I didn’t enjoy Christmas. I rarely do. This year had the added ‘bonus’ of me reaching the age my dad died at. I also realised it isn’t Christmas per se that isn’t liked. True, much of it isn’t, like the panic and stress about who goes where and what happens when they’re there, but really it’s that whole time of year weather thing previously mentioned (links below). The meal and all the drinking, any going out and socialising (assuming I can get past the leaving the house bit), I love and can’t ever recall a time of sitting morosely through any of that.

When a meat eater, I actually loved turkey even when dry, and never understood why it wasn’t eaten more regularly the rest of the year round, attributing it to the fact that doing so would take away from how magical it therefore is to have at Christmas. These days—when in the UK at least, for Quorn are not in Canada despite their worldwide/global claims—there’s the sans gluten Quorn Roast; as intended, it very much tastes like turkey, doing the job of replacing the meat of one excellently (I even had a second one to cook on Boxing Day just to make sure there’d be plenty of leftovers).

The endless chasm of despair around and beyond the 25^th did play a role in my recent lack of posts, but ongoing faults and an utterly frustrating experience with the ‘customer service’ side of wordpress .com are just as equally if not more so to blame. It’s had me consider the value of continuing with a blog/site; in a thread involving fifteen emails from me, nothing got fixed (though more got discovered as broken) and ‘happiness engineers’ continually repeated already tried and failed remedies instead of acknowledge or even realise these had previously been suggested in the thread.

I considered just being done with it, then a couple of positive comments on Facebook from the Poems and Dark Poetry pages (thank you both) made me think that maybe just letting it revert to a free site, so at least I wasn’t paying for all the nonsense, was the way to go. It would mean all my urls changing and there being third party advertising on the site, but –

And then I got an email notification from a free blog I follow, only to find myself faced with Chuck Norris and the suggestion his housing market secrets awaited just a click away.

No offence, Chucky; but, eh?

I was going to screenshot it to add to this post, but when going back to the email found the ad had changed to one about the secret every dog owner needs to now if their dog has ‘weepy eyes’. The picture this time was of a long-haired dog with said affliction and so wasn’t the best to look at; I decided to check on the day of setting up this post, and lo and behold it had changed again, this time to the one shown below (this is not the ad but a screenshot).  

A recent Snopes article about the ‘putting a bottle on a car tyre’ phenomenon (here) explained that such clickbait headlines are designed to take the clicker on a jaunt through numerous ad-heavy web pages, while promising the wanted info is just another click away. By the end of it all the information originally offered is completely forgotten.

In fact, it can be worse than just a complete waste of time.

When taking the screen shot, I accidentally clicked on the ad only for my security protocols to kick in and stop the page loading due to dubious aspects of it. This ad/link arrived in my inbox thanks to who wordpress .com/Automattic chose to do business with. On one hand, all the more reason not to financially support; on the other, plenty reason not to go free. Moving forward a new host is an option, but that means having to spend time looking into all involved with that, and would it really make any odds given how many hosts rely on the block editor?

Anyway . . .

Back to the Quorn—the products of which aren’t all vegan as I’d thought, but often vegetarian; including the Roast, just in case any vegans in the non-worldwide-Quorn world are reading this enviously—Roast that while cooking afforded me the opportunity to again contemplate the tree featured The Tree of Love albeit at a different time of year and from an altered disposition (as last time, no camera to take a picture of the actual tree; the one used taken by me a few years ago and bearing little resemblance to the tree described below).

 

Bare like bone
Branches and twigs
Alike
Some going this way
Others heading that
Difference in thickness
Short and long lengths
Some boughs almost
Like whole new trees
Trying to grow out
From the old
Before a change of mind

In the grey of winter
Summer’s deceptive leaves
Are dearly departed
Making that once lush
Suddenly stark naked
Except for the trunk
True heart of the tree
Climbed by evergreen ivy
Clinging to every inch
Covering in entirety
To hide from view
A secret there

The passing of a life
Gone but never forgotten
A memory
Desperately hung onto

Or a cold betrayal
Remembered bitterly
Not as raw but
Still stinging nonetheless

Maybe a lonely old life
Wishing for a could’ve been
Something that never was
To begin with

Perhaps a coming to terms
Withered for being stuck in
A situation sucking
The once great love for living

Ivy but an ember
Of a fire once burning
Roaring with passion
Rising in desire
So insatiably hot
Alas for what
Is a story
Unknown
Just a tree standing
In testimony to
The time it has
Grown

 

Other doomy weather/mindset related posts:

• Winter is Coming
• Grey Matter: Autumn and Winter
• Tomorrow’s Bad News Today

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