My Christmastide wish list

The thing that I am most looking forward to at the moment is what the Germans call 'zwischen den Jahren'.  This is the time in between Christmas and New Year, when all the hysteria of partying and present giving subsides.

It is a gentle, grey time, where days can flicker into brightness - sometimes even startling sunlight - for a few hours, before the horizon is once again soothed with tangerine strokes of settling colour.  A crisis of cerise and then the greedy darkness of the long night takes hold.

This margin of time feels magical to me.  The year that is just passing releases it's hold over us; the year to come has not quite started yet.  Here then is time without demand, a secret time, rarely planned and with so little expectation placed over it, anything is possible...

My favourite time to write is late at night.  It's not so much that I'm a night owl, rather that the demands of the day recede like an outgoing tide, leaving behind an empty beach of a page on which it's okay to make my mark without fear of letting someone else down by not doing the things I have promised them I will do.

The 'zwischen den Jahren' is like an extension of that.  It is a time for sleeping and reading and writing and taking walks out into the quieter-than-normal countryside.  A time for staring at the lights on the Christmas tree and talking lazily about nothing-very-much in front of a roaring fire whilst nursing a wee dram of whisky or a mug of tea.

All I really want for Christmas is a 'zwischen den Jahren'.  And the madness before that is more than a reasonable price to pay...

Kicked into Perspective: Why taking a lunch break is really important whatever your job

I got kicked out this morning.

It was totally brutal.

Kicked out of my own flat, shoved out the door and told I couldn't come back for a couple of hours until I'd wandered around and had some 'Bectime'.

"BECTIME?!?!" I thought. "What the hell is Bectime at a time like this?!?  Term is ending, deadlines are looming, December is a horrifically short month business wise and He thinks I need Bectime?!?!"

The 'He' in question is of course my boyfriend.

Frustratingly, it looks like 'He' might just've been right.

Once out on the street I ambled down Cotham Hill.  I bought an advent candle.  Spent more money than I should've done in the Oxfam bookshop buying books really for me but with half a mind to Christmas presents (as a 'reasonable' excuse for frivolous spending).  I went to a cafe, ordered a pot of tea, wrote my journal, flicked through a magazine about Bristol, did some sewing of a gift I'm making for a friend.  I bought household essentials from Sainsbury's to get us through the next 24 hours and came home.

In that sort of saccharine way that you'll hate if you're a hater of hippie spiritual writings, it kind of turns out I brought something else home with me apart from dinner and some books.  Along the way I appear to have picked up Perspective.  And Perspective is starting to sprout a really calm and collected Plan.

One of the challenges of freelance/portfolio working (apart from dealing with it having a name like 'portfolio' working - I'm renaming it to 'patchwork working' I think) is that you don't really have a normal week.

I've been doing *something* work related - whether MA, business or barwork every day and night for about 10 days.  I'm not complaining (honest guv!) at all but I'm just staring down the barrel of proverbial truism that actually all work and no play leads to unimaginative, unproductive and cross procrastination rather than anything else.  On that basis it definitely makes sense to go take a break.

So wherever you are, whatever you're doing, my suggestion is that right now the best thing you can do for you, your employer, the people you care about in your life, your general mood/state of mind is to go put the kettle on, grab a chocolate hobnob and spend ten minutes doing something totally different.  I can't promise you what you'll do after that is going to be amazing but you'll feel less agitated/angry about it.