Ep.44: Snow globe

B was beyond mortified as we all slipped off our shoes but David is particularly persuasive when he’s being silly so there was no way either B or me were going to escape being caught up in this festive daftness.   There was a zip up the back that we had to clamber through and a curtain to shuffle round.  Maria Carey fought to be heard over the noisy generator pumping warm air to keep the whole thing inflated.  We took up positions in front of a winter wonderland, hurled soft white petals of fake snow at each other and giggled – mainly at the magnitude of B’s scowl in the face of this very public humiliation.  Click. A photographer captured the moment while baffled and bored shoppers, pausing to re-fuel on fast food eaten out of polystyrene trays, stared at us from their plastic tables and chairs.  It was in the days leading up to Christmas 2019 and we had no idea a huge cancer-shaped hand was about to pick up our world and vigorously shake it.

And a shaken snow globe is exactly how a cancer diagnosis feels.   Suddenly there you are, trapped inside your fragile bubble, desperately trying to remain upright while the soft petals of everything you ever took for granted and thought you knew, fly around your head. Everything unsettled, dislodged, the only certainty being that nothing will come to land in quite the same place ever again.

A year down the line and the scene inside the snow globe is again a festive one.  This time the backdrop is The Byre, our beautiful nearly new house on the hill above the loch, and its Christmas Day (at this point I’m tempted to take the shape of a Dickensian character so I can brush imaginary ice from the pane with my fingerless gloves and peer through the window).

I wake up early, not oh-my-god-Santa-has-been-let’s-rip-open-all-the-presents-at-5am kind of early, but a holy shit I’m on Christmas dinner duty and have done pretty much fuck-all kind of early.   For the first time in 12 years I’m not with B, she’s having Christmas morning with her dad, so the start of the day takes on a different rhythm and tint. I’m comfortable with this, because the underlying message is that we all know I’m not going anywhere any time soon (unless there’s some freak woman-versus-turkey accident in the hours to come which feels unlikely, if potentially entertaining).

We eventually swap presents, David and me, lazily late in the morning.  I give him a painting by a favourite artist, Dot Walker, a beach on Harris, birds lift-up off the shore in sudden flight under a menacing sky, sunlight glinting off their wings.  I love the perspective, sound and emotion that pours off the canvas and David does too, as I hoped he would.  We immediately put it on the wall where it sits, unfamiliar, catching the eye each time I look up, offering a glimpse into another world.  It makes me want to go to Harris and find Dot’s beach.  In return David gives me new lenses for my camera, I wasn’t expecting them but it’s a pitch perfect gift.  I’ve spent so much of this year observing the world.  Pulling it apart, tilting my head so I can feel my way to viewing it from different perspectives, climbing the hill behind the house, immersing myself in the cold of the loch, from outside the security of the BBC, inside the comfort of our decision to get married. To have these new lenses feels like a physical manifestation of all I’ve been doing of late, one lens which allows me to go in close, intimate, another wide-angled so I can capture the larger landscapes I move through, snare both woods and trees.

Later, after David’s kids have visited and B has re-joined us, into our snow globe good friends arrive.  Mike and Shona, and their twins Jack and Emmy, bring gifts of endless laughter and fun and silliness.  They understand the joy of a secret-santa present which has us take turns at being unicorns, throwing shiny pink hoops at each other’s heads.  They retain the childish delight of playing a game of utterly filthy snap.  They know the true value of a cheap Christmas jumper. We fuel our day with food and games and humour and stories.  It’s a Christmas as relaxed and fun and joy-filled as I can remember.

If you look more closely at that picture through the glass of that snow globe, really study it, you’ll realise there’s something missing.  As the day wore on, I too looked but couldn’t see it.  It’s not there on the table with the happy crumbs of cheese and dribbles of chocolate sauce that missed the profiteroles.  It’s not in the bag of scrunched up wrapping or in the empty bottles of champagne.  It definitely doesn’t make an appearance when Henrik brings in a live mouse to drop under the table during Christmas dinner which has Emmy screaming and standing on her chair while B scoops up Henrik and David scoops up the mouse to set free again.

In fact, I don’t think it was hiding at all, I’m pretty certain it wasn’t there in the first place. I know because after Mike and Shona left, David and i cleaned and cleared all the laughter laden debris away and there wasn’t a sign of it anywhere. 

What was missing from that scene in our snow globe was, whisper it, cancer.  It had no place at our table. The biggest present I could have asked for was the realisation that it was possible to experience an entire day with cancer completely vanished from my consciousness and our lives.  What an amazing gift to get. 

I draw back from the glass, just like that Dickensian character would.  I’m careful to be extra quiet, not to disturb a single fake snowflake from where its settled.  I want to slip gently away in the hope that this joyous scene will long continue, because I now know that it’s entirely possible to find a place where cancer is banished to history and the past.  And just that knowledge is amazing and I’m profoundly grateful for it.