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Born in a Stable on Christmas Day

25/12/2009

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Jean has three young children, including one born this year, so you would have thought she would have enough to do, preparing for Santa on Christmas Eve. Yet she spent the early hours of Christmas morning acting as midwife to one of our Saddleback sows. The farrowing bays are in the old stable, so she had the perfect venue for a Christmas birth. Eight piglets were born, all in perfect health, the last at 3am, just in time for Santa if not for the Three Wise Men.
The Slow Life perfect Christmas would include the Christmas Eve service at Cartmel Priory, which can be enjoyed even by a gnarled old non-believer like me. You have to get there early to secure a place, a situation summed up perfectly by Wendy Cope in her lovely new poem:
​
CATHEDRAL CAROL SERVICE
Those of us who are not important enough
To have places reserved for us
And who turned up too late to get a seat at all,
Stand in the nave aisles, or perch on stone ledges.
We shiver in the draught from the west door.
We cannot see the choir, the altar or the candles.
We can barely see the words on our service sheets.
But we can hear the music. And we can sing
For the baby whose parents were not important enough
To have a place reserved for them,
And who turned up too late to get a room at all.
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    ​About Slow Life

    The idea of Slow Life is to take the principles of Slow Food, which are “good, clean and fair”, and extend them to life in general.

    Here in the Lake District, the air is clean, the pace is slow and the atmosphere is calm. If we don’t grow food ourselves, we can buy it in friendly small shops, where you know the quality is going to be the best.

    This blog is a celebration of the Slow Life, with forays into the world of design, music, the arts, gardens, and my particular weakness, Japan.

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Jonathan Denby's Slow Life blog from the Lake District

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