I know I have been away. Apologies. It has undeniably been the most wonderful and fulfilling Christmas and New Year.  I normally spend Christmas in an ill state of disrepair  picking through the car crash scene of childhood. I normally spend Christmas taking the broken limbs from the scene to the dump, listening to the memory of screeching tyres and screams all set  against the background sound of  “Jingle bells Jingle Bells Jingle all the way”.     

You’ll know or not, that I spent my adult life, from eighteen years old leaving the children’s homes until the age of thirty two searching for and finding my birth family around the world. I wanted one thing from them – that they spend some time finding me.  But why should they – they weren’t looking for me in the first place. They didn’t know about me.  They weren’t searching for me?   

So it is no surprise that not one of them contacted  me this Christmas. And in that it was no surprise or shock,  the car crash disappeared (evaporated) and in its place there are lots and lots of flowers. Who are these people that secretly leave flowers? Maybe it was me. Maybe I did it in my sleep.  It happened over night. It must have. I went to the crash scene one morning and waited for the mist to rise so that I could begin picking through it. But it wasn’t their.  It just wasn’t there.  So it was one long party with the GF and friends and a good one was had by all.

The GF has the cheesiest christmas songs on her ipod. And there I was pulling a cracker with Omar over my own antique farmhouse kitchen table. It  buckled with the weight of food and fourteen elbows and laughter and flicking candlesticks and  in the background Whitney Houston singing Jingle Bells Jingle Bells Jingle all the way.