Good morning M’up, it is officially Umpherday.
That strange, unnamed day that lives somewhere between Christmas and New Year, when time has been affected by the gavitation forces of wrapping paper, joy and laughter and lying on sofas doing very little.
My Facebook feed kindly informed me this morning that I might like to buy a Captain Scarlet Pursuit Vehicle. I actually had one. I also had an Angel Interceptor. I’m fairly sure it was 1968 or ’69, and they arrived carefully wrapped in my Santa pillowcase, which for 52 weeks of the year was just an ordinary pillowcase, but at Christmas became an Aladdin’s cave of wonderous stuff.
Naturally, I now wish I’d left them in their boxes. They’d be very handy additions to the pension fund. But these pictures did something far more valuable they triggered memories of Christmases long ago.
Christmas Day itself was always a blur of tearing paper, excitement, and thank yous.
Boxing Day meant relatives, visits, and more thank yous , the day of the “Thank you” letter, no email, whatsapp or SMS in those days.
But the 27th… ah, the 27th was different. That was the day you were left alone with your new treasures, my sisters Janet and Ruth in their room doing sisterly things with their treasures and me in my room imagining what it would be like to drive a Captian Scarlet car ….
There was a Captain Scarlet year.
A Joe 90 year.
A Thunderbirds year.
An 007 Aston Martin DB year with working ejector seat year.
Common to them all were two constants: the Blue Peter Annual and the Doctor Who Annual. And then there were the books , especially the ones my Auntie Joy White gave us (Ali you can let her know I was minded of her) . She reviewed children’s books, and there were always a couple that felt different, a little deeper.
One of them was “The Giving Tree” by Shel Silverstein.
I remember reading it even though it was meant for younger children, loving the illustrations, and being unsettled by the ending. The boy takes almost everything from the tree over his lifetime, apples, branches, trunk,until only a stump remains. When he returns as a tired old man, all he wants is a quiet place to sit and rest. The tree can still give that.
The book ends with the words:
“And the tree was happy.”
As a child, I didn’t fully understand that line.
Now, 55 years later, I think I do.
When you’re young, it reads like generosity.
When you’re older, it reads like love.
When you’re older still, it starts to read like life itself, uneven, costly, freely given, and never quite fair.
I kinda wish I still had a copy 
Some stories aren’t meant to be understood all at once. They wait in your memory like old toys or well-loved books, until we’re ready to meet them again.
Umpherday feels like a good day for that, sitting quietly with old memories, not to sell them, not to use them, but simply to remember what they gave us.