Bandylegs

"You're surely not putting those on!"

- Wendy Holden

I hadn't heard Sue come up behind me.Turning in the hall of my house to see her disgusted face, I shrank inside. No-one made me feel as stupid as my big sister did.

I looked back at the Christmas tree I was decorating. "Why not?" I said timidly. "I think they look nice."

"They" were a selection of old baubles. Mum had hung them on the Christmas tree at home for as long as I could remember. But now she had Alzheimer's and couldn't remember anything. Home was now a care home.

All this had happened quite recently and it was while I was clearing her house that I had found the battered cardboard box, its contents carefully wrapped in yellowing tissue paper. Most of Mum's stuff had gone to the Salvation Army but I had kept the decorations as a reminder of happier times.

"Well, I think they're horrible," snorted Sue. "Old-fashioned, dirty and some of them are smashed."

She picked out a cracked one and swung it on its slender gold thread.

"It just needs some glue," I said.

"Look at these awful 1970s colours!" My sister indicated the faded purple, turquoise and yellow plastic cones forming the Three Wise Men.

"And this Santa's only got one leg."

Scornfully, she held up a Father Christmas with long red pipe cleaners for lower limbs. Or limb, as it was now.

"We used to call him Bandylegs, if you remember." I took him carefully off her and gently hung him on the tree. But if Sue remembered, she wasn't admitting it.

"Surely this is an opportunity to chuck all these away and get new ones," she sniffed.

"New ones?" I echoed, shocked.

"M&S have some in the shape of little crisp bags and Colin the Caterpillar."