christmas lights

This festive lighting is adorning the ceiling of the Frog and the Peach, where we were having a pre-Christmas dinner with Barry - an early dinner, since we were planning on flying to England in the morning.   But tomorrow's departure is Not to Be.   We had an email in the early morning saying that our flight is cancelled, and since then I've been ghoulishly haunting the internet looking at increasingly miserable pictures of Heathrow - bad enough at any time; worse at Christmas; unspeakable at the moment.   Impossible to find anyone to speak to on the phone, I gather, without waiting for hours and hours - and Virgin Atlantic's website indicates no availability until Sunday, the day we're due to fly back ... and then only in 1st.   So we gave up the struggle before we started struggling, and I hurled myself at the phone and internet to find flights back out to New Mexico.   Maybe there was something prophetic about yesterday's ABQ post?

But - quite apart from the disappointment of disappointing my parents; quite apart from the curious pangs of nostalgia at not being in England at this time of year - this has done something very strange to my rhythms of Anticipating Christmas, which are usually fairly finely tuned.   It oddly feels to me as though it's already been and gone, so these lights were like left-over festive illuminations, not anticipatory ones.   I'm hoping that some Canyon Road luminaria will sort that one out ...