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This is a picture I took (OK it was on Dan’s posh camera)
of our friend Finola with her three sons home for the Christmas.
James, Tom and Dan.

When I was a child my very favourite books at home were a three volume set of The World’s Greatest Paintings.
This was a set of reproductions of what was thought (in the 1930s) to be the best of all paintings with reproductions from galleries from all over the world.

I used to devour these paintings and my greatest pleasure was to lie on the floor flicking over the paintings and living vicariously through the pictures.

I have inherited the, now very tatty, volumes and realise that, being British productions they have a very high proportion of English Artists , loads of Constables,Gainsboroughs etc but no sign of Italian masters like Piero della Francesca.

One of my very favourite paintings was called The Star of Bethlehem which was painted by the British Pre-Raphaelite Burne Jones.
This shows a vulnerable and cold looking child snuggling into his mother in front of the three kings, naked and frightened.
His mother looks remarkably unimpressed by the kings and seems to be sulking.
It makes an interesting contrast with the more usual super confident infant distributing blessings and his beneficent mother.
Here is the detail that I enjoyed.

Click on this to find a repeat of a Christmas Card which I put on my blog last year.
Without apology,here it is again.(Thanks again Fernando and Marylene)
Or click on to this if it is not opening
http://ie.youtube.com/watch?v=jctccnyun5g
Also Happy Birthday to Fin.(who liked the card as much as I did)

(If you want to see the original Drifters singing the song click here)

My sister-in-law Beth sent this photograph to me yesterday.
It acts as a sharp reminder of the time in our marriage, about 20 years ago, when we were particularly hard up and Sile took on some extra work to supplement our income.
After school each day she used to row visiting film stars around the lakes of Fermanagh.

I am delighted to find in Mark Steel in todays English Independent someone who detests the modern experience of flying as much as I do.
I am absolutely convinced that all the queueing, the restrictions,the weigh-ins, the scannings and more queueings, and the interminable waiting, again usually standing up and queueing are perfectly dispensable and someone with a little sense could make the experience of flying bearable, like it used to be.
Like Mark Steel says;
“If Casablanca was made now, it would end with Ingrid Bergman waving off Humphery Bogart, then sitting on her bags at the back of a 40-minute queue at check-in while Paul Henreid waited 25 minutes for two lattes at Costa Coffee.”

For an explanation of what these are about see here.
I have just remembered a tale told by a parent some years ago.

Her daughter came home from school and proceeded to do her homework.
It was a drawing of eleven men and, somewhat incongruously at the end, a large, wheel less pram.
Ah ! Said mother, “and who are they?”

“The apostles”
“And that” ? she asked timorously, pointing at the strange pram like object.
“That ” she was told, with some contempt at her Mother’s ignorance.
“Is Judas’s carrycot”

There is a restaurant in Waterford for twenty something years now which we have always referred to as Carrycots as our eldest daughter, understandably, as she didn’t know any French, thought that this was what “Haricots” were.

Our friends, the Nunns, who eat in a better class of restaurant, referred to one which also still exists in Cashel, as Shake Hands, this being the perfectly logical interpretation their eldest son Naoise gave to the French name ; Chez Hans.

In this Autumn’s edition of The Professional, the organ of the LIA my brother Ted contributes an article about planning a will called Where there is a will there is a way.
As the introduction to the article mainly concerns our mother I feel free to give you a synopsis of it.
Long before she or my father died they gave a lot of their possessions to their various children and grandchildren. My mother, because she had seen it happen so often, had a horror of family rows happening after their deaths.
She freely discussed with us all what we would want after her departure, (my father predeceased her by several years),and then she wrote a list.
This she hid in the “secret” drawer in the bureau and instructed my sister that as soon as she was in the ground we were to all go to the bureau together and divide her possessions as per this list.
This we dutifully did.
Every member of the family was mentioned on it , all of her seven children and their seven spouses and all of her thirty grandchildren and their spouses.
Every scrap of furniture and delft, every kitchen appliance and china ornament was so bequeathed.
On the day there was a bit of friendly swapping, I announced that , as I had just bought a dining table, I didn’t want the large mahogany one I was assigned so my sister, who’s son was looking at an empty house, happily swapped it for a large mahogany bookcase.
All happy.
It was a brilliant coup of my , always wise, mother.
She insured harmony even after her death.

In some ways I think her wisdom and tact was another attribute she bequeathed to us.
After my father died my mother was left with very little money indeed and it is a great tribute to the organisational ability for downright duplicity of my brother Ted that she never knew this.
Ted organised between her children and some of her better off grandchildren that we all direct debit, according to our means, a monthly figure into a fund which he would administrate.
This was then given to my mother as if it were part of her pension.
She never suspected.
Sometimes she would go to Ted (say at this time of the year) and wonder if she might remove a bit extra for Christmas.
A couple of phone calls later and we would all end up effectively buying ourselves our Christmas present from our mother.
This, we all felt was her due, she would have hated to think that she was accepting charity from anyone and she died never feeling that she was.
As Ted said to me recently; “We all got every penny back anyway when we sold the house after she died”
True for you, but by what a kindly path you steered us on Ted, to achieve this end.

Just this morning Sile went out to pick Rocket in our large and overgrown patch of the same and found lurking in its depths…the lost windmill so, instead of flying away over the rooftops like the Red Balloon it ended up, in our own garden and under the rocket.
(There must be some little pithy sentence that would cover the unlikelliness of its resting place but I can’t manage to get it together)