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.