Out with the old! In with the New Year! Be sure to add that second bit or poor grampa’ll be feeling a chill wind coming in with the bells.

All right, I’ve had a wee snifter already but I’ve looked at the clock and it’s officially Hogmanay! A time when all tall dark-haired men are seized upon at doorsteps and their pockets rummaged thoroughly for lumps. The coal etc. found they will be ushered in as harbingers of good luck for the coming year. Tall dark men are favoured because it’s said the true Scots are dark-haired and tall blonde men at the door used to mean Vikings and more bad luck than Telly Savalas’ head-lice. Blonde women are considered lucky though – possibly because of the fertility suggested by the child-bearingness of their Nordic hips. Luckier still are the couple that come a-first-footin’ up the path with a nicely clinking plastic bag.

It’s Hogmanay!! When Scots all over the planet grow jolly on barley juice (“Wha’s like us, eh?”) then maudlin (“O howly! Waily!”) then emotional (“This could well be the last one I see! Oh uh-huh. Yes it could well be. It could well be the last one any of us sees. It’s all going to hell, all of it” *Great sweeps of the arms to indicate the enormity of the number of the things that are going to hell* ) then Bolshy (“Nemo me impune accessit! D’you hear? NEMO!”) then defiant, tedious, then back to jolly again before singing the ould songs and passing out to be found the next morning by a sensibly-shod tweedy lady’s labradors, lying in a ditch, foetal, thumb-sucking and softly snuffling the old year’s dreams and drams away.

(Hogmanay is also the very best time of the year to use run-on sentences)

It’s Hogmanay!!! The only time of the year anyone ever drinks Advocaat.

It’s Hogmanay!!!! A time for shortbread on the good plates, whisky in the best crystal and flushed aunties getting better and better measures from ruddier and ruddier (and often ruder and ruder) uncles.

It’s Hogmanay!!!!! A time when it’s OK to snog perfect, but often imperfect strangers in the street. One year in a freezing Aberdeen I was kissed right on the gob by a passing fellow who, I grew hideously aware, as his face drew back and I began to get a look at him, had a great, crusty cold sore over half his lower lip. God knows how I didn’t get it but I reckon the cold in the Granite City that night wasn’t allowing many germs, complex or simplex, any chance to flourish. They were probably huddling together for warmth deep in his pustulent lip behind the wall of scab. Pah-phthoo! Pah-phthoo! Phthoo!

For the Problem Household it’s been a year of mixed blessings. Chief joy was the kids. The Problem Children have transformed from pre-school mud-puppies into proper sticky-out-tummied little girls rushing off to Kindergarten each day, hardly remembering how they used to cling to their mammy’s legs and want to stay home with me all day. Problem Child the Second lost her first baby tooth today and tooth-fairy dust is settling still on her pillow of great hope. Nothing I will ever do in my life again will be better than the girls.

My granny died in June. I loved her with all my heart. She lived with us all throughout my childhood (our house was built onto the back of my grandparents’) and played a huge role in bringing me up. She taught me to read, to love books and was a constant source of wisdom and fun. We were best of friends and I remember days when it was as if there wasn’t anybody else in the world but us and the cake we were making, or the book we were reading, or the daffodils we were tying or one of the collections or projects we were always working on. I was allowed to do all sorts of messy things in her kitchen I wasn’t allowed to do in our’s. My brother and I were free to poke into nooks and crannies all over her creaky, old house and I never felt so safe and secure as when she was playing the piano for my grandpa and me to waltz to. She was always very proper but had a twinkle in her eye and a razor sharp wit that seemed to grow sharper the older I got, but of course, I was just growing up and getting the joke more. She was a granny for all ages. My friends loved her and a few would go and visit her whenever they went home to Lewis, right ’til she was near the end. She had infinite time for me, it seemed, until her’s ran out and I will miss her deeply til the hour my own run’s out.

But Hogmanay was a great favourite of my granny’s. She liked Glenlivet at Christmas and Glen Morangie at Hogmanay. She would hold court, holding forth on all sorts and all the time holding her whisky – she assured us it had no effect on her whatsoever except a little swelling round the ankles – and she’d have us all rapt at her stories and fun. So this year, I’ll be raising a glass to my granny, thanking whatever God sent me my unexceptional but wholly amazing children, and as the ancient tradition demands*, sweeping away the dying year to make way for the promise of the new.

And I will be raising a glass or seventeen to you lot of fine blogging pals, declaring “Lang may your lum reek!” which means “I hope your chimney will always smoke” and is by way of saying long life and prosperity and stuff.

So then. Blogpals I salute you! You make me chortle and guffaw and think and engage on an almost daily basis. You rock. Slainte mhor agus bliadhna mhath ur! Which is by way of saying “May your neighbour’s sheep never eat the washing off your line.”

Scoff you not, you ungrateful bleggarts! You never know when you’ll need that. It could happen day or night but I’ve protected you now see – your scanties may air unmolested.

*Scottish people take this more seriously than others I think although I dunno why. Something to do with the Scottish Kirk not letting us have Christmas for a few hundred years, saying it was a papist ceremony or whatever. Something like that. It sounds like them. That’d make you want to make up for with a big splash at the New Year. But I remember being horrified when I was wee when I heard my uncle’s fiancee from Nottingham had said on the phone she didn’t wait up for the bells and usually just went to bed. I had an idea of her all dusty and cobwebbed with the old year like Miss Havisham before she caught on fire and I remember being genuinely surprised at her relative freshness when I finally met her to be her bridesmaid.

I am so almost ready for Christmas!

Bring it on, Santa!

Wishing you all a very happy Christmas, lads and lassies all.

The Witches Of Mad Glen continued.

Only slightly hiccupping 80 proof green bubbles covered with gentle little gooseberry hairs, Chrissie-Peigi drew herself up to her full 4 foot 11 and waggled a brass contraption under the noses of the other two witches perched precariously on the tiny island.

“Oi, watch what you’re doing with that thing! You nearly had my third eye out there!” squawked Effie. “What is it anyway?”

Smoothly ignoring Effie’s dramatic reeling and clutching of her forhead, Chrissie Peigi fumbled with the tiny brass lever on her thaumometer. “It seems to me, *hic!* It seems to me that the craziness coefficient of the surrounding atmosphere has increased slightly, meaning one of several things. Either we have been burning up too many fossils in our cauldrons and releasing excess irrationality into the air, since magic is, after all, 4 parts irrationality; or things have become so absurd in the world outside the Glen of The Mad, that people leaving and entering barely notice any difference in the state of things at all. Or, there is a breach in the magic membrane surrounding the Glen of Insanity.”

“Well, which is it?” asked Mabel, adding to the air in general “And Jack Frost, if you ever, ever attempt to put your fingers there again I will majick a big ole pair of Helly Hansen mittens on them and you will never again nip so much as anyone’s nose, you nasty freak. What’s the matter with you, anyway? Get a proper job!”

There was a slight breathy mumble of “Sorry” in a Dorsetshire accent and the surface of the lochan crackled icily as something retreated over it.

“Well, really, it’s a bit of all 3,” continued Chrissie Peigi. “Witchologists and Wizardographers have noted a rise in thaumaturgical energy over recent decades and, if you read the papers, you’ll know how vocal they’ve been about the need to cap necromantic emissions. There’s been an alarming lack of political will to clean things up though. The President of the United Sorcerors of Ardvourlie says that the jury is still out on occultic climate change. He is also, however, also widely considered to be the stupidest man ever to draw breath. The other week he was informed that 3 Brazillian people had died in storms as a direct result of his laissez-faire magical climate policy. His aides were puzzled by the President’s extreme reaction:

“Oh no! But this is terrible news! Calamitaneous! How are we going to get out of this one, Ouihomme? You, Sihombre, what’ll we do? I overpay you for this kind of thing. Oh, this is horrible, horrible! Tell me, how many exactly is a brazillion?”

“I hear he still has his mammy cut his toast into soldiers which he then sends off on spurious, preemptive missions half-way around the lazy-susan, where lie the vast reserves of the pancake syrup he covets,” said Mabel. “You can’t help but wonder what would have happened if a man more involved in, say, ketchup or double mayonnaise than in Big Syrup was our leader.”

The three witches paused to consider this for a moment in the freezing air, their condensing breath forming shapes of rabbits, toads and a great big wolf that ran after the rabbits and toads and ate them before dissipating. Chrissie-Peigi scowled at Effie, who imperceptibly licked her chops. Without comment though, pleased in her new role as Explainer Of Modern Stuff to her elder sisters and proud of her ability to talk in html, she took another swill of Mabel’s gooseberry schnapps and went on:

“Also, studies show that the real world is actually becoming more and more insane. You need hardly look further than Fox News Channel to see that. It’s very widespread. In the US, for example, lots of people routinely vote against their economic interests because a very powerful wizarding conglomeration known as The Southern Baptist Convention, bewitches them to care more about boys kissing than their own futures. The Irish have gone batshit crazy and just reelected that third-rate conjurer Ahern, who can’t even make a pile of laundered money disappear effectively. And the British, well, The Spice Reunion is now more popular outside the Glens of Insanity than in them. Plus, this is the kind of mad thing dominating their news media lately. And of course, there was this guy.

“But most alarmingly for our duties in this wee corner of the world, of which we all know the regulation of the Hebridean Glen of The Mad is a large part, there appears to be a change in the relative craziness inside and outside of the magical membrane around the valley. As far as I can tell with my thaumometer the magico-osmotic potential of the membrane, the MOP, is still within normal range despite the increasing extra-membrane lunacy I’ve just described, so that only leaves me with one conclusion: Ladies we have a leek.

“You mean a leak, surely?’ said Effie.

“No, I mean a leek. I have reason to believe that the Welsh Glen Of The Mad has sent a spy up to our glen to see how we have managed to win the coveted “Best Kept Mad Glen” and “Most Spiffily Dressed Lunatic Ghost” competitions these last 6 years in a row. The theory is more complex obviously…”

“Hmm, obviously, very, very obviously,” chimed in Mabel, eager not to appear the technodoofus she felt. (The technodoofus she felt was really Torquil MacLeod but she could tell she was one too.)

“…but, whenever the mad soul of someone non-resident in Scotland for 12 months prior to expiring enters the glen, a tiny puncture is made that is unfixable by the puncture-maker. Derangement leaks out. The Welsh witches protect against the English dead-mad from coming to build holiday homes in their Glen Of The Insane in this same way; the English protect against the French; the French against the Belgians, etc. Sistren three, we must face the fact that we have been penetrated. We have a mole in our Glen.”

“I thought it was a leek.”

“Shut up.”

Pan out.

Mabel: “Oh God, they’re panning out! No! Come back!”

Effie: “She is, isn’t she? That bloody Problemchildbride is going to write To Be Continued again and leave us standing here for another week in the perishing cold. She thinks that having 6 adults and 2 children in her house ’til the New Year is our problem somehow. That we have to wait here on a soggy little island in some ridiculous but totally true Glen of The Mad lochan, while she busies herself with decorating and baking and jumping onto the consumer treadmill to engage in the profligate consumption of which she herself is embarrassed but nevertheless does. She’s gonna effeeng well do that, isn’t she? Beeyatch that she is.

Chrissie-Peigi: “The bint! I shall cast a spell to ensure her mince-pies explode all over the inside of her oven.”

PCB: “Not if you want a speaking part in the next episode, you won’t. Who else is going to give you work at this time of year, eh? If it wasn’t for me, it’d be slim pickings for you ’til next Halloween. If not for me-hee, you won’t be able to find the leek, meaning the Authorities will relieve you of your Mad Glen posts and replace you with corporate witches from Glasgow.”

Mabel: “I thought it was a mole.”

PCB: Shut up.”

To be continued…

The other day I was out for a walk when, across the road, a woodpecker fell stone-dead to the ground. It made a much larger thud than I’d have guessed it could. I don’t know what happened but it fell at the foot of an electricity pole so it might have been electrocuted. Or it might have been murder -there were other birds at the top of the pole and none of them seemed in the least bit grief-stricken. One in particular, I’d have to say was “quite chipper” and I’ll say so in court of law if I have to.

Suicide crossed my mind (not mine, the woodpecker’s; I was having a life-affirming walk, all pleasant an’ stuff, and while the woodpecker incident was indeed upsetting, after a little bit of breast-beating, I was fine). Was this a bird, bone-weary of the sterile promontary (Villanova Road), dive-bombing the ground in despair, tears blurring the fast-approaching ground as stinging taunts of “Bernie is somehow different, Bernie is somehow different, Lets all go and peck him, Nah nanananana” rang in the headholes where his ears weren’t? We’ll never know but I like to think he’s in a better place now. Or she. Bernadette.

Anyway, I took the event as a sign of dreadful foreboding and all week now I’ve been sorely foreboded. What did the plummeting woodpecker mean? Are cider futures falling? Sell sell sell? Buy buy buy? Or is tragedy about to fall into my life?

I’ll tell you what it meant. I’ll tell you what it bloody meant, all right! I looked it up in a large tome called Witchy Lore. In Witchy Lore, page 7003, it says “If a lassie espye an Earthbounde Woodpecker, great shiftes in th’affaires of thon lassie will be afoote. For whensoever the wynde dothe change….” And that’s it. The next part of the page was ripp-ed offe during The Great Toilet Roll Shortage of 1603-04, and so I’ve not the smallest Scooby (nor yet a Scrappy) about what’s going to happen when the wind changes.

Does anyone else know? As I say, I’m up nights with the dreadfulness of the foreboding and the toll that’s taking on my early-morning packed-lunch-making skills is starting to be noticed. All the joy has quite gone out of packing yoghurt and pb sandwiches. If my children are ever again to experience anything more than lunchtime dismay, you must help me, beloved blogren! What’s afoote? Apart from the inestimable Footeater being back, what’s afoote wi’ me?

(Also, I’ve been getting pains in my right patella and above my left eyebrow especially when I stand along mystic ley-lines, if that helps any.)