Robin Hood, Robin Hood, Riding through the Glen . . . .

The latest version of Robin Hood was watched with great interest in our house. Prior to the screening of the series, the children’s interest in the period had been fuelled by the acquisition of a Lego Knight’s Kingdom, visits to various castles, the purchase of a (toy) set of bows and arrows each and by my rendition, in a very loud, semi-operatic voice, of the theme song from the Robin Hood series of my youth. This was evidently so scary that they both immediately dived under the table. For a while, even threatening to sing it again was enough to encourage total compliance.

Owing to the constraints of bedtimes, we recorded each episode of Robin with a Hoodie – as one of the newspaper reviewers so aptly dubbed it. This meant that we were always a little late watching them. Thus it was that it was only the night before Saddam Hussein’s execution that we saw Marian on her deathbed saying that she could never condone the death penalty for anyone – even though it was the wicked Sir Guy of Guisborne who had (albeit unknowingly) stabbed her. Perhaps President Bush should have been compelled to watch the series. He might have learned something.

It is clear that while we never thought that Youngest Son (aged three and a half) would appreciate the subtleties of the stories, we were badly mistaken. Last week, I had an enlightening conversation with him. He had clearly been considering Marian’s ethical dilemma. For those of you who weren’t following the current series, the problem was this: she loved Robin but she had promised to marry Sir Guy and her sense of honour dictated that she must do the right thing: unless, that is, it could be proved that Sir Guy was downright evil and not just a regular bad guy. In the nick of time, Robin manages to prove that Sir Guy has not only plotted to kill King Richard but has also – and this is the clincher – denied it to Marian. Just before the ring goes on to Marian’s finger, she lifts her veil and lands a knock-out punch on Sir Guy. Clearly, the wedding was off.

Youngest Son had watched and learned.

“Why do you think she punched Sir Guy?” I asked him.

Back came the confident, if slightly ungrammatical reply: “Because he had been lying on her . . .”

Crisis Open Christmas.

Mention the charity “Crisis”, and like many people, you probably have a vague image of volunteers ladling out soup to queues of homeless people for a few days over the Christmas period.

Guests staying at one of the seven centres run by Crisis Open Christmas 2006 had access to a lot more than soup. At each of the centres there were a range of services including: medical and dental care; opticians; hairdressing, chiropody; manicures; massage and other alternative therapies; clothing, a sewing and alteration service; laundry facilities; advice and support on anything from mental health and drug and alcohol dependency, to benefits, housing and legal matters; IT facilities and Internet access; and of course, the provision of three hot meals a day and snacks and hot drinks. Almost all of this bounty is provided by donation and staffed by volunteers.

And that is just what was there over the week. Prior to the centres opening on the 23rd December: all the buildings that had been lent to the charity had to be cleaned, wired, plumbed, furnished and decorated with Christmas decorations. In all, 6,500 volunteers were involved and over 1,000 guests were looked after. As the Crisis Volunteer Handbook says, it is a “Herculean effort”.

As I mentioned in the “Postcards” in the New Year, my sister is fresh from the volunteering experience. She found it an amazingly worthwhile thing to do. This is a short account of what she found, how she felt about it and what happened after.

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My sister, Sara, helped out at the “Quiet Centre” This was located in an Old People’s Home which was due to be demolished. Along with the Women’s Centre, the location of this centre was confidential. Having worked before Christmas on the set-up process, she arrived on the 27th December feeling just a little apprehensive. Within a short time, she was finding that in many cases it was difficult to tell whether someone was a guest or a volunteer without looking for the identifying badge. Many of them simply did not look like homeless people. They’d had the chance to wash, shave, get a haircut and get clean clothes and when she started talking to them, the question that kept coming up in her mind was “How did you get to be here?”

“The clichés about homelessness were exploded within hours,” she says. “having met and talked to some of the guests, it brought home the fact that it is easier to fall through the net into homelessness than I had realised, and a lot harder to climb back out than you think.”

How, for instance, had the young actor that she met become homeless a year ago? What was the story behind the ex-marine who has been coming to Crisis over Christmas for 25 years now? And how did a distinguished-looking Lebanese man come to be living “around Victoria” since August (the month the Israelis sent troops into Lebanon)?

While she was there, Sara saw very little aggression and because there was a no alcohol and no drugs rule at the Centre, there were few of the obvious triggers for unpleasantness. There were slightly bizarre moments such as the man who, at breakfast on the last morning, pointed out to the chef that his scrambled eggs were too hard; the guest who flipped from being polite and considerate one moment to being angry and abusive the next because servers had run out of the pudding of his choice; there were the volunteers who sat and made roll-up cigarettes (handed out one at a time); the guests who took handfuls of sachets of sugar to stuff in their pockets when they were being served with cups of tea, and the ones who complained because there were no chocolate biscuits left, or that the only cigarettes on offer were mentholated. These were side issues however, most of the guests were incredibly appreciative of what was being offered to them. Towards the end of the week, several asked to come along to the Volunteer’s de-brief sessions in order to thank them for their efforts. Sara will remember one young woman especially; whose thanks went to “everyone, particularly the hairdressers.” . . .

One of the many things that impressed her was the emphasis on dealing not just with people’s immediate, short term needs but on the future: trying to connect homeless people back into the system. Hence the literacy and computing facilities on offer and the assistance with finding housing and getting registered with a GP. “With so much of the work that we do these days,” reflects Sara,“you can’t see the benefits. There, you can see you are helping - both in the short term and in the longer term. It was incredibly satisfying.”

Sara will volunteer again this Christmas, and she has already spoken to friends who have said that they would like to come with her. This seems to be a characteristic of the volunteers: once one person starts going, they pull in others as well: whole families come along in some cases (the lower age limit is 16 – those under 18 must be accompanied by an adult).

The motivations of the volunteers are as varied as the day is long. While some have little more explanation that they “thought it would be a good thing to do”; others volunteer out of a religiously-motivated desire to do good; some used to guests; some volunteer because they want the company over what can be a lonely and difficult time of year even when you aren’t homeless, and some probably do it because it gives them an excuse to get away from their families.

As a result of her experiences, one of Sara’s resolutions for 2007 is not to ignore homeless people in the street. As long as she cannot see any evidence of alcohol or drug use, she has decided that she will stop to talk and will offer to buy them a cup of tea or some food.

Her first opportunity to put this resolution into practice came along soon enough. She checked that the café near the tube station outside which this person was begging was open and then went back to make her offer. “No thank you,” came back the polite reply, “But thank you for asking.” . . . As she turned to leave, he called after her: “I like your earrings”. Talk about getting something back from an unexpected quarter . . .

Useful website: www.crisis.org.uk

Earwiggings

This one comes courtesy of a friend.

A group of private school mothers discuss running a fund-raising stall selling mulled wine and mince pies during Henley’s late night Christmas shopping evening: “Well, I suppose that we could get the au pairs to do half hour sessions . . . .”

Postcards from Christmas

Happy New Year to all my wonderful readers . . .

Here are a few “postcards” on Christmas-related topics.

Crisis at Christmas - For years, I have muttered under my breath that helping out at a soup kitchen over the Christmas period would be a good way of balancing out all the excesses of our annual consumer-fest. It’s not that I don’t like Christmas. . . . but there does appear to be a bit of a puritan streak in me which finds the idea of every person in the UK spending an average of £700[*] in a supposed celebration of the birth of someone that most of us don’t even believe in, vaguely nauseating.

My problem is that all I ever do is feel faintly guilty about the indulging but find excuses to avoid doing anything about it. This year, I have been well and truly trumped. My sister – who has never demonstrated any signs of remorse over eating too much turkey and Christmas pudding - announced that she was going to “do Crisis at Christmas”.

She found it to be a truly worthwhile experience. I’ll be writing about what Crisis at Christmas actually does, and what she learned from it shortly.

John Lewis’s Father Christmas letters – When I was a child, we wrote letters to Father Christmas to tell him what we wanted and then set them alight and watched them go up the chimney. As Father Christmas came down the chimney to deliver the presents, I suppose there was a simple kind of logic in this arrangement (I assume my parents must have made sure that they got a quick look at the contents of the letters before they were consigned to the flames).

This year, in line with the consumer emphasis of Christmas, Mr Darnbrough and I got the children to write their letters and then Mummy put them both in an envelope and they were posted into a letterbox by the toy department of John Lewis in Reading. About a week later, two rather special looking letters arrived. We got two completely different letters, from the North Pole, thanking the boys for writing and telling them how Father Christmas’s preparations were going. The children were very pleased. The parents were ecstatic! It was as though we’d actually had letters from the man himself! We’ll definitely be doing that again next year.

Christmas cake testing (1) - Home-made For the past six years or so we have relied on Delia’s Complete Cookery Course for our Christmas cake recipe. I have occasionally been tempted to stray but the power of the familiar is just too great. I also love the fact that Delia, who always strikes me as a rather strict mistress of the kitchen, is very firm regarding the addition of large amounts of brandy to Christmas cakes. We follow her instructions diligently and have always been well rewarded.

This year, just when I’d weighed out all the fruit, I discovered that we’d run out of brandy! After ransacking the drinks cupboard, Mr Darnbrough produced a bottle of Russian brandy that he’d bought in St Petersburg over fifteen years ago. We opened it carefully: for some reason I was worried it might explode. We sniffed it and decided to take the risk. The fruit was duly soaked, the cake made and the result duly “fed” with Russian brandy every week or so. At some point I had a bit of a wobble over the advisability of using this unknown spirit, so I did actually try some. As I’m not a brandy drinker, all I can say is that it didn’t taste like vodka, so I assumed it would be OK. The cake was a great success.

Christmas cake testing (2) - M&S You may be wondering why, if I made my own cake, I should be needing to buy anyone else’s. The reason is that Mr Darnbrough is adamant that “our” Christmas cake cannot be opened until Christmas Day. This means that I have to (note the imperative) buy another Christmas cake to eat in the run-up to Christmas.

We generally opt for an M&S Celebration fruitcake as our pre-christmas Christmas cake. We had them at our wedding, at both the children’s Blessings and we have them in the run-up to Christmas too. They are rich, moist and they have a good thickness of marzipan and icing. They also get my vote for reliability. We’ve been buying them for eight years now and we’ve never been disappointed.

Because we have never sufficiently tired of Christmas cake by the time our own cake is finished, we usually buy one more from “somewhere else”. This is just in case there is anything better out there.

Christmas cake testing (3) - Duchy Originals The reason we bought the Duchy Originals cake is that it was reduced to half-price in Waitrose and I do find it difficult to resist a bargain . . . but if I’d spent the full £16 on that cake I’d have been wanting my money back.

One of the things that really annoys me about packaging is when it appears to have been designed to give you a completely false impression of the size of the item it contains. Cosmetics companies are prime culprits in this respect. It would appear that Duchy Originals has been following their example.

The closed box (no tacky cellophane windows here for the vulgar to peek through) looked big and inviting. I picked it up and it felt substantial. The cake weighed 900g. To my greedy mind, that sounded big enough but I was seriously disappointed when I took it out of its box. It looked rather small and weedy, sitting slightly off-centre on a thick, gold foil-covered cake board.

Never mind, we thought. It’s organic, and it’s top of the line. The proof will be in the eating. Well, it wasn’t. It was rather dry and rather sugary and when I looked at the ingredients list I was rather surprised to see that 40% of the total cake was the icing and the marzipan and there wasn’t much brandy in it, either. We won’t be buying one of those again, even if they drop the price to a fiver.

[*] Which? survey, 28 December 2006. www.which.com.