A Very Merry Christmas to You All!

I had hoped to visit some blogs over the past few days but we have been without LP (liquified petroleum) Gas since the start of Wednesday. We've just had a delivery this morning but we cannot get the gas to feed from the tank to the boiler. It is several degrees below freezing. Long love the Calor Gas Engineer! May he/she arrive quickly and sort all of this out! (Perhaps luckily we are going to my parents tomorrow for Christmas lunch. My two sisters will be there, brother-in-law, niece and grandfather. Central heating as a Christmas present - yeah!)


So from here I am wishing you all an extremely very merry Christmas and a super duper 2011!

In the last couple of days these things caught my eye and I wanted to share them:

1. A wonderful poem which is well worth reading


Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost

2. Sonny Rollins, the legendary octogenarian tenor sax jazz player, interviewed recently by Martin Gayford in The Daily Telegraph:


" 'It was a heck of an experience, man, but I learnt a lot from it. One thing: material things don't really matter. Life isn't about whatever you have accumulated up until that point.' (He lost everything in the attack on the twin towers in New York in 2001. He and his wife had an apartment near the World Trade Center and he was alone there when the planes hit. He lost everything - treasured records, his piano, his clothes, mementos. All destroyed by the toxic dust. He was there alone (Lucille was upstate) when the planes hit, and spent the following night without power.)

The other story he tells about that awful time is revealing. 'The next day there were buses to evacuate people. But when I got to one, and the guy there said there was no more room, immediately I began to think, they don't want me on the bus because I'm black - which wasn't the case actually. Then I saw three elderly Italian ladies who lived in the building, just sitting waiting very peacefully amid all this hubbub. Not complaining, not panicking; I felt ashamed of myself for getting so uptight. So that was another little lesson.'

I made a remark a bass player friend of mine once made about another great tenor player, Ben Webster: that he didn't just play a certain tune, he played his whole life. 'That's it, man!' Rollins exclaims. 'You've got to keep it pure. The worst thing in the world to me is to play by rote. You should feel it, you have to play from the inside. That's real jazz!'"

That last paragraph really sums it all up for me.
Sometimes I wonder what we are doing here in the frozen North...balancing finances, houses, boiler systems, the B&B, children and goodness knows what else. But deep, deep, deep down  (even under all the duvets) I know we are here for a reason. We keep it pure, deep and crisp and even.


Have a good one!

[P.S.: 2.45pm. Engineer has fixed things. Calor Gas have been good-ish. Staff have tried to do what they can do but a certain letter will go out to the bosses. Our old tank should have been replaced in the Summer as the same thing happened last Winter. Grrrr!!!! Never mind for now...it's Ding Dong Merrily on High!!!!!]