A Christmas Present? In September?

Yes, I do know it isn’t Christmas yet, but I did have a splendid surprise three months early at lunchtime today: a parcel from New Hampshire, USA, containing a gift just for me.

So what was it? It was a book containing the field journals of one Maddie K (previously known to this blog as the Borg) when she was but a burgeoning – and unbelievably erudite and versatile – tadpole training to be an archaeologist (or architect, or arch-villain, or archetype, or something like that.)

It’s very splendid, and it arrived just in time. I go for my autumn Covid booster jab tomorrow, and because they couldn’t organise a bun fight in a bakery at the Uttoxeter Heath Community Centre I will have to be ensconced with a crowd of anonymous grey ghosts – in a room which will probably be cold – for between 1 and 2 hours. (You might imagine I would engage with my usual habit of people-watching as I do when distances are manageable such as in coffee ships and trains, but in a crowded room they become invaders in my personal space and I like to imagine they’re invisible.)

I did think of taking my current late night reading – Ishiguro’s ‘Never Let Me Go’ – but I think Maddie’s field journals will be more engaging. I so look forward to starting on it, and I thank her so very much for sending it.

And I have a guilty admission to make. For some years now there’s been something I’ve wanted to send to her. It’s an heirloom passed down from my grandmother to my mother, and I think it’s something she would quite like to have. (It has no monetary value and is laughably wrecked, but I still think she would value it.) The problem is that it’s in a box somewhere among a pile of boxes with other things on top of the pile, so finding it would take an unusual effort of will. I do intend to make the effort one day though, when I’m not gardening, decorating the house, doing chores, writing blog posts, watching the scrummy Dr Ellie Anderson on YouTube, or being lost in the wasteland of depression.

So that job has now been entered in the log of important-things-to-get-around-to-doing-before-I-die. And I’m a never say never type (well, mostly.) We INFJs do seem to have a perverse need to load our shoulders with pressures, you know. We feel naked without them.