Mischief by Fay Weldon

Author:Fay Weldon [Weldon, Fay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784081010
Publisher: Head of Zeus

Happy Yuletide Schiphol

And we’d been so clever. We would catch the 15.40 from Schipol on the 24th, and be back in Bristol by 17.55. We’d pick up a hire car and be down the M5 to Okehampton in good time for Christmas Eve dinner with goose, mashed potatoes, red cabbage and a fine Rhone wine. Christmas dinner the next day would be turkey, roast potatoes, sprouts, cranberry sauce and good claret. My daughter and her husband live in Devon and are traditionalists. Chris and I tend to go for salad and a slice of quiche, but that’s the way it goes, these days. You go forward into a quicker, lighter future, and the children hop off backwards into the past, staring at you and muttering weird. But we love to see our daughter, and we have a new grandchild, and our son and his new fiancée would be joining us.

We’d finished work in Amsterdam and had a host of presents already wrapped, which we’d pack into the suitcase. Yes, very clever. Well organised. My husband does all that. It’s his thing, dates and timetables and being at the right place at the right time, and I trot along behind. He does consultancy work for a Dutch property company: I’m a writer: I fit in.

Too clever by half, of course. We’d reckoned without Christmas, or at any rate Yuletide. We’d reckoned without the waywardness of humanity. We had not taken into account the seasonal urgency which sometimes catches us up like a tide, so we move as others do, in a group, and do what we must, not what reason says. Princess Diana’s funeral, trolley rage at the supermarket just before the bank holiday. Just the same when Thor cracked his thunder over Northern skies, and everyone jumped the same way at his command. Rituals must be observed. They have their own imperative.

Amsterdam is far enough North to still be partly the land of the Nordic Gods, and Christmas is still Yuletide, their mid- winter festival. I have always suspected Schiphol Airport to be Thor’s own place, all that cracking of the skies, the low thunder of aircraft breaking through the clouds, the tremble of the ground as the big jets land. Thor likes it; he hangs around. This year Christmas Day falls on a Thursday, (donderdag in Dutch) Thor’s day: all the more likely for him to put in an appearance. When the God roars out over the flat damp land that it’s time to shut the doors and bring out the drink, people do as he commands, and who cares what the timetables say. They go home, as instructed.

We got early to the airport and checked in the baggage. We’d allowed ourselves twenty minutes to look round the Rijksmuseum annexe situated between Piers E and F before going to the gate. We like to do that. There is something refreshing, like cool clear water on a hot day, about looking at paintings in an airport. It restores you to sanity.

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