Mother Christmas comes to the community meal

We’ve had a lovely quiet day starting with a few opened presents, followed by the dreadfully late baking of the Christmas cake, with a lot of help from Helena. Then we had a short trip to the Trinity Rooms, our local community hall, where we were sharing in a big lunch. We'd offered our assistance but it turned out to bee unnecessary so we could just sit with Sam, our young friend from the Middle East, and several old local friends whom I hadn’t seen for some time.

There was an inopportune power cut which didn’t bode well for the preparation of food for more than a hundred people, but eventually ‘saviour’ was found who fixed the electrical supply, and who turned out to be the son of the friend I’d just met again. The community meal was arranged by the local network of community spaces for supporting people in the community and there were three different venues for free food just around Stroud Town. Because of the power supply problems some people were asked to move to the other venues because it was thought the daylight would be gone before the event ended. As it happened that problem was solved. Half way through the meal there was a loud cheer when Mother Christmas appeared at the door. She was visiting the venues in turn to chat to the children. When I went to queue for our Christmas pudding another cheer and round of applause occurred when someone shouted out that Mother Christmas would be leaving. At that moment she was standing next to me so I had to blip her.

Once home we rested for a few hours until a knock at the door announced the arrival of Judy ad Chris, friends I have known for more than forty years but whom I seldom see as they now live in Norfolk. They could only stay for an hour as they were en route from Norfolk. I loved seeing them and hearing news of them and other friends, sadly not all good. But Helena and I will definitely go to stay with them next year, once the spring and summer arrive. 

Chris and Judy were very supportive of my attempts to enter the film and tv industry in the early 80s, both having been very successful and involved in important filmmaking projects at the time, both documentary and feature films. Through them I was able to get work in Central TV’s documentary department, even at one time being given the use of John Pilger’s desk, while he was in Asia making films about Vietnam and Australia. Judy was the sound recordist on many of his documentaries shown on ITV in the 1980s. The adjacent desk was used by Ken Loach when he was making documentaries. Chris and Judy worked as a small team together with Ken on several of his films while Chris was the cinematographer on his early feature film called ‘Kes’. I felt privileged to be doing my lowly work in such company. Today we all agreed to not open the door of political discussion as it would have been so depressing, but I think they both rather jokingly said that they wondered why we had bothered to try to change the world, given the way it has evolved!

So we talked of much more personal things and shared a few stories from our worlds, of nature and people whom we care about. Perhaps that is all we can achieve in the end. Small scale and local to our lives.