The Ghost of Christmas Past – Christmas Dinner

xmas dinner — Photo by Amelie & Niklas Ohlrogge on Unsplash

The highlight of Christmas Day in the UK (after the seasonal TV ‘special’ Stars In Their Eyes, featuring pets of the rich and famous, and Susan Boyle singing a novelty version of ‘We Three Kings’ especially written for her by Richard Stilgoe) is the Great British Christmas Dinner, and it is this repast upon which this piece will focus as, to be brutally honest, I simply do not know what is eaten elsewhere in the world, although I would be delighted to hear, should anyone wish to fill me in.

The traditional Christmas Dinner contains sufficient calories to see the average Blue Whale through the winter, but it does not usually begin with any form of appetizer as most celebrants are already stuffed to the gills with candied fruit, chocolate covered nuts, mince pies, sausage rolls, buck’s fizz, cream sherry, glacé cherries and eggnog by the time they sit to eat. It is entirely normal for over-imbibed members of the family to have to be woken in order to be brought to the table, whereupon they immediately fall asleep in the chestnut stuffing and dribble gently into the gravy.

At this early stage, instead of eating, the Christmas crackers are usually pulled. The ‘crack’ associated with these sparkly seasonal tubes will inevitably make the babies scream and the elderly momentarily lose control of their bladders. Disagreements over the ‘prizes’ in the crackers, and whose flew where, may persist well into the New Year. The wise host will have a carrier bag full of crap with which to pacify the disaffected. The contents of the cracker usually consists of a paper crown which splits into two as soon as you attempt to put it on your head; a plastic novelty that flies across the room, ricochets from head and ornament before settling somewhere unseen, where it remains lost until a week later when it is sucked up with 3cwt of pine-needles and a half-eaten coffee-cream which jams the Hoover, having smeared itself over a six foot strip of mushroom shagpile. Finally, there is a joke, written, I believe, by a robot in Taiwan, which proves beyond doubt that there will never be an AI comedian. Never-the-less, it is not considered good manners to begin the meal until everybody has had the opportunity to read out their joke – even if a packing malfunction at the factory has resulted in everybody having the same one.

The traditional ‘bird’ of Christmas Dinner is, I think the goose, but this has now been firmly superseded by the turkey, due largely to its greater post-Christmas adaptability in sandwich, curry and rissole. Henry the Eighth, it is said, was the first person to eat Christmas turkey in the UK and, looking at some of the sandwiches in the shops around this time of the year, the same bird is still doing the rounds. It is traditional to concur, when taking one’s first mouthful, that it is a bit dry and ask for more gravy. As a non-meat eater, I will traditionally be asked at this point if I would like some ham.
Christmas Dinner is, in effect, a standard Sunday Roast with knobs on, separated from ‘the normal’ by volume and accoutrement:
• Brussel Sprouts are, for many people, a once-a-year veg. Traditionally boiled for approximately three weeks before the day and hidden under the table during the meal.
• Bread Sauce – follows the English tradition of taking something relatively bland and stodgy and transforming it into something even blander and stodgier.
• Pigs in Blankets – pork sausage wrapped in bacon (so, more correctly Pigs in Pig, I would argue) presents the UK diner with the unique opportunity to accompany a meal with the sensation of inadvertently driving a cocktail stick through the hard palate and into the nasal cavity.
• Cranberry Sauce – this is most un-British, like having gravy on your pudding. Tolerated only on this one day of the year. For the rest of the year such gastronomic eccentricities are left to the French.
• Wine, both red and white may be served. Grandma, robbed of her mug of tea, will reluctantly agree to have a glass of port and lemonade (‘More lemonade than port, please. Well, perhaps just a splash more port…’), before falling to sleep and coughing her false teeth into the mash.

After the meal has been eaten, the plates have been cleared and the worst of it mopped off grandad’s shirt, comes the Christmas Pudding: the densest duff since Cnut. The glistening globe is placed, steaming, in the centre of the table before being doused in brandy and set alight, to shrieks of admiration from everyone around the table, except for grandma who has woken to find her hairpiece is on fire. The brandy soaked pudding is usually served with brandy butter, brandy sauce and brandy – or perhaps that’s just our house. In the past, the pudding would contain a silver sixpence, which the lucky finder would use to get their teeth fixed.

Only the hardiest of souls, and those desperate to avoid the washing up, will attempt to tackle the cheese and biscuits after all of this. Those wishing to have a cigar will be sent to the bottom of the garden as the smell makes Auntie Vera nauseous. Unfortunately, the bottom of the garden contains a compost heap that makes the smokers nauseous.

When the traditional moaning about who always gets landed with the washing up has subsided everyone settles down for an afternoon doze.

The first to wake opens the window and lets it out.

Originally posted 21st December 2019.

The Ghost of Christmas Past – ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas

(with abject apologies to Clement Clarke Moore)

‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;
It should have been squeaking away at its wheel
Not laying face down and stiff in its meal.

There’ll be tears in the morn’ when she comes with his bread
And your dear little daughter discovers him dead,
But still, do not worry, she will not stay sad
When she spots, through the wrapping, that she’s got an i-pad.

The stockings we hung by the chimney with strings,
Were not for all the extravagant things:
For those they have hanging, at the end of their beds
Two giant sacks with their names on instead.

The children were nestled all snug in their beds,
Whilst visions of smart phones danced in their heads
And mummy and I, with an hour to kill,
Were fearfully reading the credit card bill.

When out in the street arose such a din,
‘Cos the people next door were trying to get in,
But the key they were trying was turning no more,
Which wasn’t surprising – it wasn’t their door.

‘If you hadn’t guzzled that last Famous Grouse,
You’d have known straight away that it wasn’t our house.’
Said the wobbling wife as she stumbled for home
And was sick down the back of a small plastic gnome.

‘It’s four in the morning,’ an angry voice cried.
‘Just shut up your racket or I’m coming outside.’
Then all became silent, except, from afar
The sound of a key down the side of their car.

As dry leaves start falling from autumnal trees,
So snow began drifting along on the breeze
And high in the sky at the reins of his sled,
A white bearded man with a hat on his head.

‘Now Dasher, now Dancer, now Prancer and Vixen.
On Comet, on Cupid, on Donner and Blitzen!’
He cried to the reindeer in tones slurred and merry,
Having just swallowed down his ten thousandth sherry.

And then, for a moment, I heard from the roof
An outburst of language that seemed most uncouth,
Then a flash by the window – a red and white blur
Of fat man and white beard; of red felt and fur.

He knocked on the door when he’d climbed to his feet
And adjusted his cloak ‘gainst the cold blinding sleet.
‘Just give me five minutes to sit by your fire
And I’ll see that your children get all they desire.’

We gave him some tea and both patiently sat
As he talked about this and he talked about that
And then, having eaten the last hot mince pie
He rose and he slapped on his red-trousered thigh.

He yawned – ‘I must return to my duty
My sled is still packed with a mountain of booty.’
And then, as he turned to the door with a wave
We reminded him of the promise he gave.

‘Of course, yes,’ he laughed, his jolly face beaming.
‘But quick now, while the kids are still dreaming.
Here, look at this dolly with glass-beaded eyes
And this wig and some glasses to make a disguise.’

‘A car made of tin and a train made of wood.
This big Snakes & Ladders is really quite good.
An orange, some nuts and a new, shiny penny.’
But electrical goods he hadn’t got any.

‘You conman,’ we cried. ‘You are not Santa Claus.
If we’d known it we would have left you outdoors.
The real Father Christmas would not carry such tat.
We want top class products – and brand names at that.’

‘Our kids will go mad if we give them this shite:
There are no soddin’ batteries and no gigabytes.
They don’t give a monkeys about innocence lost;
Just leave them a bill so they know what stuff costs.’

He turned to us now and his eyes filled with tears,
‘These presents have kept children happy for years.’
We looked at the list of the rubbish he’d got.
‘You silly old fool, you are losing the plot.’

He sprang to his sleigh crying ‘Sod this, I’m beat!’
And they all flew away to their Lapland retreat,
But I heard him exclaim ‘They are never content.
Now the thought doesn’t count – just the money you’ve spent.’

And so Christmas morning descended with gloom.
The children both rose and they looked round the room
At the i-phones, the i-pads, the Xbox and games
And they pulled at the labels and picked out their names.

Then at last they had finished, all presents unwrapped,
And we sat down for breakfast all energy sapped.
‘This is lame,’ they exclaimed. ‘This day is a bore.’
‘We’ve only got what we asked Santa Claus for.’

Then they saw on the floor where the old man had stood
A doll made of cloth and a train made of wood
And happily, low-tech, they played all the day
Whilst we packed all of their i-stuff away.

Originally posted 22nd December 2018

The Ghost of Christmas Past – I Believe In Father Christmas

Come on, even in the short time that we have known one another, you and I, you must have realised that the very mention of Christmas was going to set me off on one. It is unfashionable, I think, to admit it but I still get excited by Christmas: the whole thing. The carol singers, the TV specials, the food, the drink, the panicky rush to the local petrol station for the last minute present, the never-ending trailers for this year’s Eastenders Christmas disaster… Well, perhaps not the TV trailers. I just can’t understand the desire to witness such unremitting melancholic disaster as the highlight of Christmas evening. The vicarious thrill of eavesdropping on an entire community of joyless and soulless characters as they plunge headlong into increasingly preposterous seasonal scenarios of calamity and bedlam is not, for me anyhow, any way to let the sprouts go down. I’ll take Eric and Ernie making breakfast together anytime, thank you very much.

So many people seem to want to be depressed by Christmas: ‘I can’t wait until it’s all over,’ ‘It’s such a lot of fuss for one day,’ ‘I don’t even like Christmas pudding…’ What is this nonsense? For a start, Christmas pudding, Christmas cake and mince pies are the three kings of the epicurean calendar and the greatest consumable inventions of all time: fact. I would buy mincemeat flavoured toothpaste if it was available. Everyone’s happy* – especially the maker’s of eggnog – and even the dourest of aunties will agree to wear a paper crown for the duration of the meal. When it is all over, you have 364 days to wait until the next one. Enjoy the day, embrace the mayhem. I know it’s overhyped, unnecessarily expensive and endlessly protracted, but come on! It’s once a year. As far as I’m concerned, the best Christmas present is Christmas. A sense of benign serenity pervades the house and will last all day, as long as nobody gets the Monopoly out.

What’s not to love?
• Hungry Hippos? Tick.
• Whoopee cushion on Aunty Elsie’s chair? Tick.
• Hugely inappropriate joke from Great Uncle Derek? Tick.

As for mawkish sentimentality – well, why not? Twenty first century life is completely hidebound by startling and grimly held reality: dreaming is something we are only allowed to do when we’re asleep. What’s wrong with allowing a little fantasy into our lives from time to time?

So, does Father Christmas actually exist? Well, why would I choose not to believe in something that brings so much joy to so many? Father Christmas exists in spirit. That spirit itself may exist for just a few hours each year, but as long as it is here I will embrace it and yes, I do believe in Father Christmas.

I have actually, in the past, ‘played’ Father Christmas for the village children in my Father-in-Law’s pub on Christmas day. I have to tell you, it is not a job for those of weak disposition. I was prepared for all of the children who wanted to pull my beard. I was prepared for all of the children who wanted the opportunity to complain about what I had brought them that morning (or even what I’d brought them the previous year). I was even prepared for the sinisterly whispered, ‘I know who you are really…’ I was not prepared for all of the children who wanted to kick my shins.

We are asked to believe in so many things for which there is no proof. Most of them are intended to constrain or control us. God knows, millions have died for some of them. I believe that Jesus existed. I believe that he was a very great man whose life has impacted on millions for centuries. But a virgin birth? No, surely not. The whole Christmas story is a metaphor isn’t it: a fable become lore – either that or a very cynical ploy by the manufacturers of hand-made wooden cribs and personalised Christmas tree decorations. To be honest, after some of his frankly appallingly vengeful behaviour in the Old Testament, I think God had probably been spoken to by somebody from PR before setting off on the New Testament. A story of love and hope and peace and joy; just what we need at Christmas time.

Of course, as with all major undertakings, planning and preparation are the keys to a successful operation. Allow me to talk you through some of my own basic preparations for the big day:

Miracle on 34th Street (the Richard Attenborough version). If you need proof that Father Christmas really does exist, it is right here. Settle down with a glass of something seasonal, a warm mince pie, a little stilton and watch this film. I defy you to leave it without feeling the spirit. (And by the way, just for the record, Christmas did exist before Prosecco.)
Love Actually. I know, I know, and frankly I don’t care. I could watch this twice a week and it would still warm me cockles. A must for the pre-Christmas run-in. Christmas is not Christmas without an in-depth discussion of what’s the best bit of this film. (It’s the Colin Firth/Lucia Moniz bit, by the way.)
A trip to the supermarket to purchase several hundred-weight of snack foods and any number of bottles of sweet alcoholic beverages that would not be allowed through the door at any other time of the year. Sweet British sherry is produced for this single occasion alone: along with Advocaat and those little marzipan fruits, it has no purpose other than to keep the (more) elderly relatives quiet during the afternoon session of Charades. Nothing grates quite like an over-lubricated Great Aunt yelling ‘Casablanca’ to every single mime, especially when nobody else is getting your superb rendition of ‘Oops… I Did It Again’ by Britney Spears.

Drinking the overlarge tot of whisky and eating the mince pie left out for Santa remains my final Christmas Eve task (Santa does not like sherry at our house). No carrot to nibble on behalf of Rudolph these days – he can fend for himself. Every year the startling realisation that, by a process I do not fully understand, somebody has bought and prepared everything for Christmas lunch and dinner. I’m not sure who. The Pixies I think… And then one last check of the night sky:
• Giant airborne sleds? No.
• The unmistakable glistening of snow in the air? No.
• Superbright star on the eastern horizon? No.
…and so to bed.

Christmas morning, I usually wake at about 5am. When they were at home I used to creep into the children’s rooms and try to make just enough noise to wake them. Oh the joy of seeing their little faces as they looked at the clock before burying their heads under the duvet. I am certain that both of my children learned to tell the time simply so that they could tell me to go back to bed on Christmas morning. But I’m up – no point in going back to bed now. Christmas jumper, Christmas shirt and Christmas socks: it’s the one time of the year when everybody else is just as badly dressed as me.

Christmas dinner is a big deal in our house. Crackers are cracked, paper hats are worn and terrible jokes are read. The lighting of the Christmas pudding is a ritual that cannot be missed. It usually comes directly after the mass panicky dash by the assembled adults towards one of this year’s high chair incumbents who, with some encouragement, manages to cough up half a sprout, two carrot sticks and a red Lego brick. A spirit of benevolent bonhomie pervades even in the midst of the communal clear-up and dishwashing that follows the meal. The dregs of the wine are consumed, perhaps a small coffee and Bailey’s, and then for many the mass, slack-jawed snooze of Christmas afternoon, whilst the rest of us (me and the kids) construct Lego housing estates or attempt to disentangle the new mini drone from the light fitting without fusing the rest of the street. Sometime later, everybody wakes for the afternoon ritual of ‘Oh look at the time. We’ve missed the Queen.’ And ‘who’s putting the kettle on?’

The rest of the day is filled with the welcome drifting in and out of various members of our joyfully expanding family. Every available chair, pouffe and footstool is utilised. As the afternoon draws into evening, people are routinely stepped on, sat on and, if certain members of the family are having a nap, dribbled on. Board games are begun and almost immediately dismantled by children who crawl through them, sit on them, fly a Lego rocket through them or otherwise decimate them because they are being ignored. Everyone, except grandad, who has just evaded a very large snake and reached the top of an equally long ladder, thinks that it’s funny. Come the evening and anything that is vaguely soft becomes a crib. All rooms are occupied by people sleeping on beds and mattresses, on inflatables and floors in a selection of duvets, blankets and sleeping bags, many of which have not seen the light of day since Glastonbury 2004.

Anyway, that’s Christmas for me, and a joyous occasion it always is, until, of course, I turn on the news on Boxing Day and discover that the world is still in exactly the same mess as we left it in on Christmas Eve – and a whole new year to look forward to…

Oh well, Merry Christmas One and All.

*Not totally true, I know. This is a very lonely time for lonely people. Nobody chooses to be lonely yet loneliness could be the future for any of us. It’s easy to ignore the future as you get older; there is a lot less of it and the end of it is quite a lot closer than it was. If you get the chance, then making somebody less lonely could be one of the best presents you could ever give yourself.

Originally posted 20th December 2018 when the world was sane.

Christmas 2020 – An Explanation*

I’m not sure that I’ve ever published on a Sunday before, but …well, it’s been a rum old year hasn’t it?

As we in the UK meandered along towards our first new-normal Christmas I decided that I would visit some of my favourite ‘Little Fiction’ characters, to see how they were bearing up. I had already taken Dinah and Shaw half way towards their Christmas celebrations (Green Ink on the Back of a Pizza Delivery Receipt – here) and I knew that they would reappear on the Saturday before Christmas in order to resolve a couple of hanging threads, which, in the case of Shaw, probably amount to more than you would find in the average three year-old’s balaclava (Searching for the Christmas Spirit, the second part of the Christmas episode is here). I knew that their world could not be constrained by Covid. If I’m honest, I’m not at all sure of how Shaw and restrictions would rub along at all. He certainly would find it difficult to be bound by them. I’m not even certain that he is at ease even with the restrictions imposed upon him by normal everyday life – I think that the struggle to reconcile himself to a restrictive three-tier structure might be a step too far for him. I fear that it would leave him with more than a couple of dropped stitches to pick up. Fortunately fiction does not always have to bow to reality. I don’t actually need to write these two, they just appear fully formed in my head, often newly faceted in a way that takes me by surprise. I was a little taken aback by Dinah’s tetchiness in episode seven, but as I began to write episode eight I suddenly understood. It’s baby steps with these two, in everything they do. I’m not quite sure exactly when I will drop in on them again – I don’t want them to become boring – but I will, I feel sure. Perhaps their world will have collided with our own by then. I have a ‘case’ for the new-found partners, but I’m not sure yet quite what they will make of it. When I find out, I’ll let you know.

The three old ‘pub friends’ just had to be out and about for Christmas, but I couldn’t see them spending time together in their homes, so I sent them to the pub for a quiz. (You can read Supplementary Philosophy here, if you missed it – or even if you didn’t.) They don’t mention Christmas – men seldom do. It is black-boxed alongside weakness, illness, emotions, worries and loneliness, as something to be profoundly ignored until there is not enough Scotch left in the world to drown it. I love Christmas (although, I have to be honest, I would happily forgo it completely this year for the knowledge that we would all remain well enough to return to normal next year) but I never really discuss it with male friends. Most of them think I’m odd enough already. My wife and children have to put up with my usual over-spilling Christmas spirit every year – which bubbles over, long, long before dawn on Christmas Day as I can’t resist the opportunity to eat chocolate in my Christmas pants before breakfast and drink fizzy wine with my cornflakes – and the grandkids like the fact that somebody is even less grown-up about it all than they are, but I’m always very oh-hum about it with other men. I have no idea why. A psychologist’s dream, no doubt.

I live in England’s tier three, but I think the friends obviously live in tier two, where (I hope I’ve got this right) pubs can open to some degree – even if it is just to serve freezing Australian lager and turkey sandwiches in a tatty gazebo. If not, well, it’s a Little Fiction, isn’t it? It will not be bothering the Booker Prize panel. It’s really hard to write a Covid tale because the rules always seem to change between writing and publication, but as these three are every bit as confused about what is right and what is wrong as I am – well, that’s ok isn’t it? These are a joy for me to write as I know them all so well, and they were ready for the world in a single evening.

My relationship with the bearded man is a mite more complicated. He is not difficult to write, but I am very particular about him. Somehow, it is necessary that he does not have a word out of place. None-the-less, this vignette also came together very quickly (although I then fretted over it, word by word, for much longer) and against all expectations, it has a nice pre-Christmassy feel to it. If you have read it, you may have noticed that Lorelei, too, does not live in a Covid world. I thought about dragging him into our current reality, but I couldn’t reconcile it with the ‘story’, so I decided to leave him where he was in the real world (our own world, of course, being a totally unreal one at the moment). I hope that it works anyway. (If you want to read it, A Pre-Christmas Exchange is here– if you don’t, it’s still there anyway.)

So, having visited these seven people in the run up, I wondered what I should do in the final few days leading up to what, in the UK, will be the Five Days of Christmas this year (I cannot but imagine what the stockists of geese a-laying will do with their livestock). What I crave above all else this year, I think, is a degree of normality: a world where Louise Lear forecasts the weather and Rita Chakrabati reads the news; where I put three inches on my waist over the two days, and ten years on my liver. I attempted to recreate the spirit of those days by visiting the posts that represent my Ghosts of Christmas Past: the Christmas that I used to be able to write about before the world went psycho. I became aware that I would only get drawn into the dreariness of Christmas Present should I try to write Christmas now, so in the lead in to the big day I have scheduled two Christmas posts from 2018, two from 2019 and a Boxing Day special, also from 2019. I have read them all today and they made me smile, so I hope that they might do the same for you.

Whatever you choose to do (or, dependent upon where you are, are allowed to do) over the next few days; whether it is an important celebration for you or not, I would just like to send you all my very best socially distanced best wishes. However you spend the day** I hope you all stay well and have a wonderful time.

I send you bags of glitter-wrapped boxes full of what the Beatles said was all you need.

Enjoy.

*Explaining the unexplainable.

** My wife and I are alone on Christmas Day and, I think, may be heading for the seaside which, I believe, is allowed as it is outside – although I almost certainly will not be able to buy a moulded plastic hat shaped like a breast or a penis-shaped stick of rock. Covid is killing our culture!

A Little Fiction – Searching for the Spirit of Christmas (Dinah and Shaw part 8)

‘…Well, I just hope that my mother never finds out that I’ve got a criminal record. It would kill her.’
‘Kill her? A little melodramatic, I think. I can imagine indigestion, heartburn even, but death – I’m not sure that death is likely.’
‘You don’t know her.’
‘Well, yes, that’s true, but I know you and your mum can’t be all bad. Besides, you haven’t actually got a criminal record.’
‘Arrested in Santa’s Grotto. The shame of it.’
‘We were released without charge.’
‘The ignominy.’
‘Besides, we probably could have sued them. Locking us up in that cupboard overnight.’
‘They had no idea we were in there. How were they to know that a perfectly sane and rational woman would have allowed her partner…’
‘Business partner!’
Dinah smiled. ‘…allowed her business partner to lure her into a stationery cupboard at the back of Santa’s Grotto in a search for who knows what, where they stayed until some unsuspecting member of staff locked them in for the night? They had no idea we were in there. The poor woman who opened the door nearly died when you rushed past her…’
‘You’d been laying on my bladder all night.’
‘…Leaving me to explain the situation.’
Shaw became instantly indignant. ‘You told her that I’d kidnapped you!’
‘Well, I didn’t want her to think that I’d gone in there voluntarily, did I?’
Shaw was holding a potato peeler in his left hand and a potato in his right. He gave the clear impression of a man who did not comprehend the relationship between the two. ‘It might have been wise not to have mentioned kidnap,’ he said. ‘That way we might not have had to spend twelve hours being interrogated by the serious crime squad.’
‘Well you didn’t help the situation,’ snapped Dinah, snatching the potato from him in exasperation. ‘Actually officer, we are Private Investigators, searching for the Spirit of Christmas. He thought that you were winding him up, particularly since you couldn’t give him any details of our client.’
‘I gave him a description!’ Shaw sounded positively affronted.
‘Well, so you did. Fat man with full white beard, as I recollect.’
‘Well he was!’
‘They only let us go because they thought that you were stark staring mad and they didn’t want you in the cells over Christmas.’
‘Well they did, so that’s all that matters,’ said Shaw. ‘Besides, you didn’t help, claiming that you’d never seen me before.’
‘I certainly saw you in a new light having spent a night confined in a tiny cupboard with you.’
‘That’s not the same. They… What do you mean in a new light?’
‘You talk.’
‘Talk?’
‘In your sleep – you talk?’
‘What about?’
Dinah passed him a bottle of wine and a corkscrew, hoping that he’d have more success with those than the potato. ‘I’m not sure what you were talking about, but you said that it was terribly inconvenient. Then you started muttering about having to follow your instincts, and I lost interest.’
Shaw sighed loudly and handed back the corkscrew before unscrewing the lid from the wine bottle. ‘Do you have glasses?’ he asked.
‘Strangely enough Shaw, I do,’ she said. ‘In the cupboard behind you. I’ll have the big one.’
Shaw opened the cupboard and removed the two glasses he found there: a large wine goblet and a shot glass. He filled them both and handed the goblet to Dinah. Dinah put down the mutilated remains of a potato and stared hollowly at the peeler. ‘Cheers,’ she said. ‘Merry Christmas.’ They clinked glasses and sipped the wine.
‘Optrex,’ said Shaw.
Dinah sniffed her wine, ‘Well, it’s not Chateau Lafitte,’ she said, ‘but…’
‘This glass smells of Optrex,’ said Shaw.
‘Ah, yes,’ Dinah stifled a grin. ‘I had a stye. Use a mug.’
Shaw picked up a mug and studied it carefully, before rinsing it under the tap and filling it with wine. ‘Thanks for… you know… asking me round,’ he said.
‘Least I could do… partner,’ she smiled.
‘Yes, well…’
‘Do you mind if we don’t have the full works for dinner?’ asked Dinah. ‘I mean, we’ve got crackers and a pudding, but I thought it would save a lot of time if we went slightly more unconventional for main.’
‘Goose?’
Dinah nodded. ‘Baked Beans,’ she said. ‘To be honest, I wasn’t expecting company. I was going to do some chips, but I think someone’s sabotaged the peeler.’
‘You said you had crackers.’
‘Kind of… virtual crackers, really.’
‘No crackers?’
Shaw’s bottom lip was protruding so far that Dinah feared it might well need support.
‘We can both say ‘Bang!’’ she suggested.
‘OK,’ he muttered. ‘You did say pudding though.’
‘Oh yes,’ Dinah replied. ‘I’ve got pudding. Definitely.’
‘You haven’t got pudding, have you?’ said Shaw, who could only have bettered his impression of a five year old by peeing his pants.
‘No. I can do sherry trifle – as long as you’re not bothered about the trifle.’
‘I suppose it would seem petty of me to check that you have got sherry?’
‘Not at all.’
‘Well?’
‘Well, what?’
‘Have you got sherry?’
‘I already told you, not at all.’ Dinah couldn’t help laughing at her own joke.
Shaw, who was building up to something approaching a full-scale tantrum, caught the joy in her eyes, and began to giggle himself.
‘A fine bloody Christmas dinner this is. I suppose you know that if we had been arrested, we would have got the full works at the Police Station. Turkey, sprouts, pigs in blankets…’
Dinah exploded with a laugh that deposited a fine mist of red wine over half of the kitchen. Shaw, who had received the full force of the explosion clean between the eyes, shook his hair dry whilst Dinah fought for breath, but each time she looked at his uncomprehending face, she started to laugh again. Eventually she hugged him, which gave her the opportunity to not look at him, and so, by and by, she regained her composure. She kissed him on the forehead, without any idea of why, and led him through to the sitting room. ‘Why don’t you tell me about the fat man with the full white beard,’ she said. ‘What did he want us to look for again?’
The settee was small and definitely inclined to pitch its occupants to the centre, which is where both Shaw and Dinah found themselves. They sat, cramped together for a few painful seconds before Dinah began the difficult process of getting to her feet without having to use Shaw’s knee as a support.
‘Let’s talk about it tomorrow,’ said Shaw. ‘Nobody works on Christmas Day.’
Dinah gave him a hard stare.
‘Alright, alright, except for Father Christmas.’
‘Phew,’ she said. ‘That’s a relief. Crisps?’
‘What flavour?’
‘Er…’
‘You haven’t got any, have you?’
‘I’ll get the wine.’
Dinah returned to the kitchen as Shaw sat back, as comfortably as the seat would allow, breathing in the little flat around him. It was warm and the wine had started to mellow him. Un-consciously he picked up a cushion and placed it beside him in the middle of the settee, plumping it absent-mindedly. ‘Actually, you know, I really wish I’d taken his address,’ he said as Dinah walked back into the room.
‘Who?’
‘The man with the white beard,’ he smiled as Dinah topped up his mug. ‘Because the more I think about it, the more I think I might have found what he was looking for…’

Part seven of this saga is here with links at the bottom that will get you to the whole story so far.

Part nine is now here.

Festive Planning Principles

Even in these Covid dominated times, it is necessary for all of us to navigate our way through the pre-Christmas-check list; to plan the timetable for the day with the precision of an Audi engineer – Langeweile durch Nayhem*. Regardless of the type of Christmas we are to be allowed, certain steps have to be undertaken in preparation for whatever lays ahead. These are the rules.

Christmas dinner this year may be a much smaller, more subdued affair than in the past, but the average pre-Christmas shop will continue to include enough brussel sprouts to power a hot air balloon (which, depending upon your supermarket, will actually be ‘substituted’ with thirty heads of Romaine lettuce, three tins of baked beans, or a catering pack of Brillo Pads); the turkey will still be too big for the oven unless you cut the legs off, and the potatoes will still have blight.

The rigid ‘cook’s plan’ which typically starts with ‘getting the sprouts on’ (about the 19^th of December) will collapse into chaos when the vegan ‘pigs-in-blankets’** turn up in the goose fat and the parsnips are discovered, un-roasted, in the garage five minutes before everything else is ready; the gravy will boil over and fuse the pan to the electric hob and the roast potatoes will only be able to be removed from the tray with a machete.

Despite the limited numbers that we in England are to be allowed around the table for Christmas dinner this year (I would say in the UK, but I’m really not sure. Even when the rules are similar across the four nations, interpretation varies almost as widely as pronunciation, so I’ll stick to England. I understand that. Actually, I don’t.) temporary extensions will still have to be assembled in order to allow social-distancing around the table. Grandchildren will still have to be protected from the language and the meal will still find itself deposited onto a multi-levelled surface that will ensure that the gravy ends up in grandma’s lap and the carrots wind up in the custard. Somebody will complain about getting the ‘emergency chair’ which leaves them at neck-height to the table and the paste table will fold itself up when the pudding is put on it.

Christmas presents still have to be bought. It is far less likely that the country’s male population will hit the High Street on Christmas Eve this year. Instead there will be a mad scramble for the thirty day free*** Amazon Prime next-day delivery service which will not be cancelled until the credit card bill gets checked in August, with the realisation that it ceases to be free if you don’t cancel it. Dad will still get socks; mum will still get a liquidizer; grandma will still get a variety of unusable items, all of which smell of lavender. Everybody will get a lottery scratchcard. Nobody will win.

Christmas entertainment is not something that can happen spontaneously: it has to have all the fun planned out of it first. Nothing matches a good spreadsheet for sucking the joy out of everything. Make sure that you print in triplicate and include strict starting times. Plan for every eventuality (grandad falling asleep, grandma having an attack of the vapours, Aunt Ethel finding the gin again) and map out detailed contingency measures. Make sure that everybody sees the print-out and ensure that they all realise how badly they will be letting everybody down if they go ‘off-piste’ again. Remember that the main obstacle to ‘fun’ is joy – do not give it the opportunity to spread. Plan it out of existence. Ensure that every minute that is not pre-scheduled for the Queen is filled with a fun activity in order to guarantee that nobody becomes too relaxed – you don’t want to have to hire that carpet cleaner again.

Finally, we have to plan to get people home/find them a bed for the night. Remember, if you don’t get rid of them before December 28^th this year, you may well be stuck with them for weeks. If you don’t want Great-Uncle Desmond sucking up the hospitality until the second dose of vaccine becomes available, better work out some way of getting him home before he’s banned from travelling. If nothing else, just remember that it only happens once a year – and next year is always much better.

*Ennui through mayhem

**I understand your question, but I do not know the answer

***Nothing is ever free – especially online

Zoo #14 – Millipede

Pity, please, the millipede
Who never managed to succeed.
Feel sorry for the insect who
Could never ride a bike like you.

Pure, simple nonsense. The joy of this is to simply close your eyes and drink in the picture…

That Moment

It’s that moment in an i-tunes playlist when a song begins that, not only do you not remember including, you actually do not recognise at all. It is the point on a journey that you have made almost every day for forty years, where you pass a house that you could swear wasn’t there when you drove past this morning. It is the moment when you realise that they have inserted a whole new chapter into a book you have read a thousand times. It is the column of figures that you add up incorrectly a thousand times, making the same mistake on each occasion. It is the point at which you realise that you are perfectly capable of missing the same thing a million times. It is the peeled onion in the fridge that was definitely not there this morning.

I don’t know what it is called, this moment – I don’t even know where it lurks in the shadows of the psyche – but it never loses its capacity to startle. It rests occasionally, biding its time until it knows that it can catch you fully unaware, before dumping its big one on you – the dentist’s appointment that you’ve had for ages, the coat you’ve always had (it’s even got last year’s poppy in the lapel), the scar from an injury you cannot recall – and then it amuses itself trickle-feeding a thousand little surprises into your life over a number of weeks, before it falls back to sleep for a while.

Once it has started its little game, nothing is ever where you’re sure you left it; no instance is quite as you remembered it; nobody’s name is the one you’ve been using for the last fifteen minutes. Don’t worry; this is not ‘forgetfulness’. This is not me descending the slope (yet) towards ‘who are you?’ and ‘where do I live?’ This is something far more calculated. This is what the pixies do when they get fed up of nicking my socks.

The difference is subtle, but I cling to that difference if it might hint that I am not going daft. It does not centre around absent-mindedness – about things that I have lost – it is about things that suddenly appear where they didn’t use to be. It is about the moment you find half a maggot in a just-chomped apple; it is about the message that appeared on your phone cancelling an appointment only after you got there – that wasn’t on your phone when you set off, but somehow found its way into yesterday’s messages; it is the scene in the film that suddenly appears, explaining what you have not understood for years; it is the hole in your pants that wasn’t there when you put them on.

These moments are not even new to me – I have had them all my life. You must all have written a word – a word that you have written a countless number of times before – only to realise that you don’t know how to spell it. Try thinking about how you walk if you want to discover that you no longer can. Try to think about how to swallow whilst you’re eating.

If you’ve been around here for any time now, you might recognise the symptoms, you may already have deduced that I’ve been moving the photo’s again: a thousand crystal clear 6x4inch memories, crisp as the day they were made. Familiar and comfortable… and then a time I do not recall, a place I do not recognise, full of people I do not know, and yet

I am there, right in the midst of them. Was it a moment, so awful that it has been consciously excised from my memory or, perhaps, one so banal that it has simply faded away beneath some kind of shabby-chic chalk wash – with all the accompanying certainty that when all the chic has been washed away, just the shabby will remain. The only thing that convinces me that I am not going mad is that my wife is also on the photo, and she can’t remember it either. Some night that must have been!

Photographs should not be like that, should they? They should be a physical manifestation of a memory – like a scar, but less annoying in the cold weather. If you don’t recall the location in which a photograph was taken, then you should never be on it. Particularly in the company of other people who don’t recollect the occasion either. Obviously we will both remember sooner or later (she sooner, me later) and wonder at our ability to forget such a thing. And then, with a self-deprecating ‘tut’ we’ll put the photo away with a final glance – at which point one of us will say, ‘Hang on a minute though. I don’t remember that castle being there…’

A Little Fiction – Conversations with a Bearded Man (part 5) A Pre-Christmas Exchange

Yet another day when my spirits had descended to previously unplumbed depths: I was a compromised bathysphere, slowly sinking into the abyss whilst building up the kind of internal pressure that could foretell of nothing other than impeding disaster and a date with the fishes. My mood was black – I would say blacker than black, because ordinary black had become my normal default mood, but my mum always told me that there were no shades of either black or white, so whilst no saintly youth club leader could ever be whiter than white, I could not be blacker than black, just black, very black indeed – and my spirits were lower than the Trustpilot rating of the average Italian politician. I could not have been more down without being out. Except Christmas Day lay just around the corner: the knockout blow; the nightmare scenario for a man whose very best efforts at false bonhomie fell somewhat short of the minimum expected, a man abandoned by the Grinch because of his over-zealous views, a man whose ho-ho-ho had somehow become a strident no-no-no. I am tempted to say that I have always felt the same way about Christmas, but it would involve me in the kind of lying that would redden my cheeks and make my nose itch. This seasonal melancholy was relatively new to me, although I had been engendering it in others for years apparently.

Christmas is no time to be alone. I have no family, whilst the few friends I have, do have family, with whom they choose – treacherous scum – to spend the festive period, so, as usual, Christmas Eve found me alone in the pub observing life through the bottom of a beer glass. I had almost reached the decision to go home early – a plan that was only forestalled by the fact that the kebab shop hadn’t opened yet – when a hand reached out to take my glass. I was about to protest that I hadn’t finished, despite the fact that I patently had, when I noticed the cufflinks and the crisp white cuffs. The landlord was ok, don’t get me wrong, salt of the earth and all that, but not really a cufflink wearer. The kind of people he employed as bar staff were much more likely to have them through ears, nose or nipples than shirt cuffs. Given the state of the table tops, nobody in their right mind would wear a white shirt in the Public Bar. To be honest, a full forensic overall would be less out of place and definitely more suitable.

“Same again?” said the voice that I knew I was going to recognise even before its owner had spoken.
“How do you do that?” I asked, simultaneously nodding an affirmative. The man that I now knew as Lorelei simply smiled and walked to the bar. The landlord left his conversation and served him without a hint of rancour. If I had wanted serving in mid-Brexit rant, I would have been told to hold my horses in no uncertain terms. For Lorelei he was all genial host. But for the fact that he was as bald as a coot, his forelock would have been on the receiving end of a severe tugging. I could not hear the conversation, but whatever my bearded friend had to say, the coot found it exceedingly amusing. He made no attempt to short change him.

I thanked him for my drink and took a long draught from the glass. “I’m surprised that you drink beer,” I said.
“I don’t,” he answered, “but the landlord was so happy to serve me, I didn’t have the heart to ask for a dry sherry.” He took a long drink without flinching. “A bit more hoppy than I was expecting,” he said, after pause for reflection, “but quite adequate, all in all, I expect.”
“So,” I ventured, trying to sound as cool as I could. “What brings you here on Christmas Eve? Not exactly your local, is it?”
“Isn’t it?” He looked shocked and I realised – with a flicker of the surprise I had grown used to in his presence – that I had no idea at all of where he lived.
“Well I’ve never seen you in here before.”
“No,” he said. “Is this your local?”
I was painfully aware that he already knew the answer, but I gave it all the same: “It used to be” a mite more sulkily than I intended. “When I was… you know…”
He nodded. “More local?”
“We used to come in here a lot, when we were… you know… Before she left me for that…” I wanted to swear, but I felt quite certain that I would feel as though I had let myself down by doing so. Odd, I can normally barely stitch two sentences together without writing out an IOU for the swear box. “…Estate Agent,” I concluded, feeling it a more than adequate signal of my distaste.
“Ah,” he said. “Should I have bought peanuts?”
“What?”
“I was just wondering, I’m quite new to this, Christmas Eve and everything: should I have got snacks with the drinks?”
“No,” I said. “No. This is fine. I’ll get some when I go to the bar. You will have another?”
“As long as it doesn’t have to be the same,” he said.

We sat for some time in companionable silence. I studied his face as closely as I was able to without seeming… weird. He seemed genuinely happy to be there, smiling, out of place in my mind, but not in his. He did not touch his beer. After what seemed to me to be a suitable pause, I asked him if he would like another drink. He asked for a whisky. “He keeps a nice malt under the counter,” he said. “His little weakness, I think. I’m sure he’d be pleased to share.”
I approached the landlord with caution, it always seemed wise, and explained what my friend had suggested. “A gent,” he said pouring an unmeasured tot into a tumbler. “Tell him it’s on the house. Here…” he said, handing me a freshly filled water jug. “He’ll want this.” Unsurprisingly, my pint was not on the house.

Lorelei seemed much more at home cradling his whisky than he had appeared to be with beer, although he did not appear to be convinced by the pork scratchings. “Well,” he said at length, “it’s so nice to be in company, isn’t it?” I had to admit that, even though the conversation between us was sparse at best, I was happy and comfortable in his company.
“Sometimes,” he said, “you’ve got to let old things go before you can find new things.”
“Sometimes,” I said, “it’s easier said than done.”
“Yes,” he agreed, “but it’s a whole lot easier to not even make the effort. Why don’t you like Christmas?”
“Well I… I… Why do you say I don’t like Christmas?”
“Do you?”
“No.”
He smiled.
“But,” I continued. “I used to.”
He swirled his whisky in his glass, peering down into it as though he was looking into a crystal ball.
I felt obliged to fill the conversational void. “It’s not the same, is it,” I whined, “when you’re on your own.”
“The same?” he sipped his drink with exaggerated pleasure. “The same? No, I suppose not. Nothing is ever the same, but you can find pleasure if you choose to look for it. Perhaps you ought to start looking.”
“Where?”
“Where? Everywhere. Maybe not through the bottom of that glass – it’s not been cleaned properly in years and the beer… oh dear, the beer – but if you look for joy, you’ll find it. If you’re content with what you find, then friendship will find you.” He drained his glass and began to rise from his chair. I looked at the clock on the bar; 11:30. Where had that time gone? What is it they say about time?
Lorelei had waved his goodbyes to the landlord, who looked like a dog who had just been given a Bonio, and had moved towards the door. “Do something tomorrow,” he said. “Don’t wallow. Paddle.” He opened the door and a cold rush of late evening air spilled in. I tried to stand, drain my glass and put my coat on, all at the same time. Two things too many as it turned out.
“Do you fancy a kebab?” I asked as he disappeared into the night.
“No,” he answered…

Previous conversations are here:
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four

Getting On – A Year Two Reflection

This is the photo that accompanied my very first blog. I used it here because a) I’m lazy and b) it serves as a reminder that it is never too late to start again.

Having quietly slipped past my second anniversary on WordPress last month I have been paying a little extra attention to what it is I am doing here exactly. My last post was titled ‘Nostalgia’ and I worried that this is what my blog has become. That is not what I intended it to be. I intended it to be forward looking – although as all drivers will know, it pays to look behind you before you move off – nobody wants to pull out in front of the juggernaut that is The Past. There is nothing quite so unnerving as being surprised by yesterday.

The blog is, and always has been, intended to describe life as it appears through my eyes. New life through jaudiced old eyes. It has, of course, been shaped to some extent over the past twenty four months by the blogs of others – inkbiotic, for instance, keeps me constantly entertained with her brilliantly personal view of the world – I would like to write like her but whilst imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, it is still something that I have to vigilantly resist. As much as I would like to be able to describe the world as she does, I think that admiration is good, but plagiarism is generally frowned upon. So if you continue to read this rag-tag collection into year three, you will get just me – I’m sorry.

I love the process of writing these posts because they allow me a space within which I can take a proper look at myself – and attempt to do something about it. If I have the tendency towards pomposity, it gives me the perfect opportunity to pop it. Nobody buys The Beano for sincerity. I try very hard to keep my opinions to myself. Everyone is entitled to opinions. Everyone is entitled to not be bothered by those of others if they choose. Opinions are easily manipulated. I am not sufficiently assured of the verity of my own opinions to want to fight for them. I’ve never been much cop in boxing gloves. My nose is much too big to be spread across my face. My opinions are there, you will be able to divine them if you choose to, but they are my own. You might even be able to change them, but you will never know. I might say that ‘proper’ dark chocolate is the best, but I’ll still be eating Galaxy.

Sometime ago, the wonderful Calmgrove speculated that I write from a starting point, via bullet points, to a pre-destined conclusion. I wish he was right; that I could be so organised. I would love that to be the case. Sadly, it is not. I actually set off from my point of departure with no real perception at all of where I am going until I reach the end which, ironically, is generally very close to the beginning. I don’t go via bullet points because once I have started to wander, I can seldom find my way back. Somehow, as each post reaches its natural end, the conclusion dangles itself in front of me and I grab it. There is no alchemy – just Pixies.

I would like to write shorter. I love what dumbestblogger does, for instance, but I’m far too full of hot air. Words just spill out of me. I can’t help it. Everything I have to say gets draped in hundreds of the bloomin’ things. Whenever I do manage to write short, I proofread long. My red biro additions often have a higher wordcount than the original draft. The first rewrite is when I add most of the ‘jokes’ – the second rewrite is when I take them out again.

I do like the Little Fictions strand, I’m actually quite proud of some of those little stories, but they’re much harder work. They require pre-thought. Beginning, middle and end in a thousand words is, for me anyway, never easy to achieve. Sometimes I can hook into the mind-set much better than others. When they disappear for a week or two, it almost certainly is because I don’t have a story to tell, or if I do, it starts to drag on beyond ideal blog length*. I enjoyed resurrecting the Odds and Sods of the last few months, but I think they have run their course. They are not really the me that writes this stuff today. I remember the man that wrote these things and he was nice to visit, but his cynicism gets me down. I have managed to get him to lighten up a little. He’s barely depressed these days.

Personally, I really enjoyed writing the early pastiches of Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, Winnie the Pooh etc, but nobody ever read them. I don’t know if they felt that they were not original. More likely just not funny. Poetry is always the most successful thing to post, but it is such hard work. I am so tied to the rumty-tum of scan and rhyme that I drive myself mad with them. If I can get in and out, pinching a laugh in four lines, that’s great. If not, I find myself trying to maintain order in something that creeps on inexorably to Iliad length, with even less idea than Homer of where it’s all heading. Besides, there are so many, so much better at it than I: crispinunderfelt, james, obbverse, scribblans and many more. The list is depressingly long.

My favourite part of the platform is without doubt the ‘chat’ of the comments boards. So many great people from all four corners of our benighted globe (eh?). When I started this, I thought that what I wrote was very parochial. I didn’t expect anyone from further abroad than Watford to get it. If I am honest, I was extremely doubtful about Londoners. What I have found is that my ‘readers’ come from all over the world, a high proportion from USA and India. I absolutely love this – the opportunity to ‘talk’ to people and not just listen to what the news tells us. To know that we are all uniquely similar is incredibly comforting. The realisation that happy, jokey ‘conversation’ is the universal language is a joy to me**. How to stop wars? Just let people talk. It’s not rocket science. The problem is that those in power like building rockets.

Anyway, my two year anniversary allowed me the opportunity to decide whether I wanted to push on for a third year and, all in all, I think I will. Hopefully you might hang in there too. The Monday and Friday posts have finished with the end of Lockdown #2, but they might be back when I find myself out of work in March and almost certainly firmly ensconced at the back of a vastly corpulent, post-covid unemployment queue. Having been in work non-stop for well over forty years, I have not quite got myself adjusted to that one yet. Being out of work might well give me new experiences to write about, but I hope it won’t last until anniversary three.

If it does, I’ll try to improve my poetry and I promise to burn the red pen…

*The magical distance that experience has taught me, no blog is ever read beyond.

**Thank you Boo, Shaily, Herb and everybody else that I know I’ve forgotten.