exceptionally hot and dry weather the garden looked miserable. I had intended to trim back the hydrangeas and cut off the woody branches from the roses and prune the herb bushes which had grown wild and unruly. Our oranges had also ripened and I needed to pick the fruit. The ones hanging from the low branches were easy enough but the ones high up needed to be tackled with a special pole with a canvas basket at the end of it. So the work was piling up and I had made plans with the cleaning lady, who is also a gardener when the need arises, to assist me in grappling with all these mounting tasks systematically.

Just when I had rolled up my sleeves and pulled on my gardening boots and was brandishing the electric clippers in my gloved hand, Yiannis casually dropped a bomb on me.

He: The people will be coming to clean the collectors.

The collectors, by the way are these panels of pumps and pipes that regulate the hot water to our radiators. We have them in various parts of the house hidden in small cupboards and one behind the kitchen sofa.

Me: ( blood rushing to the roots of my hair )But why didn’t you…..

My voice rose to a crescendo and before it could erupt into shrieks of protest…they…these cleaners of our collectors… were banging on the door and waving from the kitchen window. There were three of them in blue overalls and grimy fingers, dragging in a huge monstrous machine, trailing some huge pipes stuck into it. Then the boss of them all, a youngish man, a mechanical engineer with a ponytail appeared and went into some lengthy description of how they were going to suck out all the grime from our collectors with Yiannis stopping him every now and then and giving him some suggestions…although his expertise lies in insulating buildings. Mr Ponytail nodded politely and Yiannis plied him with even more tips.

Then all was set and the machine was plugged into the main collector in the kitchen and the man in the truck outside was given the signal to start the ball rolling…and roll it did…in fact it roared and gurgled and shuddered and caused such a racket that even this cat that sat in patches of winter sunlight and observed the goings-on in our garden scuttled off in panic. When I went outside to clip a few plants to escape the racket, my neighbour waved to catch my attention and approached our gate with alarm in her eyes.

Neighbour: Panayia mou! Ti yinetai Viola? ( My All Holy Mary! What’s happening Viola?)

Me: They’re cleaning the collectors.

Neighbour: What collectors?

I explained it to her as well as I could.

Neighbour: I’ve never heard of such a thing.

Nobody has collectors in our neighbourhood. We’re the lucky ones!

The men in blue overalls came for three days from 8 in the morning till 4 in the afternoon and the machine bellowed and made our walls tremble. My gardening didn’t take off and some of our oranges, ripe and bursting with juice, fell to the ground and split open. But when they left, dark clouds rolled from the horizon and the cleaning lady and I hurried through the gardening…tugging at the weeds, pulling oranges from the branches and getting scratched but every now and then stopping to breathe in the tangy freshness of the fruit. We worked fast and furiously under the gaze of the threatening sky and before we could finish the rains pelted down and then settled into a steady grey drizzle for two days.

When the sky blinked off the last drops, I decided to put the rest of the gardening on the back burner and saunter into town and treat myself to some Christmas cheer. All the lights were strung up and the shop windows were decorated with trees with shiny baubles hanging from their branches and glitter thrown about randomly. I trotted down to this wide pedestrian walk in the older part of town where Xmas songs were playing from every shop…`I’ll just slip into this festive mood and do some window shopping,’ I thought. But the Galerie de Beaute, this large make-up store, had thrown its doors wide-open and wisps of fragrance wafted into the street and intoxicated my senses and lured me in. The girls at the counters showed me tubes of cream, light and smooth that glided over the face and made it glow and eyebrow liners in bold ink for eyebrowless people like me and…lipsticks…gorgeous liquid lipsticks in deep reds that you could just paint on with a single stroke…But alas they were all in matte.

Me: What a pity! Every liquid lipstick is matte these days.

Make-up girl with pouty lips: Simple! Just put a drop of gloss on it.

Me: Yes…but gloss runs…and it’s messy.

She: Not this one.

She handed me a Bobbi Brown lipstick in my favourite vibrant red and a gloss, juicy and viscous but not sticky and not one of those runny ones. I rushed home with these precious items and tried them on…and…I’m as pleased as Punch.

Let’s look at it this way… as I mature into an increasingly unyoung person, I have deep conversations with myself and say things like…` I don’t care about my appearance anymore. What I’m looking for is inner radiance .’ Then I work on that tarnished soul of mine with good doings and deeds and throw in some mantras to keep me steadfast…but… my house is a house of…MIRRORS. I had been collecting mirrors with beautiful wooden frames for years and they adorn our walls…and  my reflection peeps from every corner showing the dullness and drabness of age. So my philosophy is this…if I wait for my inner glow to surface…it might take forever…so I’ll give it a bit of a boost…bold sweeping strokes of ink on my eyebrows to define my eyes that are disappearing into some droopy folds and a slick of lipstick with a dot of gloss to transform my lips into something red and quivering and some glow slapped on my cheeks to tease out that struggling inner light…and…I’m good to go…all decked out for Christmas.

So that’s all for this year my friends. Yiannis and I will be spending the holidays in Brussels with Annie and Laurent and Little Miss Ouise.

I’d like to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and a Wonderful New Year!