ewein2412 | welcome yule!

'Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house not a creature was stirring except for a Sara, who was sleepwalking and ended up in the utility room wrapped in an afghan, and a Mark, who kicked off his duvet and got cold so he wandered into his mummy’s bed to warm up, and Tim, who was just coming in after his car battery went flat (various electrical faults having been misdiagnosed for the fifth time by the Saab garage) so he couldn’t get home from the airport without calling out the breakdown service. Oh and also except for E. Wein, who wasn’t in bed at all when the boy came looking for a snuggle, because she was sitting in front of the computer doing silly Arthurian role-play with people in time zones at least five hours behind her.

Oh whoops. That is not a description of the night before Christmas. That is a description of any Wednesday night throughout the year.

On the night before Christmas no creature is stirring in the Gatland house because we are all in Dunkeld until one o’clock in the morning, ringing the bells connected with the parish church of St. Columba. The church is in the great choir of the fallen cathedral there on the banks of the Tay, among the scions of Birnam Wood. It is a lovely, if somewhat baffling ritual, which even the small Gatlands appear to enjoy, despite that it is always freezing in the bell tower, and the midnight service always includes a frustratingly obscure translation of “Silent Night” which no one can sing because no one knows. The bell ringers are always last to leave, picking our way by the beams of flashlights through the ruined cathedral; and we hope that all of you are tucked up in bed or sharing good company, and are warm and well fed, while we stand in the cold and the dark to ring in the joyous season and the sun.

The 2008 Gatland Trivia List

Tim’s ~~baby~~ game this year: Rail Simulator (What it sounds like. Check it out on www.railsimulator.com)
E Wein’s ~~baby~~ book: The Empty Kingdom
How many commercial flights Tim has made in 2008: ~70
How many times he has driven to work: ~12
How many pages typed so far in the book E Wein is writing: 417
ETA page count: 550
Number of online journals currently in E Wein’s name: ~7
Number of paper journals she has filled this year: 2 (none of these journals actually contains anything productive)
Laura (the cat’s) annual take-home haul: 10 mice and 3 birds
How long Sara’s hair is: 2 feet (60 cm)
Number of PowerPoint presentations Mark has created: 173
New second cousins Sara and Mark have got since June: 3
Number of bears knitted by Sara as baby gifts: 2
How many miles we drove between 27 June and 5 August: 4100
Number of Playmobil people in our house: ~75
What time E Wein went to bed on Election Day: 6.00 a.m. (after the Shipping Forecast)
Places Sara has left her glasses: School, pub, playground, pool
Jars of jam made from wild fruit: 20
Full-size edible ears of corn grown in the greenhouse: 3
Part played by Mark in “The War of the Vegetables”: Pea 2
Most seals seen at once in the Firth of Forth by Tim on the train going to work: 15
Best name for an ancient monument visited this year: “Auquhorthies Recumbent Stone Circle”
What Sara wanted to be for Halloween: Sarah Palin
What she finally went as: A Boy
What Mark went as: Mark

Other Dubious Statistics

Total rainfall in Edinburgh in August 2008: 8 ½ inches (21 cm)
How many degrees above the horizon the sun is at 1.00 p.m. in December in central Scotland: 12
Average hours of sunshine on any given 7 hour day in December in Perthshire: 1

It is a known fact that despite these gloomy statistics, if you want the sun to come out between November and February in Scotland, all you have to do is get in the car during daylight hours. No matter which direction you are driving or how hard the sleet is pounding, the sun will always shine directly into your windscreen and blind you.

May you all receive sun and rain in appropriate measure in the coming year!

welcome yule!

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