The death of Santa.

We are slowly being surrounded by Santa. It's the last day of November, so we've been allowed to say the c-word for a month now, and it has crept closer every day, just as its domination seems to begin earlier every year, with the opening of the Christmas shops in August or, obscenely, July, the booking of Christmas 'experiences' selling out in minutes in early September. So with this comes Santa, the jolly, red-clothed, cocaine-laced-beverage-invented image, with his magical sleigh and magical reindeer and most of all his magical ability to deliver real-life toys into the real-life homes of real-life children around the world every Christmas Eve. Santa's ubiquity is so all encompassing in Ireland that many people don't seem to register that he is a religious figure, full name Saint Nicholas, inextricably associated with a religious festival that celebrates the birth of a really quite significant religious figure, one Jesus Christ, it's right there in the name of the 25th December festivities, it's hard to miss, yet so many people do. Just this week during a discussion of diversity and inclusion in relation to a christmas-themed event, a very sensible and kind person stated that christmas was just a part of Irish culture, so it couldn't not be inclusive, and Christmas certainly wasn't Christian, so what was the problem? Particularly with Santa. There are not just one but several statues of Santa in my child's montessori school, the man himself will be making a visit there in a couple of weeks, or at least a human man dressed in a Santa costume will be there in really-real life and give really-real presents, the under fives are all learning songs about Santa and the aforementioned reindeer or chimney-based shenanigans, drawing pictures of him, writing letters to him that don't require stamps. SANTA ISN'T REAL. But already, whether the children are Christian or not, whether they wish to or not, whatever they're being told at home, they are being told that this is a real person, a real but magical person, who magically delivers real presents and says ho ho ho a great deal. And the entire society is colluding in this lie, a delightful lie in many ways, but a lie, an elaborate fiction, a collective fantasy, but one that has many very tangible, concrete and abundant subtantiations in real life. And everyone is in on it. And what do the children make of this? And later, what do the adults? Because at some point, earlier or later, as young child shouting the truth to their blindly gullible peers, or older child clinging to their belief in the face of incontrovertible evidence and plain facts imparted to them by multiple authorities, at some point, the child realises that Santa isn't real. And this week I found myself wondering, what does this do to them? It's often said that one part of the problematic fallout of realising that Santa isn't real is realising that your parents, and many other trusted adults, have been lying to you. And thus, there is a sense of betrayal. And a wondering about what else they might be lying about (Capitalism? Love? Equality?), what else society says is great and true, if it's not true, might not be so great either? But that betrayal, that unsettling distrust, is not what was concerning me this week. I was thinking instead of the death of Santa. The loss of Santa. The terrible, irrevocable ending of Santa when you realise, when you _know_ that Santa is not real. Because Santa seems mainly great. Awesome. Amazing. He brings presents! He rides around in a flying sleigh powered by reindeer, one of whom has a glowing red nose! He gets presents to every child on Earth in one night! He likes biscuits! All of it. Santa is wonderful, generally. There are no doubt some rougher edges and more dubious elements and certain dimensions that would not stand up to serious scrutiny, but overall, to a young child deep in the Santa-lie, Santa is mostly wonderful. And then he's gone. Then, at some point, still probably as quite a young child, Santa is no more. You probably first suspect, then realise, then really know that he doesn't exist. But he was real for you before. And now he's gone. And that is a terrible loss. That is an awful absence of something wonderful. That is a sorrow. That is grief. That is a death. The death of Santa. Because when you had someone in your life, whose presence was actively felt, who you could meet and talk to and write to, who other people also knew, who brought you gifts, whose picture was everywhere, who had songs and films and poems written about him, who was entirely a real presence in your life, and then that person is not there any more, they are permanently gone, they are forever absent, then that is a death. This is the death of Santa that millions of people experience every year and perhaps billions of people are living with this loss from their own childhoods. And this loss is not acknowledged. It's not even seen as a loss. When it is profound. Someone, something good has been taken away. Then later perhaps you feel that he never existed. Which is even worse, which is discrediting the magic and positive experiences you had as a child, your belief, your reality. Which leaves you grieving the loss of a person you're now being told didn't ever exist and therefore your loss and grief do not exist either. And I think this is happening for a lot of people. This is happening for a lot of children. And it is very confusing and distressing. It is not a reason to get rid of the concept of Santa or to decide not to pretend to children that he is real or any of the many other positions in regards to this that could be taken, that provide a magical and wonderful experience for many children. I just thought suddenly this week that it is the death of Santa that is painful and confusing and terribly sad. That is a grief. That is a real loss of an unreal person and all they meant to you. And this loss is echoed in other losses, of very real people, that you may experience later, and of other things, ideas, hopes, places, anything. But mainly, there is a real loss here in the death of Santa. It is real grief. And I think that is not acknowledged, not understood, and not soothed. We need to think carefully about how we give Santa to our children, and how we will take him away. How we will give the joy, and how we will honour the grief. We need to be jolly careful how we let Santa into our lives and especially our children's lives, knowing that he does not exist, that his death is intrinsic to his creation. Because it hurts. Santa isn't real. But the pain of losing him is. Let's be a little careful how we bring him to life and have him die. Joy, magic, gifts, collusion, lies, confusion, loss, grief, complexity, inexpressibility, societal dysfunction and societal celebration, community and isolation, life and death, reality and unreality. It's all very Christmassy. Ho ho ho to one and all.

Hallowe'en.

It's All Hallows Eve. It's Halloween. I just went trick-or-treating for the first time ever with my little one and it was magical. I thought it would probably be quite fun, but it was really a wonderful thing to be part of. People complain about how commercial it is and all the plastic, in the costumes and wrapping the sweets, and worry about all the sweets and chocolate and treats that children collect and consume, but all of that paled in comparison to the sheer beauty and wonder and surreal joy of it all. To wander the streets, in costume, meeting dozens of other children also all in costume doing the same, and call to the houses of strangers, who are expecting you and want you to call in, who have gone to enormous effort to decorate their homes and who welcome the children at the door with treats they have gotten in specially to give to them, that so many of the adults at the doors have dressed up too, that everyone is participating in this, just by themselves, no organisation or corporate entity behind it, everyone interpreting it in their own way, and it's such a wonderful thing for the kids to experience this, this welcome, this extraordinary amid the ordinary, this community. Above all it was the sense of community. Of everyone doing something together, but in their own way.

To watch it and how my child and the other children were experiencing it, how they loved it, so much joy from so little and yet so much. And it brought me back to happy times in my own childhood, which was also so precious. And it wasn't at all about the sweets or the treats, my child didn't want anything except satsumas and bananas and maybe some jellies, it wasn't at all about getting all this 'stuff' but about the incredible joy of getting to knock on strangers' doors and them be opened happily, getting to have this kind of party with their friends and other children and parents on the street, everyone dressed up, everyone having fun. And many people had made their costumes, or their parents had. There was a cardboard box robot with light up buttons, there was a wrapped birthday present made of a huge cardboard box, there was a giant handmade snake curving out of a garden. There were so many carved pumpkins, many of them works of art, and carved turnips alongside them. There was just so much joy, and so much togetherness, and so much effort and reward. I felt lucky and grateful to be part of it. It was all about community. Another world is closer to us tonight. I hope we can reach it on other nights too.

A blog post.

You know what I didn't do again this month? A blog post.

Mind the gap.

I'm increasingly sad and angry about how little care seems to be put in to public services by some people in Ireland. Today I got off an Iarnrod Eireann/Irish Rail train at Connolly Station. I had come from Malahide, but the train was a mainline commuter train rather than a Dart. This was how the train looked after arriving at its platform at Connolly Station, one of the two main train stations in Dublin, where intercity trains arrive and depart around the country.

This was the gap between the train and the platform:

There was also a high step down from the train to reach the platform:

It was so dangerous, and so inaccessible. Travelling with a young child it was quite frightening, it would have been so easy for them to fall into the gap between the train and the platform, and was quite a maneouvre for me to get them off the train safely. Indeed the gap was wide enough for me as an adult to fall in to. I dread to think what it would have been like for a wheelchair user, or someone using crutches, or someone with any kind of mobility impairment. Or an elderly person. Or a blind or visually impaired person, who would have virtually no chance of detecting the height or width of the gap that awaited them as they stepped off the train. Or a person with a buggy. Or a person just not paying enough attention, because they hadn't expected such a hazard as they merely got off their train.

As you can see from the first picture it was like this at every door on every carriage of the train all along the platform. That's what made me sad and angry. It was planned like this. It was left like this. There is this train, which is not at all unique, and it does not fit the platform correctly, and probably never has, and that is dangerous and inaccessible. There must be many trains like it. And no-one has bothered to fix this. It has been designed in this way, because when the train platforms were built, or when the trains were ordered to run on these tracks to these platforms, the train did not fit the platform or the platform did not fit the train. With hazardous and exclusionary consequences. And that was simply accepted as fine. And has remained fine. Was it even noticed? Either no-one cares, or more precisely, the people who could do something about this do not care. And that's also fine. It would seem like it is someone's job, to have trains that allow their passengers to reach the platforms safely and easily, or to have platforms that have been built or modified to ensure they reach the trains well, again so that passengers can get on and off safely and easily. That doesn't seem like an outlandish expectation. Yet this is the situation. And no-one seems to feel that it is a problem or it is their job to ensure this doesn't happen or fix it when it does.

There are no warning signs, or even announcements to mind the gap. It's not even considered worthy of an alert. It's simply expected. Have people complained? More importantly, has anyone been injured? Impossible to know.

And this is why I'm sad and angry, more and more, in our capital city, around the country, or reading the news. It's not that things are bad. It's that things are intentionally and simultaneously carelessly bad. Avoidably, unnecessarily bad. Yet persistently, consistently, compoundingly bad. It's that so few people who a citizen might reasonably expect to be concerned with and responsible for doing things well seem to care. And that they are not made to care. They can do very basic things badly, they can refuse to fix things for years or decades, and there are no repercusssions. And worse, that there is no sense of responsibility or even shame. That there is no vision, no expectation of better. It's not that things are bad but we know how they could be so much better and we're fighting for that better future. Some of us are. But it seems like those with the most power don't even have an idea of what better could be, they are unconcerned by just how unneccessarily bad things are, and how the status quo negatively affects the lives, deaths and health of so many. There is a vast chasm between how things are and even the basics of a decent public life that citizens have a right to expect, which they can envision and which could quite easily be achieved. The powers that be are whistling into this abyss. And we all, especially the most disadvantaged, are in danger of falling through the gaps.

Eclipses.

I was thinking about eclipses. There was a partial solar eclipse visible from Dublin recently, I thought it was this month, but in fact it was in April. Time has little meaning here. It was cloudy and rainy and the eclipse wasn't visible at all. This made me think of other eclipses I've seen. I was extremely lucky to be in the zone of totality for a solar eclipse in France in 1999. It was an eerie and powerful experience, the strange semi-darkness, the sudden quiet of birds and animals and all of nature around us, the silence and respect of the other watchers, standing outside, all in our eclipse glasses. I don't know if I have any photos of that eclipse, I ought to check. I found some photos I took of a partial solar eclipse on 10 June 2021, so perhaps it was that memory making me think the recent one was in June too.

First I projected it onto a sheet of white card. Look very closely and you can see the white dot of the sun. To the right is the nappy box that I also made a pinhole viewer out of.

A little closer, if blurrier, projection of the eclipse.

A not very successful attempt to take a photo through the pinhole viewer. It was very clear and amazing watching the eclipse inside this box, seeing the crescent taken out of the sun. But it was not very possible to capture it with the camera.

And then there is this photo. I don't actually know how I took this. I know I didn't look directly at the sun, I'm not quite that much of an idiot. And I didn't look at the sun in the screen of my digital camera either. I think I looked at the projection on the card and put the camera pointing behind me up at the sun and took some pictures in that general direction without looking at the sun, the camera or the screen.

Maybe taking these could have damaged the camera. I'm not sure. Or maybe I used a filter. Nonetheless, I'm glad I have these photos now.

All those eclipses, reflecting earthwards. Good to be here.

Here is the link to the blogpost including the (much better) photos I took of a total lunar eclipse in London in September 2015.

And of a partial lunar eclipse in Dublin in July 2019.

Aurora Borealis in Dublin.

I got to see the Aurora Borealis. In Dublin. A life-long dream to see the Northern Lights, achieved from the balcony of my home in Portobello, in Dublin city centre, in Ireland, in May. Incredible.

Spring snow.

On the 1st March we woke up to snow.

Heavy snow falling.

In Dublin city centre.

In the spring.

We went to Iveagh Gardens and made a snowman.

You can see the snow falling in the video above.

It was joy amid the sadness.

Sneachta.