Ee by gum

“Ee by gum that were a right good storm last night”. That’s what my granny Phillips from St Helens would have said. She was a northern lass from Lancashire, with a voice like Gracie Field, and her claim to fame was that she had been offered a job with a dance band but had turned it down to get married.
When I got up with the children for school at their usual unearthly hour of 6.15, it was too dark to see much, but I could hear my sweet H’s bamboo hedge thrashing about in the wind, and Porridge came back in soaking wet, so I pulled on my clothes reluctantly to drive them down the hill to the bus stop. Drummer boy was supposed to go in on the scooter, so that he could give a drum lesson to a little girl this afternoon, but I didn’t like the idea of him being blown off into the lorry lane. This required a complex set of arrangements for chauffeuring later on today, which only a mother with teenage children far from bus routes would understand.
I had spent the night sleepless and anxious with the usual pointless worrying about the future that can paralyse me in the present. Unable to work, I went back to bed and fell into a deep sleep. I woke up to a gloomy, cloudy sky.

Slowly I felt my thoughts focus and the possibility of concentration and work started to glow in my mind like a candle flame in a big black space. I raced back down to the piano, and there it was, a new idea, a melody, chords, relief, a gift…


I looked into the garden from the kitchen window and saw another gift hovering over the vegetable plot.


I check on the web before posting to see how to spell “Ee by gum” because I have never seen it written down, and find to my delight that it is the title of a song by Gracie Field.
Three gifts in one day, and it isn’t even Christmas yet.