The Advent Calendar

Window #1

I love Advent Calendars, and here it is the first of December, and we don't seem to have a calendar window on hand to open and begin the countdown to Christmas. Before he left for the States, Bob went to his favourite Advent Calendar store and bought two for the grandchildren, but I don't think he chose one for us at the same time.  I can't ask him because he is off sleeping in Paris after two very long days. We flew back to London yesterday on the longest flight in a long long time — no tail wind at all.  A long flight with little food except for pasta at 9 am and a muffin —just a muffin — for lunch (unless you were Bob, upgraded to First Class, where there were two full meals).  A flight then extended by the Winter Wonderland of the UK where snow has shut nearly everything down including the runways at Heathrow which needed de-icing, since nothing could take off,  there was no room for any planes to land. 

Bob was then up at 5 am to find his way to St Pancras International for a Eurostar trip to Paris where he was giving his debut presentation at a bank conference today.  Late afternoon, London time, he phoned, "I'm walking on the Champs-Élysées. . ." which sounds exciting except he couldn't find his hotel from the incorrect address given to him, and Paris is no warmer than London. So via the hotel's website and a Google-map, we found his way to a warm bed for an early night.

Back here in London, a warm bed was also my sought after Holy Grail. Susan had turned off the boiler, rather than turning down the thermostat, while we were away. In ordinary weather that would have been a green and prudent thing to do, but London is having the coldest autumn weather in decades, with temperatures hovering at the freezing mark for weeks now. The boiler is back on, but thick masonry walls take time to warm up. Then many of the radiators needed bleeding to get them to heat up. Some still aren't cooperating.

Now 24 hours later, I am no longer feeling chilled to the bone. I attribute my survival to my beloved LL Bean Norwegian Sweater that got me through every winter in Massachusetts. I filched the sweater from Bob because the Extra Large size allows various under layers of long underwear, turtlenecks, jumpers or cardigans as needed for current conditions. I brought my beloved sweater to London in 1998, but the weather was never cold enough to need it. Eventually I brought it back to the States, and sort of lost track of it for a decade, then last summer when it turned up in a pile of clothes,  I presciently set it aside, thinking I might like having it in the autumn when I returned to Hingham for Trixie's birth. Indeed I did wear it nearly everyday, and now it is back in London keeping me warm. So my first Advent Window pays tribute to the sweater that I may need for a good long time after hearing the BBC forecasting snow and cold for days to come.