Restoring old furniture to former glory.(Grand-kids)

Old Cupboard and round table

It is the only way. Do something useful and Christmas will soon be over. We all know that all norm explodes and insanity becomes king during Christmas. Did you see that footage of demented shoppers on boxing day? Twisted faces gripped in shopping frenzy. They camp overnight in sleeping bags in front of David Jones. On Boxing day they buy what they don’t need and don’t even want. The magic of the advertisers now have voodooed the world’s population in ‘shopping means saving’. Everything you buy is ‘saving’. ‘Save’ here, the poster tells us. We carry bags full of goods home and are now even richer than before.

The grandkids are staying with us for a second time but tablets are locked away in my sock drawer. It has come to that now. My socks are behind lock and key. I have Norwegian socks and someone in this family ( I won’t mention names) has taken to wearing them without shoes and tramped around the tiled floor and even outside in the garden. Can you believe this AND with Norwegian socks?

With an hour of tablet withdrawal suffering and some twitching button fingers, the boys soon were on their way to activity. One started reading a 600 Michael Grant page book. The other started building a real working V8 engine toy, given as a Christmas present. . We had the Lamb Raan on Christmas day. It was given it’s well earned standing ovation.

Now that things are settling back to normal ( That’s if Ms ‘normal’ ever lives here) I decided to finally heed Helvi’s frequent requests to finish stripping the remnants of paint from an old farm cupboard that we had lugged from Holland together with an old table and lots of kitchen thatched chairs, all of which came from the (approximately) 1780’s Saxon farm that we had bought during our stay there between 1973-76. The cupboard was painted by us while living in Holland. It was fashionable to go and hand paint old farm furniture and give it a ‘Scandinavian’ look. Strictly speaking Finland is not Scandinavia, but so what? It was close enough. Anyway, we were foolish, young, passionate and great home makers. Our kids were young and learnt Dutch within a few months. I can still see them riding their little bikes to primary school a couple of kilometres away… And now, and now… We are having their kids over with Internet tablets.

The grandkids. Sometimes I wonder, if the future will make another one of those monumental great medical discoveries whereby grandkids will be born first, completely bypassing children. They, our grandchildren are immensely mature and so easy. Full of innovation and wisdom. Questioning and yet guileless and pertinent. It wasn’t like that when their parents were young, or perhaps they were and we were the nervous inexperienced parents. Or, is it the ‘other’ parent that brought in the more restive, innovative gene? Who knows and does it now matter?

Today I took out the stripper bought four years ago and stripped the last bit of dark blue from the cupboard. Tomorrow I’ll get some shellac and French polish the whole thing. I used to French polish doors and architraves many years ago when French Polishers were as rare as a Stradivarius and just as expensive. ( I made a good earner)

With the old round table near the cupboard we decided some time ago that it was too dark for the small space that it lives in. It casts a gloomy spell over the rest of the room. It imposed itself as too dominant and was used to be looked at in a larger farm type room with open fire or a piano with a Rachmaninov score nearby.

I painted the top of the table a stark white and it cheers up the whole of that area.

And that is how the Christmas period has passed, yet again. A miracle. It is over.

Tags: Christmas, Finland, French polish, Holland, Rachmaninov, Scandinavia, shellac, Stradivarious