Monika, you don’t know how glad I am. Thank you for coming back. I’ve suddenly realised we haven’t ordered anything for Christmas. I was going to try to go to shops during my lunch break but as you’re back, etc, etc.
My parents don’t know how to react. My father seems to think Tom’s just popped out to buy some rawlplugs and been diverted. Mother has said it’s a pity it’s at Christmas, as if it would have been better planning to shag an ex-neighbour when there isn’t the same worry about sufficient turkey portions. My parents are coming for Christmas. Their world would collapse if they had to sit down for Christmas lunch without a man fiddling with giblets and me doing something in the kitchen with incompetently cooked parsnips. Christmas is like a noxious gas that seeps up under your closed door and no one can escape it.
Do I miss him or don’t I? Am I just used to him like a piece of hideous old pine furniture I never got round to replacing, because it’s got all your personal little things in its nooks and crannies and you wouldn’t know where else to put them? Or do I miss him being bumbling, even if he’s bumbling
away my life and can’t even do adultery properly? It’s true, once you’re post-partum, you do see things differently. It’s another country from which the traveller only returns with the smell of Calpol, phonetic spelling and fifteen years of pesto suppers. If I have to hear my unmarried colleagues
boring on about their latest sexual encounters or Big Brother again I think I shall scream. Jesus, I’m forty three; I can remember Simon Le Bon before he was famous. Monika, what am I supposed to do?
Oh, I’ll be back late – meeting. Theo volunteered me to help at school Nativity Play rehearsal. Hope you don’t mind taking my place. I don’t think you have to do very much.
Bella x
Yes, I still here. I telling you one thing: as Christmas come close, it more and more mad here. Is only time all families must force themselves come together. All they is talking about is bringing relatives they not like across country to sit in front rooms just like their own. They is jealous of those that is going to Centre Parks (like big Eskimo house but you see through it) or sunny places where you just take clothes off and not bothering.
I do strange thing called Nativity Play. It mean children on stage and forced to be angels and sheeps – but they no idea what is all about. We has nothing like this in Estonia. Theo teacher put me in charge of costumes. This Mrs Willoughby teacher, she look tired (so tired you are not seeing her eye balls). She say it very difficult to make time for what she call ‘extra curricular activities’ like birth of Jesus. I watch rehearsal: it not good. Is Virgin Mary with make-up, Joseph (nice costume, is Josh), a doll (Barbie) for Jesus, too many king and shepherds (Theo is shepherd), some angels (Fay, she has Barbie wings) and forty three sheeps (with sound of ba-ba-ba in twenty different languages). Virgin Mary tell me her mother spend half one day searching for right material in Peter
Jones which is making the rest of us feel like the Polish pig slops. Theo say he will not wear shepherd tea towel on head until we put on it the number ’10’ and ‘Bergkampf’. I tell Mrs Willoughby about Ahmed – she say if he come back he can be sheep (wear shaggy toilet mat).
After rehearsal I is seeing Cressida. She is telling woman her son wear a costume designed by Stella McCartney – a Beatle daughter – special-like. She see me and her smile about half-mile wide (800 metres). This Cressida woman, I just see her and I have knife through heart.
I collect Theo and Fay. Theo ask if Jesus got extra big presents from Joseph because not his real father and was feeling guilty. We pass lollipop lady. She wearing her flashing reindeer things on head. She call out ‘I’m having all the trimmings’ Do not know what this is meaning. She say someone is throwing in her hole a cabbage and person’s burger and she expecting a lot
more, because Christmas. We all look in hole together. I say we do not have so many holes in Estonia. She look at me with concern and say she sure things will get better, then walk out in front of lorry. I still not understand the English.
I cannot be coming home for the moment, I having too many responsibilities here for the English Christmas thing. Everyone needing me …except the ONE person I want to be needing me.
I still not heard from HRH Queen. I is still hoping.
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