11-feb-2015

Each January at home, one of us has to take down the Christmas decorations which my husband carefully and painstakingly put up before the festival. Traditionally, it has to be done by Twelth Night, which this year fell on the first Monday that husband went back to the office, so the task, as usual, fell to me. I don't mind this at all and have been doing it for some years now – it's easier when he is out of the way for the day - and it means also that I can do it in a most enjoyable manner : blindfolded!

I can bring forward my Friday routine which has had to be postponed for some weeks over the Christmas period, but instead of the usual house-keeping tasks and with no piano tuition to fit in, I will take down the decorations instead.

So, soon after husband has disappeared down to the station and having checked my breakfast and lunch arrangements (and my diary for that matter!), I bandage my eyes securely in the manner I've described from time to time. I have been studying the decorations carefully over the last few days, standing in front of the Christmas tree for instance to count and commit to memory the items hanging on it, and together with the paper chains and ornaments, most of which are conveniently pinned to the picture rails (wooden strip around the room about seven feet off the ground on which pictures are supposed to be hung in old-fashioned houses like ours.

So, on that Monday back in January, I make a start (having by then been blindfolded for a couple of hours already). The tree is relatively easy, so I stand close to it, finding the baubles and dropping them into a box at my feet. I count carefully but there is always two or three at the end which take a bit if groping about to locate.

Then the more difficult part. Again relying on memory, and standing on the Kitchen stools that I have moved in and being just the right height for me, I feel my way about, carefully unfix the dawing pins which I put painstakingly into a pocket in my apron. Painstakingly is an appropriate word here, I have trod very painfully on to dropped drawing pins in past years. I just let the chains drop onto the floor for the time being and clear up after.

I used to put each one separately into a box in the middle of the room, but found that I got dis-orientated very easily, losing my way back to the next chain..

There is that particular buzz which I hope I share with some of you who read this blog. That is being blindfolded and thinking I have found my way, by feel only, to a particular place, and then I am surprised to find that I am not at all where I was expecting to be. I might sometimes even have difficulty finding out where I actually am! As I said in a recent blog, I can get myself lost in my own home! Not that I mind when dismantling the decorations but more than once does use up more time than I intend. This year I finished and tidied away in time for my lunch which, like any Friday morning, I eat before having to reluctantly remove my blindfold.

Husband came home that evening, moved the Christmas tree outside and pointed out that I had left a bell behind the sofa. Well done me, I thought.

Jane.