2 1GT Thursday November 26 2020 | the times

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C

hristmas Day is

back on the cards.

Christmas Day is

a roast dinner,

essentially, but

households appear

overjoyed and

are getting down

to the business of whom they

might expose to Covid-19 this

year. (This is the year to invite

all the relatives you least

like, surely.)

It will in the end, I think, be

pretty much like every Christmas,

but with the added suspense of

not knowing if the virus is at your

table and in that sneeze just now

and whether it’s been sufficiently

trained to go out of the window

we’ve all been told to keep open.

However, the usual Christmas

carols and songs do require

adapting, so if you want your

Covid Christmas to go not with a

swing, but with a ring (of truth),

here is an updated song sheet:

Jingle Bells

Jingle Bells, I can’t smell

Nope, it’s completely gone

Oh what fun it is to find

The third wave doesn’t pong

Deck the Halls

Deck the halls with boughs

of holly

Fa la la la la, la la la la

’Tis the season to be jolly

Fa la la la la, la la la la

Until we’re sad cos Grandpa’s

dead.

Fa la la, la la la, la la la

What did he die of? The super

spread!

Fa la la la la, la la la la

Deck the halls with boughs of

holly

Fa la la la la, la la la la

’Tis the season of our folly

Fa la la la la, la la la la

Grandpa wasn’t quite ready

for that

Fa la la, la la la, la la la

But he did get to wear a paper

hat!

Fa la la la la, la la la la

Merry Christmas Everybody

So here it is, Merry Christmas

Everybody’ll be having fun

And you’ll be dishing out the

hand gel

So what could possibly go wrong?

Are you waiting for the family

to arrive?

Are you sure you’ve got the room

to spare inside?

Have you opened that window?

Doused the Quality Street

in sanitiser?

Which is all one can really do —

for God’s sake hurry it up, Pfizer!

So here it is, Merry Christmas

Everybody’ll have such fun

You’ve a bit of fever. A bit of

a cough

But as they’re all on their

way now

You’ll just have to pull it off...

Away in a Hospital Corridor

Away in a hospital corridor

As there were no beds

Dear old Auntie Betty laid down

her sweet head

The strip lights in the ceiling

Look down where she lay

Poor old Auntie Betty

Cursing Christmas Day

We loved thee, Auntie Betty

We were all such big fans

But Boris wouldn’t steal

Christmas

So you were gone by mid-Jan

Other carols and songs

include: It’s Beginning to Look

a Lot Like Thrombosis, O Come

All Ye Covidiots and God Rest

Ye Merry Students Returning

Home to Kill Everybody.

All have been bound in one

volume, which is on sale from

all the good bookshops that

may be open, depending on

whether they can understand

what the rules are. Price: £189.99.

Steep, but you can’t take it

with you!

Power nap

or power

hour?

Writing the book you

always meant to write.

The usual.

This hour is now

called “the power hour”,

which should not be

confused with “the

power nap”. But hang

on. Aren’t power naps

meant to be very good

for you? Didn’t Winston

Churchill swear by

them? Didn’t Napoleon

swear by them? Didn’t

Gwyneth Paltrow kit

out her home with

“nap zones”?

So I’m thinking, if you

wish to be especially

effective and achieve

your goals almost

instantly, you could

combine the power

hour with the power

nap? If you do this, you

could get the napping

out of the way early and

wouldn’t have to stop

mid-afternoon? So

you’d get up at your

usual time, but you

would know, and I

would know, that for

your final 60 minutes

of sleep, you had done

something, powerfully.

Even though it will look

as if you’ve done

nothing at all. I should

put all this in a book.

But I’ll have to wait for

them to invent the

power hour before the

power hour before I’ll

have the time for that.

The latest wellness,

achieve-your-goals fad

is: get up an hour

earlier and devote this

time to a planned

activity. Yoga.

Meditation. Work.

Deborah Ross

Jingle Bells, I can’t

smell — and other

carols we’ll be singing

‘I woke up and

The Duchess of Sussex has revealed

that she suffered a miscarriage in July.

The Times journalist Lucy Bannerman

describes her own brutal experience

I

have heard it described as the

Secret Sadness Club. When the

Duchess of Sussex revealed

today that she too knew of

the “unbearable grief” of

miscarriage, my first reaction

was empathy. I’m so sorry that

she and Prince Harry have lost

their baby.

I’m sure I’m not alone when I say

that the reaction that followed, almost

immediately, was comfort and relief

that, thanks to Meghan’s candid

disclosure, the club that no one wants

to join has just become considerably

less secret.

It was not so long ago that updates

concerning Windsor wombs

(successful, happy updates only, of

course) were communicated via

a notice on a gilt-edged easel on the

forecourt of Buckingham Palace.

This time the duchess shared news

of her own body in her own words in

a piece for The New York Times. Her

message was clear: before you all start

asking me when Archie is going to

have a brother or sister, here is what

you should know. In doing so, I think

she has done women — and their

grieving partners — a great service.

She wrote of that awful moment of

panic, helplessness and despair that

will be seared in the memory of

anyone who has gone through the

same traumatic experience. “It was a

July morning that began as ordinarily

as any other day: Make breakfast. Feed

the dogs. Take vitamins. Find that

missing sock. Pick up the rogue crayon

that rolled under the table. Throw my

hair in a ponytail before getting my

son from his crib.

“After changing his diaper, I felt

a sharp cramp. I dropped to the floor

with him in my arms, humming

a lullaby to keep us both calm, the

cheerful tune a stark contrast to my

sense that something was not right.

“I knew, as I clutched my firstborn

child, that I was losing my second.

“Hours later, I lay in a hospital bed,

holding my husband’s hand. I felt the

clamminess of his palm and kissed his

knuckles, wet from both our tears.

Staring at the cold white walls, my

eyes glazed over. I tried to imagine

how we’d heal.”

Much harder to put that on a gilded

easel. But by sharing her loss, she

will, I hope, help others to heal. As

Meghan writes: “Losing a child means

carrying an almost unbearable grief,

experienced by many, but talked

about by few.

“In a room of 100 women, 10 to 20

of them will have suffered from

miscarriage. Yet despite the staggering

commonality of this pain, the

conversation remains taboo, riddled

with (unwarranted) shame, and

perpetuating a cycle of solitary

mourning.”

Yes, to this, a million times over.

I kept my experience of miscarriage

and infertility mostly secret for four

bewildering years. When I wrote about

it for The Times last month I was

overwhelmed not only by the kind

responses, but by the number of

people I knew — family friends,

neighbours, mums on the school run

— who confided that they too had

gone through the same secret sadness.

We’d had no idea we were all in the

same club.

I’d described how our first son had

breezed into the world without

a problem. Yet the slow creep of

unexplained infertility that followed,

the monthly cycle of hope and

despair, of digging ever deeper to

celebrate the joy of others while

growing ever more despondent about

my failure to get pregnant and stay

pregnant, had slowly, quietly, cast

a veil over everything.

I was 38 when I had an ectopic

pregnancy that nearly killed me, but it

was the miscarriage a year earlier that

took the greatest toll. How can people

help you to grieve for something they

didn’t even know was there?

It happened suddenly, then

gradually. Until then, I’d naively

thought of miscarriage as a one-off

catastrophic event, done in a day; an

awful realisation that you’d misread

the numbers on that lottery ticket and

wouldn’t be having that gloriously

imagined future after all before

returning to normal life. I hadn’t

realised it could be a surreal

bereavement in slow motion.

I lost the baby early, at around nine

weeks, but it took three full weeks

from that first car-stopping blast of

blood for the hope to flicker out, three

weeks of continuing in my job as

a reporter for this newspaper, of

covering a terror attack that made

everything else insignificant. I found

that a tragedy of that scale made it so

hard, almost disrespectful, to talk

about the loss of the not-quite lives

that hadn’t yet begun. There was no

code to talk of them, no familiar,

public language to express that

peculiar, internalised pain of losing

something no one else knows is there.

Instead there’s just a deadening

dissonance between the world around

you and the secret drama going on

inside your body.

In my case there had been a bleed,

a dark disc of blood lurking beyond

the baby floating in its sac. With every

secret trip back and forth to the

hospital, the shadow loomed darker

and larger in every scan until the wee

one was surrounded. How strange it

By sharing her

loss, Meghan

will, I hope, help

others to heal