Return to Sender

My parents have a new "hobby", a rather morbid one that all old people seem to practice: checking the death notices in their newspaper first. On Christmas Day they were rather upset that an artist colleague who lived alone had died at the age of 84 and it took a few phone calls to find out that he had not in fact died alone (and potentially undetected for a few days) in his flat, but in hospital where a doctor friend had referred him to."Did X also send us a Christmas card?" followed by "No, but maybe she/he hasn't received our card yet and therefore didn't bother sending one" has also been a repeated topic in recent days. Not hearing or reading back from people of a certain age is inevitably a bad sign. Mum also keeps saying that the "active" contacts in her address book have dwindled, but she keeps names and details of deceased friends and family in it anyway. It must be rather sobering to have this constant reminder of "I'm probably next" and I sometimes think that since I'm only 25 years younger than my mother I might be engaging in this type of morbid smalltalk with Highflyer in two decades or so...if we are lucky to live to 70+, of course.

 

Flat

It seems half of my friends are currently sick and it's the usual end-of-year phenomenon: powering through at work and/or with Christmas preparations at maximum capacity and then when you were planning to reap the rewards of your hard work and chill for a bit you find yourself feeling like absolute sh** and unable to do much. I more or less succeeded in nipping a mean cold in the bud the week before last, knowing I had to entertain my mother, deliver a workshop, attend a Christmas party, fly to the UK (and survive a flight: if you've ever flown with congested sinuses you know what I mean...cannot recommend) and enjoy the concert I had been looking forward to for months. Wishing everyone whether ill or not the chill and peaceful time they need to recover.

 

Holy Grail

I have been a Beatles fan for 44 years now (since December 8, 1980 to be precise when John Lennon was shot, radio stations played Beatles songs all day long and my Dad explained to me who he was) but being born after the band split up of course made it impossible to ever see them perform life as a unit. I didn't actually have it on my radar that Paul McCartney still toured until Highflyer mentioned that he saw him perform in Vienna about 20 years ago. While we were on vacation in Norway this June the topic came up in conversation and just out of interest I googled whether Paul McC was still playing, knowing that he had already celebrated his 80th a couple years ago. It turned out he would end his Got Back tour in the UK just before Christmas and tickets were about to go on presale that very week. Well, I put a reminder in my calendar and successfully bought two tickets from a reseller website. I could not believe my luck until I mentioned this to an intern over lunch when I got back. She more or less pitied me for my naiveté and made me believe it was almost 100% certain I had been scammed and would never actually receive those - not exactly cheap- tickets. The fact that I was supposed to only receive the tickets the day of the event, i.e. last Saturday, when I would obviously have sorted out flights and accommodation did not make me incredibly hopeful. In the end I received the tickets 10 days before and everything worked out fine. I also had a mean cold just before flying out and ticking off the usual pre-Christmas commitments, but the concert was just as magical as I had hoped for and it was essentially one massive Beatles singalong consisting of 20.000 fans directed by the legend himself. This really was something I had on my bucket list and was not sure was even possible to tick off so I ended up giving the most wonderful Christmas gift to myself, even more valuable because I got to experience it with someone who appreciated it at least as much as I did.

Positive Stress

 

I finished my Christmas baking earlier than usual this year, mostly as I hosted my annual Advent get-together earlier than I normally would since we're going away the following weekend. I ended up slaving away on two weekends in a row, pretty much all day as work foiled my plans of getting some baking done during the week. I had more office quality time than I would have opted for, but in the end I managed to finish everything as I knew I would. Was I exhausted and somewhat sleep-deprived? Yes. Did I mind? No. Since I am one of these annoying people who tend to have their Christmas presents organised weeks if not months before I am not affected by gift-buying stress, but by baking and socialising induced stress even though I have long since refused to play the game of "but we MUST meet one more time this year". It's a positive kind of stress that makes me enjoy the lazy days between Christmas and New Year's Eve even more.

Honey, Pack Your Bags...

For some people the sexiest sentence somebody could say to them might be something along the lines of "Let's go shopping to Cartier!" (Ngl, I DO like this one, too...), or "I'm ninety, have a heart condition and no heirs" (joking). For me it's: "pack your bags, we're going away!". Last weekend, not working on Fridays really paid off as I got the opportunity to join Highflyer on a flight to Hamburg around lunchtime, spend the night in his crew hotel and fly back early on Saturday morning. I had never flown with him in the cockpit since he moved to the Airbus fleet and this was my opportunity. Plus I had not been in Hamburg since I left the Firm when I would be there pretty regularly on business trips. Being picked up by taxi directly from the plane like a Hon Circle member also was pretty cool and saved a lot of time. I briefly contemplated whether this spontaneous adventure would upset my Christmas baking plans, but then decided that the rest of the weekend would be long enough. It was beyond exciting and we both were so happy that these flights came up on his standby roster and coincided with my day off.