12 days of Christmas - time well spent

Have taken full advantage of not being at work by investing hours finishing ‘Resident Evil 4’.

The game is fantastic fun, if blowing away zombies with an increasingly exotic amount of weaponry is your idea of a good time (and why wouldn’t it be?). One criticism though – it starts really well but then sort of drops off.

Maybe it’s because it just starts so well, or maybe it’s because I’m a bit long in the tooth. But I really feel as though I’ve run along every corridor known to man shooting at alien, zombies and critters from dimension Y.

That was why the start of the game was so good, you’re in a village in Europe (Spain, I think), and the locals turn on you. Basically, this is brown-trouser stuff – great because it’s a fabulous premise that is recognisable from many movies (especially the excellent ‘Dagon’) but mostly because this is the base-level fear of any tourist who has ever driven though the sort of village where there are more goats than people about where you start to wish that the three-door sub-compact you rented came with a shotgun as well as collision damage waiver.

It’s all very well done and brings on a sense of creeping dread rather than shock and jumps. Then, of course, as soon as you pot a bloke and an alien sprouts from his decapitated torso, it’s business as usual.

Most terrifying of all – the game keeps track of how long you have played it for. Took me 22 hours to get through. Time enough to make a start on learning the guitar, dig the garden, write that slim volume of poetry or go to the gym 22 times (actually 21 times, first visit would be to join a gym) but let’s be honest – it’s actually simply saved me 22 hours of watching crap on telly.

12 days of Christmas – festival of ennui

We’ve entered that fallow period between Christmas and New Year which marks the dipping point equidistant between the two celebrations. A sort of collective hangover and state of lethargy sits over the nation, possibly a sort of mini-diabetic fit as our bodies re-adjust to not having to cope with eating chocolate every hour on the hour and alcohol consumption levels revert to normal, near normal or weeeeeee-heeeee depending on how much booze is left in what bottles.

In family households this period is marked by the batteries in the first toy running out. In other households it’s marked by the realisation that, despite the fridge containing more food than the Hall of Valhalla on Christmas Eve, you apparently have to go shopping again if you want to have a proper meal (although eating a buffet of leftovers garnished with the least popular dips, for the third day running, has not yet lost its appeal!).

12 days of Christmas – any nuts left?

This is the time of year when people eat things they would never normally consider consuming. Honest to god, if you put me in charge of a trolly and send me round a supermarket on a normal shop, I can do it in half and hour on autopilot, the only moment of real choice coming when I face the drinks aisle and wonder what’s on special or think about trying some exciting new east European breakfast lager.

At Christmas though, people buy stuff they would never normally eat – to be precise: vegetables. That’s why you see baffled men holding up phallic root crops wondering if it really is okay to serve that up to Aunt Irene or whether it will simply bring on one of her ‘turns’ and why you see women buying packs of sausage meat and spices and stuffing mix – instead of a pack of ready made stuffing.

Much is made of people suffering for long hours in the kitchen over Christmas, slaving over a stove stirring vegetables that go from firm as pebbles to mush in an instant, throwing out more steam than a laundry, an industrial cooling tower and a 01B482 Class 7 loco combined.

In truth, the kitchen is not a bad place to be over Christmas. For foodies it’s where they can practice their art and relax, for harassed hosts it’s a place with unlimited access to cooking sherry.

As for the nuts – throughout the year the decision is normally ‘salted or dry roasted?’ – at Christmas we’re confronted with the real thing and, the arch-nut…the walnut, in shell. This is the king of nuts for two reasons – to get at it requires effort disproportionate to what is revealed inside (eating a walnut usually makes you think ‘great – so where’s the chocolate and fondant?’) and watching somebody try to open one allows you to pick your time to say…’you know, squirrels can open one of those in about three seconds’, leaving the inference hanging until answered with ‘well why don’t you go and fucking well fetch one instead of these crap nutcrackers!’.

The real purpose of a walnut, shell on, is to allow Aunt Irene to do her party trick – thighs of steel that woman.

12 days of Christmas – The Sales

This year, the seasonal consumer glut known as the ‘sales’ apparently started on Christmas Day, with people going on-line and purchasing stuff. Whether this was intentional, or simply a you-are-fooling-nobody tactic used when you have forgotten to get somebody a prezzie and hope that an e mail from Amazon telling them that their Harry Potter gift set is in the post will do the trick is open to debate, but it does mean that we don’t even have hiatus anymore between mad-arse shopping in the run up to Christmas Day and people camping outside the shops in London waiting for them to open on Boxing Day so they can shop again.

I’m a bit of a last minute Christmas shopper. I like to hear the merry bells on the muzak system and the merry bells of the tills and to be wished a ‘merry Christmas’ when buying soap or something. I also like that feeling of panic in the pit of your stomach when you realise that all shops have sold out of what it was your wife has been asking you to get for the last month and you’ve been putting off.

Though to be honest, I think shops selling out of stuff is a thing of the past. Santa might still rely on hand-crafting and elf labour, but then the bugger does have a magical sleigh to make deliveries, the shops rely on the sort of stock control system that requires computing power that would wrestle HAL 9000 one handed and still have time to beat SKYNET at chess.

My family have long learned the lesson of buying gifts when and where they see them throughout the year and then putting them away until December. This is not a system that works well for everybody, by which I mean me. By which I mean by December I’ve forgotten where I hid the stuff throughout the year, meaning panic buying at the last minute and what can only be described as an ‘anger episode’ in January when I find the sodding things I hid in June.

My family are also somewhat traditional, which is why on the day following Boxing Day we hit the shops in search of bargains. As a result, I now own two rather spiffy new tee shirts, one black, one white. The rest of the family were a bit more adventurous and dive into the ‘sale’ racks like explorers plunging into jungle.

Sale shopping is not for the faint hearted – putting it in a film context I’d say the whole experience was a cross between the opening of ‘Gladiator’ and the final battle in ‘Lord of the Rings’ – except Orcs are somewhat better looking than an enraged woman when you’ve just grabbed the last size ten cocktail dress off of the rack.

12 days of Christmas – walking off the turkey

Off to Hampton Court for ice-skating. Not actually ice-skating you understand, the Thames last froze over 100 years ago and anyone attempting to skate on it had better be towed along by a speed-boat. No, ice-skating on the seasonal man-made outdoor rink. Well, not actually ice skating on that either - to do that you need to book your tickets in July, 2005, but rather to look at the ice rink installed at Hampton Court and place your bets on which skater will fall over first.

As the day was very mild, falling had a double jeopardy, as there was a half-inch of water on top of the ice. This made for impressive plumes of spray as people shot about the place, but did make everyone a little cautious.

Walking alongside the Thames, pausing only to shout at the puppy not to chase joggers (one of whom was, I have to say, a little bad tempered – well so would I be if I was jogging while the rest of the world was simply strolling or just reaching for the extra-comfy sweat-pants instead) was a good way to work up an appetite for a pic-nic consisting of whatever Christmas dinner had not yet been consumed, forced into a bap.

Why do Christmas dinners always result in so many leftovers? I suspect it’s because people buy stuff to eat at Christmas that they don’t usually eat and don’t even like. Sprouts are the prime example. This year we didn’t have any and they weren’t missed. Having said that, I do now have the oddest craving for one. Maybe the human body needs just three sprouts every year, no more, no less.

What this doesn’t apply to is Christmas Pud. I’ve been road-testing them since November to pick just the right one to serve up to the family (orange panettone).

The swans and ducks on the Thames don’t get sick of an unvaried diet – as we finished our pic-nic, a swan sidled – there’s no other word for it – up in the expectation of a bit of bread. We tossed a bit to the river, it fell short, I stooped to retrieve and relaunch and then the bloody beast launched itself from water to bank in a single slingshot motion, complete with angry hiss.

The angry hiss was almost drowned out by the startled scream that issued from me. The last place I wanted to be at Christmas was in A&E explaining to the nurse that my injury was caused by brutal pecking, explaining to the royal parks constabulary that I didn’t mean to kill the sodding thing but that it bit me and so I strangled it in reflex (easy, so much neck to choose from) and explaining to the chap from the local paper that no, I did not think ‘seasonal swan slayer’ would be a good headline.

12 days of Christmas – Boxing Day

In the run up to Christmas the house smelled of pine from the tree. On Christmas Eve the aroma of cooking filled the house. Christmas Day and the house smelled of selection box and booze.

Boxing Day…the place did smell of bleach but thanks to the wonder of scented candles now smells of…vanilla I think but it says ‘Ocean Spray’ on the candle. I am, however, learning the ways of married life and know better than to suggest simply opening a bloody window if we want some fresh air.

The reason for all this is the Royal Visit! That is, my family are visiting for Christmas. This has necessitated what I believe is called a ‘deep clean’, which I think involves filling a leafblower full of bleach and turning it to ‘blow like buggery’. Put it this way – I never knew a loo could smell that fresh. As for the environmental damage of the various cleaning products: all environmental damage is measured in comparison to Wales. It used to be Belgium, but since the environmental situation got worse, we needed a bigger country. So, deforestation is happening on the size of a Wales a day. They also manage, oddly, to measure cubic CO2 emissions using Wales.

So, not being arsed to make up my own environmentally sound cleaning products from the lemons leftover from the G&T and my own ammonia-rich pee, we turned to the bottles of stuff that have Estonian warning labels on them and are probably banned in the EU or they stopped making in 1973 (you need to go to the right web-sites to get ‘gleamo’)

Make no mistake, having the family and new puppy come to stay is a big deal – I feel like getting a plaque made or something.

As for my hospitality tactics – simple, I intend to feed my normally teetotal lot enough booze to, if not float a yacht, at least float them though the festive period with a fizzy fuzzy sense of wellbeing so that they will end the visit knowing that they have had a good time even if they cannot recall any particular aspects of it.

As for the environment, I’m going to encourage the puppy to pee over as much as the garden as possible in an effort to deter cats, foxes and, at this time of year, deer, from using the back garden as a commode. If that doesn’t work, I shall have to look into renting a bear.

12 days of Christmas – Christmas Day

Whoever maintains that ‘Christmas is for the kiddies really’ clearly doesn’t realise that having an excuse to drink champagne before breakfast is great!

Kids and Christmas does not constitute peace and goodwill. I used to think that the tradition of gift giving at Christmas started with the three wise men – wise indeed, because how were they to know that Jesus was an only child? That’s why they took, basically, a token, bath salts and perfume – three things that siblings would never squabble and fall out over. Believe me, if the wise men had bourn gifts of lego and Jesus had had a big brother, it wouldn’t have been a silent night in Bethlehem.

In fact the tradition of gift giving on Christmas Day was invented, or re-invented, by the Victorians, probably driven by popular culture or Fisher-Price, Sony and Mattel.

Thankfully, I am still enough of a big kid to enjoy Christmas. The difference is that while as a child and teen I was a horribly materialistic little git, I now take great delight in my new Doctor Who mug, which comes complete with spoon or, as I see it’s titled, a ‘time-stirrer’. Honest to God, it’s more fun than a DS.

12 days of Christmas - Christmas Eve

I know I’ve banged on about his before, but as it’s Christmas I don’t think it’s unseasonal to simply offer up repeats of earlier episodes of the blog, reheated leftovers if you like – possibly served with pickle and savoury sauce and a slightly bloated feeling (that doesn’t stop you reaching for tin of Quality Street to see if any of the soft centres remain).

So…the weather. In particular, the weather and numbers. I can appreciate why meteorologists like numbers, I’m a big fan of them myself, nothing quite like the number ‘80’ in the middle of a sun symbol when you’re planning a day at the beach. But there are times when numbers just won’t do and these instances, I think, clearly indicate that numbers are just an indication of lazy thinking.

The other day I was listening to the Shipping Forecast on Radio 4. Much has been written about the Shipping Forecast, how it’s poetry and so on. Indeed, there are probably two great broadcasts, the Shipping Forecast and Alaistair Cook’s letter from America – both indications of how important the voice is on radio.

On the shipping forecast they were talking about what sounded like a wild night out at sea and, yes, they did use the Beaufort scale to some extent, but it was the descriptions that followed the numbers that froze my blood ‘force eight, serious becoming violent later’.

If your life depends on the weather forecast, this is what you want. What you don’t want if you’re in a small boat in a choppy sea is to hear that a storm is approaching graded force eight and then have an argument with some bearded tosser in a cagoule and waders who thinks that these things are marked out of fifty. No, you want to start the engine, hoist the sail and start paddling for shore like a couple of bastards, eyeing up the lardiest member of the crew to heave overboard if things get really rough and you have to lighten the ship to make better speed.

It’s been a decidedly un-jolly run up to Christmas for some folk. As well as the holiday company Travelsphere going bust, meaning – judging from the news footage I saw – that thousands of people are going to have to spend Christmas with their families rather than bugger off to Europe to avoid sitting next to a grandchild full of sprout wind at the Christmas dinner table, fog descended on London.

I’m not sure if there is a scale for fog. If so, and we’re grading out of 12 where 1 is ‘like looking through cling film’ and 12 is ‘hold a piece of paper to your nose – that’s it!’, this was about a 9.

I suspect that they measure fog and mist in yards of visibility it permits, but that’s not the point – let me tell you about this fog. This was a freezing fog that had city pollution mixed up in it, it was like drizzle that was suspended in the air, beading your jacket with moisture and, somehow, chilling your skin beneath your shirt, vest and tattoo. Because we’re in winter, daylight lasts from about 11:15am to 12:30pm, everything else is twilight or dark. Or yellow – the many lights of London dyed the very air a sort of sickly amber, broken up by the occasional jolly reds of Christmas lights (and blue! Where the hell did the idea of blue LED lights come from? Does everyone want their homes looking like police stations?). Cars moving in the fog didn’t so much illuminate it as simply describe two cones of grey/white moisture in front of them as they moved along.

It hung around for two days, was bloody creepy and, given the way people drive at the best of times, even more dangerous than the fog in the John Carpenter movie – at least that just contained the vengeful spirit of lepers, this fog contained idiots on scooters – which actually you could hear coming for miles away as scooters these days seem to have some sort of million decibel fart array fitted to them before they leave the factory.

The fog also grounded lots of flights from London airports – just like last year! I have to admit I’ve not got a lot of sympathy for people going away at Christmas – going home, yes, going to see family, yes. Leaving the country because you don’t like tinsel – bah humbug.

The BBC showed a programme last night about how the Victorians in general and Dickens in particular invented, or reinvented, the modern Christmas as we know it by resurrecting select customs from the past (more bawdy ones were primly forgotten, having seen how tight Victorian trousers were, there were probably sound health and safety reasons for this’. It was fascinating stuff – for instance I didn’t know that Oliver Cromwell banned Christmas when he was in power! Too catholic, apparently. I now suspect that the restoration was a plot by toy makers and turkey farmers.

Where numbers do apply to Christmas is, of course, advent calendars, usually with a Chocolate behind each little door or, if you had a family like mine (up early and with little conscience), a note advising you to get out of bed earlier ‘you snooze, you lose!’. The other place they can apply is the 12 days of Christmas. Can you name them all?

They are:

12 Drummers Drumming
Eleven Pipers Piping
Ten Lords a Leaping
Nine Ladies Dancing
Eight Maids a Milking
Seven Swans a Swimming
Six Geese a Laying
Five Golden Rings
Four Calling Birds
Three French Hens
Two Turtle Doves
and a Partridge in a Pear Tree

Frankly, I think that after the geese, things get a little odd. I have no objection to partridge (I’ve currently got a brace in my fridge, awaiting cooking) but I think that half a dozen swans arriving through the post would be a bit of a lively event, to say the least.

So this Christmas, I’m going to make an effort to avoid using numbers. This will make it tricky quantifying pickled onions consumed, glasses of alcoholic beverages drunk, numbers of carollers doused in horse piss from an upper window (a Christmas tradition of my very own) and paracetamol popped… actually, better keep track of that, tricky chap, Johnny overdose.

Who's that girl...or is it a bloke?

Depending on your status as a celebrity and your relationship with the media, if you are famous you can expect to see pictures of yourself in the paper either smiling on some red carpet somewhere or reeling drunk in the gutter showing your knickers.

If you are famous you probably have your own file in the newspaper vault. If you are lucky this has pictures of you in clean, ironed clothes. If you are unlucky this has pictures of your cellulite. If you are really unlucky this has your police mug-shot and if dame fortune has crapped on you after embarking on a high-fibre diet, this will contain those ‘glamour’ shots you did at the start of your career.

Ordinary people pictured in the paper used to fall into three categories. You either looked startled as you walked to court and some snapper papped you, or you looked happy as you lifted some sort of trophy aloft, or you had a blanket over your head and the caption described you as ‘the accused’ or, possibly ‘the beast’.

The saddest photographs on front pages were those posed school photographs. You felt your heart drop into your shoes because you knew that the picture of the smiling child was not on the front page because it was a slow news day and the kid was related to the editor. When you saw a picture of an entire class, with nobody ringed, it was time to reach for the bottle. I guess class photographs were used because these were the ones most available to the journos, either from the parents or an underpaid school caretaker.

The internet has changed all that though. Recently, high-school gunmen have taken to putting their declarations of insanity on YouTube and so that’s where newspapers go for video grabs – although to be honest they could just have been using the same shot of some acne ridden git in a ‘slipknot’ hoodie, as that’s what all these kids look like.

Worse, they have started to comb social networking sites like MyFace for pictures of missing teens, tragic teens or teens that may well have done something nasty to other teens. This is why one should be careful about the photographs one puts into the public domain. Do you really want, next to the headline ‘suspect held in gnome theft case’, a picture of you simulating sex with a soft toy, because you thought it was a laugh to have it on your home page.

Worse still, do you want to rely on a lazy, pissed up journo getting the right image? The last thing you need is to have a name close to that of a notorious donkey shagger so that on his arrest you see that photograph of yourself taken last Christmas when you were playing twister after getting pissed and the caption ‘mule molester busted’.

So one should be careful what one posts, and what one does, and what one is pictured doing. Or simply emboss all pictures of yourself with the watermark: ‘in my defence, I had been drinking’.

Blowing hot and cold

Spent a couple of days last week doing medical research. More precisely, how many sachets of Lemsip do you have to drink before you start to feel a bit ‘odd’? The answer is three. I’m not sure if it was the vile bug I was struck down with or the remedy that did the most harm, but it was a great excuse to lie on the sofa and watch daytime telly.

Which was crap. The only decent thing on was the news channel, which made me want to laugh and rant in equal measures.

Laugh because of the continuing donations scandal enveloping the labour party like a cloud of fart-gas in a lift. So, you’ receive donations laundered through a third party from an anonymous donor? Nothing wrong with that then. How stupid are these people? As it was, the funds came from some dodgy developer but might just as easily have come from somebody who makes his money selling DVDs of gnome porn or something. Best of all, the donations were for £500, £900 that sort of amount. Sorry? You are willing to compromise your career by accepting a donation that would just about buy you an iMac? How stupid are you?

Ranting because of the teacher who was banged up by a bunch of wankers in the Sudan. The charge was naming a teddy bear ‘Mohammed’. Her real crime was probably educating kids to the resentment of their parents who think that if a life of grinding ignorance and poverty is good enough for them, then it’s good enough for their kids. I see today that after meeting a couple of Muslim peers, the tech has been pardoned.

I really hope the meeting went something like this ‘Hello Mr President…pick an envelope, you can choose the one labelled ‘iron’, ‘bronze’ or ‘stone’. Whichever one you pick is the age we’re going to bomb your country back into if you don’t release that woman right now.’

Personally, I think they should bomb the place anyway as soon as she’s home.