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Merry Christmas my arse

Life under Capitalism, posts interesting only to me, video
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And then it was exactly a month ago I was facing my first night without Sandra. Here in the Netherlands fortunately the Christmas insanity starts late, as we have to deal with Sinterklaas first, but it has started now. At work the Christmas trees are being put up, the shops have traded in the Sinterklaas tat for Santa tat; worse the X-Mas adverts are back on telly. Awful as they are though, with the incredibly annoying yet very very earwurmable Sky Radio jingle being the worst, none of them can match the horrors of this particular example from the UK, as Charlie Brooks shows:



The rest of the lyrics are worse still. It’s a terribly sad song. So sad Leonard Cohen should be singing it. “Mum” appears to have purchased an entire nervous breakdown’s worth of cold branded goods in a pathetic bid to win the affections of her own family. Her desperate offerings include a top-of-the-range MacBook for Grandad, “an HTC for Uncle Ken”, a “Fuji camera for Jen”, and a “D&G” for Dad. In case you’re wondering what a “D&G” is, the advert makes clear it’s a truly disgusting designer watch even Jordan might balk at. In the mad Littlewoods universe “Dad” seems inexplicably delighted by the sudden appearance of this ghastly bling tumour on his wrist, instead of screaming and trying to kill it with a shoe, like any sensible human would.

Everybody involved with this ad should’ve topped themselves rather than kill their souls this way. Christmas has always been a festival of commercial greed of course, but I’ve not seen it as blatant as this yet. It’s as if the naked lust for more stuff has burst out from behind the veneer of asperation it was made slightly more respectable by.

For Sandra Christmas never was about presents, though she did like the ritual of buying each other slightly more expensive gifts than we could afford, the one time of year we could legitimately spoil ourselves. She loved the rituals of Christmas, the food: mince pies, turkey or another sort of roast, even brussel sprouts, but especially Christmas cake. She made them each year, even in 2009 while we were preparing to go to hospital for the kidney transplant operation she made two, one of which is still on the top shelf of one of the kitchen cupboards. Last year she was in hospital, so I brought Christmas to her, getting all sorts of nice little treats that could be eaten cold or heated up in the ward’s microwave. It wasn’t perfect, but it was Christmas.

This year I’m going back to my family, the first without her and also the first I will be spending entirely with my family since I first met her; it’s like going back to my childhood, not entirely pleasant even had the circumstances been different. It’s hard to explain without sounding ungrateful, but it’s going back from having your family, no matter how small, to being part again of the family; the dynamics of Christmas are altered. It’s only a small complaint in the scheme of things, but I’m still dreading going home a bit, especially with the sentimentality surrounding these holidays.

Never mind, at least I’ll get to enjoy my father’s oliebollen again, which nobody does better…

Four weeks ago now…

Music, posts interesting only to me, video
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What do you do after you met, lived with and lost the love of your life? Other than write maudlin posts on your blog that is?

No idea, but it has been four weeks since Sandra died, almost a month since she was cremated and that means I can shortly pick up her ashes — another milestone I’d rather not have reached so soon.

Last Saturday I spent part of the afternoon listening to another of Sandra’s favourite bands, Steely Dan, whose brand of mellow, technically perfect, coked up yacht rock is not quite the sort of music you’d think she’d enjoyed when you know she spent most of the seventies trawling record stores for import funk and dancing to northern soul at the Wigam casino, but she did. What she liked was how mellifluous they sounded, the calm perfection of their sound. She hated any sudden loud noises, discords, anything that jared and whatever you think of Steely Dan, their music always flowed and flowed smoothly.

Perfect late night reading music, with a glass of whisk(e)y or cognac and a good book, a cat somewhere and a roaring fire.

We still don’t know the name of the flower we found that day

Anime, geekdom, video
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Anime right? Twenty years ago we all thought it was all adolescent power fantasies with teenage boys flying mecha power suits and heroines in stripperific costumes before we realised that we got them confused with superhero comics. Back then I was lucky in that the local videostore my parents had gotten a subscription to when we’d finally gotten a vcr ten years after everybody else (having had a black and white telly until long into the eighties and only the very very basic cable package) had one or two anime/manga enthusiasts working there and they managed to get all the classics. Akira, Legend of the Overfiend, Fist of the Northstar, Dominion Tank Police, Bubblegum Crisis, Macross, all courtesy of Manga UK and all of a certain consistency. Not bad series or movies by any means, but only a very small part of a much more diverse selection Japan had to offer, tailored to the tastes of western nerds and not too strange.



These days, even if the official supply is still somewhat limited, the internet and various not quite legal solutions can get the dedicated anime fan everything they want. Now myself I’ve never been a hardcover anime or manga fan, being fairly conservative in my tastes, depending on the recommendations of others for cool new series. Which is how I discovered things like FLCL or The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, but not the anime series I’ve just started to watch: Ano Hi Mita Hana no Namae o Bokutachi wa Mada Shiranai or AnoHana for short, which means “we still don’t know the name of the flower we found that day” and which is somewhat different from most series I watch because it has gotten reactions like this

I accidently ran across some fan art for the series when googling something else, read the inevitable Wikipedia writeup and hunted down the episodes on the strength of it.

The story is simple: a group of childhood friends, young children, drift slowly apart as they grow into teenagers. One of them, Menta, never grew up however as she died in an accident on that day they found the flower. Now the guy who had been the closest to her, Jinta, is haunted by her memory, not to mention her ghost, who wants him to fulfill her wish she had asked him about the day she died. He needs to bring back the group to do so and move her spirit on, but this isn’t easy as they each have gone their own ways. How much do you have in common with the kids you played with when you were eight now that you no longer see them anymore and you’re in high school?



It’s a very adult in the proper sense of the word, low key, emotional and gut wrenching story about dealing with loss and memory. Any wonder it appeals to me right now?

Three weeks ago last night

Auntie Beeb, posts interesting only to me, video
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sandra in her wheelchair a few weeks before she died

I don’t sleep well on Sunday nights anyway, leftover anxiety from high school “ohshitit’smondaybacktoschoolnooo!” bubbling up, but since Sandra died it has become even more difficult. It was after all the night from Sunday to Monday that she died and I was woken up with the news. Three weeks on it’s still incredibly weird not to have my life intertwined with hers anymore. This weekend was also the first I was alone since she died, without my family or friends or work to distract me. I like having time on my own, to do what I like and not have to take anybody else into account, but this was different. I’ve never really lived on my own, moving out from my parents almost twenty years ago to move into student flats, moving out from there to live together with Sandra. Even when she was in hospital her presence was here. But now we’re three weeks on and I wonder how strong her presence still will be three weeks from now, three months, three years…



One thing that will keep her spirit alive so to speak is Radio 4. Sandra’s daily routine revolved around it, getting up with the Shipping Forecast, Farming Today, then getting annoyed with the Today Programme and listening to the morning shows while she did her business around the house until You and Yours came on, which like all right thinking people she disliked. Like Stephen Fry admitted to years ago in one of his books, Sandra had always been into Radio 4, a “young fogey”, but she grew to appreciate it even more being in a strange country building a new life. The Beeb was there as a lifeline with the old country.



In the evenings it was PM, the Six O’Clock news and finally the comedy, then we’d switch to the telly and Dutch news at eight. In the weekends was when the best programmes were on: Home Truth with John Peel until he died, Saturday Live and Broadcasting House, more comedy, the Archers omnibus (still the only radio programme to be regularly scheduled at Eastercons). the whole rhythm of the Sunday determined by it: I’d sleep in until the Archers would come on, then she’d made breakfast if I was lucky, I’d do the dishes, then reading blogs and do some chores and coffee when Gardening Question Time came on (which we saw live when it came to Amsterdam). But after news, comedy was what she liked best, ISIHAC (never the same without Humpf), the Now Show, Just a Minute, Dead Ringers, The Day Today, Fist of Fun, the various injokes, Mitch Benn and so on undsoweiter.



Late at night the radio would be switched back on as I went to bed, usually being the first to do so, while Sand still puttered around. If she was feeling poorly she would stay and listen as the programmes ended, the Shipping Forecast came back and finally broadcasts ended with Sailing By before the World Service came on. And I kick myself for not playing that at the funeral because it is the perfect music to say goodbye to.