Blog archive January 2026
17.01.26 / 01 / christmas decorations
Tonight I put away the Christmas decorations for the last time in my parents’ house. I feel sad.
My mother didn’t bother with decorations or tree after the pandemic, due to age and dementia, though I insisted on putting a few things out to make it feel like Christmas. I found the old plastic tree in the attic during the summer - it must have been up there 25 years or so, my parents took to having real trees.
So having found a tree, and the baubles in my mother’s wardrobe, I put it up in December for one last time. It was the first time I had decorated a tree myself, there has always been someone to do it for me! I never had one myself because I am never at home for Christmas.
Half of the baubles date from around the time I was born - I have no memory of a time without them. And there are various things added during my earlier childhood, and then when my brothers were children in the 70s. After that it’s just odd gifts or things my parents fancied.
They never went in for fashions in decoration. The original c.1960 set were fashionable then, which makes them wonderful now, but my parents believed that decorations carry family memories and stories that develop over time, and are remembered each year as we look at the tree.
When we were children my father used to festoon the ceilings with paper decorations - brightly coloured tissue that concertinaed out to form bells and spheres and rows of figures. Of course we also spent hours making paper chains. I found some more recent shiny foil versions, but it was too much effort to put them up and the pinholes have vanished (one was only allowed to pin in the same place each year).
And now it’s all packed away, and the next time will be in another house.
Below, the 1960s glass baubles. The golden bell rings.
04.01.26 / 01 / filofax as blog
Before I threw out the Filofax diary inserts I went through them making notes of significant items. The notes looked like blog entries, so I turned them into an extension of my blog archives back to 1988. Click the blog archive link above to see.
There isn't enough material to do the usual monthly archive pages, so it's a page per year. I haven't included all of my notes, some things are too trivial or personal or have no story to tell. Conversely I've added things that weren't in the Filofax but are too important or interesting to leave out now that I've made the pages.
It's very clear that my life changed dramatically from 1996 onward, as I got involved in alternative worship. 1998-2002 is a whirlwind - I was simultaneously in several churches, several discussion boards, writing columns, making or editing websites, creating parts of events, photographing and publishing them, designing flyers and publicity and so on. It was possible because I only needed to work intermittently for a while. By late 2002 I had to get a full-time job in architecture again to repair my finances, so some of this stuff had to stop or happen more slowly, but then I started a blog.
I have diaries from before the Filofax, but they don't contain much information (and I have no desire to revisit the periods). There was something about a Filofax which encouraged a thicker narrative, perhaps because I lived out of it in an active way, it was always open on the desk being written in.
It's hard to remember how analogue life was in 1988. To publish a blog would mean typing it out (a word processor at best) and faxing it, or posting photocopies. I suppose that's what a zine was.
