Tangled

We finally assembled 5 out of 6 of us in one room for the evening, which is the best we are going to manage this season. Presents and food and warmth and relief and stories. A lot of laughter, in retrospect, about travellers' tales of a journey from Glasgow to Birmingham, already deferred for 24h by yesterday's storm: the two hour queue in the rain; the standing-room only in a first-class corridor; the Schrodinger's train, leaving from two different platforms at the same time for the ssme destination; stepping off the train to allow a wheelchair user to disembark, then unable to get back on because the train is too full; the polite, so-British announcement that "unfortunately, it looks as though we don't have a driver; he's gone to Reading"; the disoriented faces of foreign tourists, unable to reconcile reality with their expectations of the country that invented railways

Eight hours or so of uncertainty. Somewhere in here is a serious point about a service-based economy that has stopped providing services. But it's Christmas, we are warm and fed and not being bombed. We can just blame the weather, even if we suspect much deeper confusion and disarray

The blackbirds have cleared the holly berries; the cotoneaster is next in line. Navigating through the tangles is part of daily life