Sunday 3 November 2019
Saturday 30 December 2017
Christmas 2015
Dear family and friends,
As you decorate your ethically sourced pine and defrost your free-range nut roast, are you all feeling blessed?
We wouldn’t dream of judging those who embrace disposable commercialism by acquiring plastic tat for their kids and indulging in a month of boozing. Its just not what we are about. Go on and snogg the boss or Xerox your bits at the office party but its not WHO WE ARE. Following retreats to the US, France, Spain and Lyme Regis we have evolved, both as individuals and as a family.
Andrew is whipping up a feast of organic quark and lentil delights for our celebrations and I plan to mark the festivities by being present. It’s a gift. My mindfulness regimen has been brutal but soooo worth it. I’ve taken to wearing yoga pants wherever I damn well please. They work really well from school gate drop-offs to dinner with other concerned Chiswickites. We Sparkes have decided to mark this Christmas by exchanging hand-made gifts and I’m certain my hand knitted woollen leggings will be a great hit with Alex on the rugby field. A far better alternative to skins, I’m sure he’ll agree and I’d be pleased to produce them for all the players in team colours. Nothing’s too good for my precious firstborn. As far as Emily is concerned, avarice be dammed. We are donating, in her name, to the upkeep of a village goat in a wonderful community we visited in Outer Vladzakoo. Its all about empowering the people. Andrew will receive the benefit of my inner peace and a simple book of reflections I’ve jotted down over the past year as witness to our journey.
The children are cool. Alex now in secondary school with almost zero spending money, an ancient mobile phone and plenty of growing room in his new blazer. Personally, I’d agree that weekly bathing suffices but it seems society takes a dim view of natural body odours. As a music scholar, he gets pulled out of class to work on his drums and voice frequently enough that at parents evening in November, certain teachers of core subjects had yet to lay eyes on the boy. But its all good.
Emily joined a new school for Year 5 and so far seems happy enough talking to herself and anticipating letters from her pen pals. She spends a great deal of time hanging upside down over a sofa back and perfecting cartwheels. Apart from writing in her journal and singing, she devotes much of her time to inspecting her face for any changes or anomalies. She has mastered applying nail polish to one hand and hopes to tackle the reverse in early ‘16.
My parents will no doubt be celebrating the run up to Christmas in their newly renovated apartment in Paris. Eric will be motoring around London in his new wheels supplied by his new job and possibly in the company of his new girlfriend. Right on, man. That’s almost too much joy to be spreading in one newsletter so I’ll leave it there.
GIVE PEACE A CHANCE
Christmas 2016
2016 was a mixed bag for us.
Between Brexit and President elect The Donald, it has been a discombobulating
year to say the least.
Most of our highpoints were our times away from home. In February, we travelled to Barcelona and
had a fabulous time visiting the sights and sampling tapas. The kids didn’t think much of the Picasso
Museum. They felt he started off alright but later work such as his ‘Las
Meninas’ were beneath contempt.
In addition to planning a fabulous weekend in Paris kicked off
with a conspicuously chic picnic on the Eurostar, Andrew pulled off a surprise
getaway to Madrid for Cynthia’s 50th. For the remainder of the year, we sponged
shamelessly off our relatives with breaks at Tig and Andrew’s enchanting
cottage in Lyme Regis, as well as the Colemans in Paris and Normandy.
Workwise, Andrew changed tack and became a Latin teacher across
three schools and various tutoring gigs.
He’d last taught at his old boarding school when Thatcher was PM and has
had to adopt a more softly-softly approach to students who are no longer
motivated by the threat of swift beatings.
You may have heard that Latin is a dead language, so no great changes in
that industry since those heady days of his unbridled youth.
Cynthia has also stepped back in time to take on insurance
work. Now that site visits are partly superceded
by sitting at home downloading satellite images, risk reports can be filed from
the comfort of her bunny slippers and fetching onesie or moth-eaten leisure
garment. Hypothetically speaking. Not that she owns a onesie but you get the
point. I vow to wear normal clothes when
the children have friends around next year.
That said, such fun to slip into my trusty Madonna holdovers from the
“Desperately Seeking Susan” era when they are all out of the house.
With Alex now 12 and in Year 8, we have a form of live-in aftercare
for Emily. He usually remembers to pick
up his sister who is 11 and in Year 6 at a school across the road. Alex has stunned us with a fantastic report
card given that much of the time he opts not to review for exams stating that
he “can’t be bothered” and that “life is too short”. I will
be adopting his laissez faire bonhomie as the first of my New Year’s
resolutions and will retort similarly when Alex is next hoping to locate rugby
socks or a fresh school shirt.
Drumming continues to grip Alex’ interest as does table
tennis. You’d think hanging around parks
in various European capitals waiting by a ping pong table for someone (anyone)
to turn up appears a little suspect but not in his world where language and
lack of social intercourse of any kind is no barrier to picking up a game with
random passers by. I am greatly
comforted that he keeps words to a minimum and grunts at perfect strangers so
it isn’t behaviour reserved for home life!
Emily is perfecting cartwheels, backflips, walkovers and various other
bendy moves learned in her Saturday gym sessions. This follows an extensive campaign when she
insisted she wanted to take classes despite our unwillingness to indulge her in
this pursuit. We had our reasons, namely
that when an 11 year old spontaneously wants to pursue this dream, the entire
West London gymnastics community snorts derisively that to attend this or that
class, you’d have to have signed your daughter up at conception. Andrew and I stood shoulder to shoulder,
united in parental we-know-bestnest while she slowly eroded our will to live
and applied stealth like tactics to make us doubt every decision we ever made
on her behalf. In a final offensive, Emily
wore nothing but a spangly leotard she’d purchased, from the back of a sales
rack in an industrial estate in Normandy for 9 euros, day and in day out for a
solid week and we finally caved. So she
attends a weekly dance, tumbling, gymnastics, cheerleading hybrid class that
keeps her off our backs.
Emily is busy preparing her 11+ exams and it won’t be long before
she’ll know where she is going for Year 7.
Following loads of visits to schools rated by her on the basis of
uniform style, cafeteria smells and presence or absence of boys, she has
created a shortlist. I’m not going to
name names but some of the schools we visited were scary places full of very
precocious girls in smart uniforms—at least from the waist up. From what we could see some skirts weren’t
strictly speaking of approved lengths.
Nor where they even, technically speaking, skirts at all. Call me old-fashioned but a nice ankle-length
tweed wouldn’t go amiss.
Upon reflection, we had much to be thankful for this year although I
was unable to channel that sentiment into a reasonable looking pumpkin
pie. Being half American, it is my job
to muster up treats at Thanksgiving and July 4th – the latter being
great fun when you live in England and are married to a Brit. Nothing like painting one’s nails red, white
and blue and waving a cheery “Happy Fourth” to every passerbye on the Chiswick
High Road.
But back to Thanksgiving, I resorted to remaining unflappable and to
act like the recipe came out exactly as a distant ancestor or the inhabitants
of some remote location intend. I have
yet to be questioned and suggest you try this for yourselves. Soggy base on that pecan pie you say? Not a
bit of it. It’s a traditional
family recipe from Mooseprout where my Great Aunt Vonga ran the women’s local
"Stitch and Bitch" sessions. She was known across county
borders for her reinterpretations of Amish quilts integrating family jockstraps
and tea towels (Beautiful work from a woman with hands the size of meat
cleavers). She used to chew tobacco and whistle motown tunes to stay
alert blah blah blah…by the time you are part way through this insane family
recollection, they’ve lost the will to live and the pecan pie has been
eaten/discarded.
Voila!
We hope
Christmas finds you with loved ones and that 2017 will kick off full of great
plans. Do drop us a line if with your
news and come visit!
Christmas 2017
Aren’t these few days of limbo between Christmas and NYE bizarre?
We are a little schlumpy after all the planning and wrapping and eating and
tidying up. I, for one, feel like a
deflated lilo at this juncture. It’s
early and I’m sitting in our kitchen with a coffee watching our moronic
goldfish swim around and around.
Pointless pets, really.
This year we travelled back from our celebrations in Normandy
with a stuffed car and barely enough space for two bickering children plus handheld
devices. I don’t know why I spend so much of the year bemoaning dependency on
electronics when those long car journeys would be insufferable without them. And no, I don’t want smug messages back from
anyone detailing the rollicking fun their families have with singsongs and
marathon sessions of ‘I spy’ whilst on journeys with tweenies.
Looking back on 2017, we remember wonderful trips to Wales,
France, Turkey, Italy and our beloved Lyme Regis. Highlights included family tennis on
Valentine’s Day, releasing paper lanterns into the night sky and watching
turtles hatch. Emily and Andrew escaped
to Yorkshire visiting his old school and other stops along memory lane. Alex and I spent a long weekend based in East
London exploring Greenwich, climbing the O2 Arena and sneaking the boy into
Kingsman despite him not being 15. The
four of us snuggled under blankets and gawped our way through another David
Attenborough series. Doesn’t he make you
want to pack up and move to Costa Rica immediately? The most outdoorsy thing I
did when gifted a wetsuit was to spend a large part of the year shoehorning
myself in and out of the damned thing, stand ankle deep in seawater and shriek
like a toddler every time I spotted a wisp of seaweed. A work in progress!
Alex transitioned from Year 8 to 9 (Grade 7 to 8) at West London
Free School and gave up table tennis for rowing. He is still into his music and is an avid
collector of random facts. Emily moved
up to Year 7 (Grade 6) leaving Primary school in the dust when she joined Lady
Margaret’s. The commute by tube took some getting used to with constant text
updates from her travel buddies along the lines of “near turnstiles” and “copy
that - heading to platform now” etc…She also confronted terror and agony by
getting her ears pierced for her 12th birthday.
Andrew started a new job at King’s House in Richmond and loves
it! Still so strange to see him head off
at 7:20am with a tie on, gripping a travel mug . He is too into his Latin derivations and
wonders why our eyes glaze over when he launches into the etymology of the word
banoffee. Although he finally resigned
from school governing, he took on a new role on the board of a local housing
trust.
I pootle along adding the odd project to my auction house consulting. The Sainsbury Centre in Norwich recently
opened a Faberge show I helped with.
Approaching contacts for loans when The Queen and A La Vieille Russie
had already committed to the exhibit was no hard sell. I’m also involved with the Gunnersbury Museum
near us that will re-open in early 2018.
So that, in a nutshell, is us. We are so grateful for our
families and friends as we struggle to make sense of Trump, Brexit and the rest
of it. We are not sad to see the back of
2017 and full of plans for the New Year.
Wishing our dearest from here to not so near a wonderful
beginning to 2018!
Much love from Cynthia, Andrew, Alex and Emily xx
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