Well, that’s Christmas over for another year.
Or perhaps not. I suppose that here in the UK the holidays linger on through until tomorrow, although no one really seems to know what Boxing Day is or why we celebrate it, except that it’s the day the Boxing Day sales start and therefore an excuse to rush out and spend yet more money.
Continue reading “all over”
Yesterday was December 25th, Christmas Day. Which makes today St Stephen’s Day; it’s the second day of Christmas, the day on which my true love sent me a pair of turtle doves, and in the UK it’s also known as Boxing Day.
It’s been a few years since I posted this, so here’s a topical love poem, taken from my collection Around the Corner from Hope Street.
In the UK, when Christmas falls at a weekend, there are compensatory holidays; this means that if you invite friends over for Boxing Day, you need to be absolutely sure they all turn up on the same day.
This year, with the 25th falling neatly on a Wednesday, there was no potential confusion: Boxing Day was the day after Christmas, it was Thursday, December 26th, it was St Stephen’s Day, and no one was likely to dispute that.
Except Amazon, it seems, whose constant messages flood my inbox: 
on a foreign shore: icing-tipped waves
toss tinsel into the clear air. We play
at Wenceslas in the sand, taking it in turns
to be the page. We look for sea holly and sing
carols under the curious gaze
of a parrot in a palm tree.
(Like the last couple of posts it’s not new. It’s also a repost, but I think the blog has different readers now. Incidentally, don’t waste time trying to find the parrot in the photo: it wasn’t actually that palm tree!)
don't confuse the narrator 