Half Term

Half term can be a mixed blessing.  By the end of eight weeks of school and work everyone is desperate to stop, but in our house the sudden release of these tight constraints can be hard to manage.  There is an awkward sense of teetering on the edge of chaos.

As soon as the clocks go back, and the nights become darker there is another palpable shift of mood.  Julie is now nervous of both Halloween and Bonfire Night, the twin rituals of autumn and approaching winter.  It is hard to believe that when we first moved out here to the villages, the two small children we brought with us threw themselves into these events: enthusiastically joining in the dressing up to extort sweets from our neighbours on Halloween, only to be found a few days later at the very front of the crowd, clutching their sparklers, gaping at the village fireworks.  Julie's brother still celebrates these festivals with his friends, but Julie now refuses to consider even leaving the house.  She is terrified by the noise and crowds at the fireworks, and not entirely convinced that the spirits of Halloween are benign.

So we are busy creating our own half term rituals, in an attempt to create a new structure and rhythm of our own.  Our attempts are sometimes successful, sometimes in the way of these things, not quite so much.

Following a similar outing last half-term, I took Julie to London for a day to visit the Tate Pre-Raphaelite exhibition.  These London adventures are challenging for her - a sort of onslaught of public transport - but can be very rewarding if you plan carefully.  The day worked quite well - the exhibition was fabulous, it is hard not to like the pre-Rephaelites at all, and Julie was enthusiastic.  The return home however was harder than I expected: it is one thing to wander back through the streets of the capital through the late afternoon sunshine of a summer's day, another to struggle through the dark and wet.  Crowds seem more threatening to Julie in the winter: faces are hidden by hoods and umbrellas, people are tense, sometimes hostile. Then as luck would have it once we got off the train at our local station, we were targeted by an aggressive beggar in the dimly lit station car-park, who followed us back to our car and continued to threaten us even as we pulled away.  It was the sort of situation that would unsettle anybody - I was certainly worried he would snatch my handbag - but it totally freaked out Julie, who was convinced that he would somehow follow us home and wreak revenge.  It was no good pointing out that it wasn't worth his while following us for 7 miles in a car he didn't have: she was way past rationality, being convinced that he would somehow hang onto the underside of our car.

The next planned outing was more successful: a return to the spa that we visited back in February.  There was nothing qualified about the success of this trip.  We soaked, steamed, meditated and slept our way through an idyllic afternoon.  Where the trip to the Tate had rather depleted Julie's stamina, this stacked up savings in the bank.  During one of our breaks to refuel with tea and cake, she admitted that she was dreading a batch of exams now fast approaching in January, and I vowed that once these exams are over, I will take her back to the spa, even if it means taking her out of school to do so.