A Selection Blog for Christmas Day -- Susan Price
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| Monet: The Magpie: Wikipedia |
A lonely, peaceful magpie... Best kind.
Earlier this month, a gang of rowdy magpies had a right old ruckus with some crows in my garden. I was reading in a back room, but the noise was so loud and so persistent, I went into the garden to find out what on earth was going on. Magpies and crows, chasing each other round the trees and chimney-pots. Screeching. Cawing. Croaking. Flying at each other. You never heard such a racket.
Not much Peace and Good Will there.
And just yesterday, in a supermarket carpark, I saw two magpies chivvying a rat. You can't live for 'em.
Let's change to quieter and more contemplative creatures...
c
THE OXEN
Thomas Hardy
Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
“Now they are all on their knees,”
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.
We pictured the mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen.
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.
So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
“Come: see the oxen kneel
“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,”
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.
c
I'd be there too. It's that last line: 'Hoping it might be so.' A killer.
Finally, Charles Dickens, speaking from 1843, would like a word with 2023...
"Oh, Man, look here! Look, look, down here!" exclaimed the Ghost.
They were a boy and a girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.
Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.
"Spirit, are they yours?" Scrooge could say no more.
"They are Man's," said the Spirit, looking down upon them. "And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!" cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. "Slander those who tell it ye. Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And abide the end."
"Have they no refuge or resource?" cried Scrooge.
"Are there no prisons?" said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. "Are there no workhouses?"
The bell struck twelve.c
Happy Christmas -- and a happier New Year than the last couple!
Comments
But, mustn't grumble. At least we're warm and dry here despite the angst that grips me through the news.
Wishing you too a Happy Christmas and New Year.