The Christmas Tree Fairy

Thursday was a busy day, and my feeble attempts to salvage an abstract photo from the early evening washing up did not produce anything worth keeping. J and I have agreed to have regular movie nights on Thursdays, so it was late in the evening when I looked for another subject. I have blipped my mother's Flower Fairies book once before, and since this is the Christmas tree's last day of the season, today's choice had to be the Christmas Tree Fairy.

Cicely Mary Barker's Flower Fairies books were published from the 1920s, and my mum will have owned this one, which is not dated, in the 1930s, though if her older sister had it first it could date back to the late twenties. It is Fairies of the Flowers and Trees, a compendium of three smaller collections, and this is the last illustration in the book. It is something of an exception in that it places less emphasis on the botanical illustration than most of the other plates: the author's forward emphasises that although the fairies come from her imagination, the flowers are real and accurate. Each is accompanied by a poem. This edition has many pairs of blank pages between the poems and colour plates, and some have been used for pressed flowers. When my mum married in 1959, she gave the book to my cousin, who in turn sent it to my daughter.

The year's first movie night was not a roaring success. We started watching Mike Leigh's Peterloo (which is available on All4 for a couple more weeks in the UK); I've been interested to see it and J is generally interested in historical subjects. However, it;s long and builds up very slowly, in a palette well matched to the lives of grinding poverty and misery of its subjects, and my knowledge of the corn laws is too sketchy for me to have a good grasp of the political context; my awareness of the Peterloo Massacre comes mainly from Shelley's rousing poem. After half an hour J was largely asleep, without having eaten much, and my efforts to nudge her back into interest were failing. We switched to J's iPlayer watch list, and found Last Christmas, a sweet but cheesy romcom written by Emma Thompson and based on the well known George Michael song (which I've always found very tedious). London at Christmas is portrayed as a very pretty illuminated fairyland where the homeless people are largely jolly, and the message that life is better if you look after yourself and others is uncontentious, but I hope we'll agree on something better next week.