A Winter Meeting

Carefully pulling on his tatty leather jacket, making sure to fasten only the three well-affixed of six dull buttons, Tristram departed his dusty basement flat and thirstily sniffed in the crisp tonic of early Winter air.  Although he hated the clichéd phraseology of ‘exercise your body, exercise your mind’, he had little to lose by it; a good walk and time away from the computer – besides, he had run out of milk.

Around the corner, a hundred yards from the local Middle School, he happened upon a chattering of local schoolkids bustling, whirling and roaring their way along a highly-polished ice slide.  Tristram watched enviously as one hapless, pudgy boy with thick ginger hair and a permanent cowlick toppled unceremoniously mid-slide only to receive the thick, leather sole of a boot squarely on his backside as an unsympathetic classmate deliberately crashed into him.

“Makes you wish we were young again, don’t it?” said a voice.  Tristram turned, meeting the kindly, wrinkled face of an elderly gentleman.  He recognised a nostalgic sparkle in the old man’s eyes as if looking in a mirror.  Vivid memories of snowy schooldays flooded his mind.  For a second he was the pudgy, downtrodden schoolboy scrambling precariously along the ice.  He was one of a hundred unremarkable children sitting in uniform rows at Christmas assembly and laughing as their good-natured Headmaster Mr Jenkins told  them, with a certain inevitability, to be careful not to suffer from ‘tinsel-itis’ during the holidays.  Now, thirty years later, he found himself reminiscing obliviously for a time when winter and especially Christmas brought him excitement, hope and warmth and not the frosty, unsympathetic smugness of the satirical 'festive' radio special he was supposed to have finished writing.