Countdown to Christmas and The High Street

From mid-November onwards, a curious phenomenon occurs in certain towns.  The outdoor market, which is sometimes branded as a German Market, but actually resembles a shed show with a very limited choice of styles available.

Before the criticism of town centres was that all the shops seemed to be closing, the criticism of town centres was that all the shops were opening and that each High Street, which in the fantasy Daily Mail readers like to construct for themselves consisted of independent shops staffed by cheery and attentive white folk, was becoming homogenised.  Where you used to be able to wander from greengrocer to butcher to farrier to witchfinder, you now drove to an out of town mothership of a superstore and got all your food and horseshoes there, meaning that the High Street became the home to Our Price, Woolworths and C&A.

This led to every High Street looking the same.

Luckily, at Christmas, with the arrival of the seasonal market, the High Street has the opportunity to once again attain some individuality.  Of course this does not actually happen because while there may be a way to make a High Street look unique, setting up 100 identical sheds selling sausage, cheese or very ugly wooden toys ain’t it.

Christmas Eve on the High Street can still be a special time.  From the bloke who stayed too long in the boozer banging on the door of a shutting and shuttering Perfume Shop to the pleased parent with a list consisting of ticked items, who is fourteen short hours away from discovering the difference between AA and AAA batteries.

Some think the High Street has had its day.  In turn, the out of town retail park is being buggered by broadband as people do their shopping from their sofa.  The centre of commerce has moved from the high street to the out of town superstore and now to the way out of town megawarehouse, the apogee of free market capitalism where thanks to zero hours contracts the warehouse workers don’t earn on toilet breaks, essentially paying to pee.  Thanks Thatcher.

Now I’m not so sure.  Maybe there is a place for the High Street.  The town centre, for instance.

Christmas Eve and we needed last minute gadget shopping.  It looked as though the only person capable of delivering it quickly enough was a fat bloke in a red suit.  Plan A was writing a letter and posting it up the chimney.  Plan B was Argos.

A quick internet search showed that Argos stocked the gadget in question.  In store.  In their store.  In the town centre.  On the High Street.  We ordered on line and promptly followed the stream of electrons to the High Street where the lights of the store shone brightly.

Argos on Christmas Eve is an interesting place.  It’s surprisingly quiet and relaxed, possibly because the sort of people who shop at Argos are the sort of people who have their shit together and who ordered that Wendy house weeks ago, collected it days ago and are currently in their garage assembling the fucker.  The most stressed person in the shop was me, having raced there on my push bike and keen to collect my clicked gadget.

Is there anything Argos doesn’t stock?  That catalogue is really, really thick.  I just used to look at Castle Greyskull and walkmans (walkmen?).  Who knows what the hell else is in there?  Mail order brides?  Cockatoos?  Small arms?

I paid, collected and was off in about ten minutes.

The only other collection I noted, waiting there on the shelves for some generous and thoughtful gift-giver, were two 8kg kettle bells.  Good luck getting those home.

There is a place for the High Street then.  It’s in the centre of town.  It’s not in a retail park, or in a vast warehouse, or online.  It’s a place where you can go and you can shop and you can get what you need and people are friendly and where you walk away from the shop with your stuff and a smile.

The High Street was there when I needed it.  Maybe in future I should be there when it needs me.

Countdown to Christmas and A Ghost Story for Christmas

What’s scary?  Fashions in fear change.  Back when film was black and white by necessity rather than some half arsed artistic choice, fear was Universal in the sense that the Dracula and mummy and Wolfman franchises scared cinema-goers.  Then came Hammer and Technicolor blood.  Then came less gothic and much less subtle fear, usually involving college girls running round a lake being chased by somebody with a personality disorder and a utensil.  Things took a turn for the sexy with the Twilight movies, where the cheekbones of the male lead were more important than the fake fangs, and we have just recently come out of an ironically apparently unkillable trend in zombie movies and television.  Somewhere, things stopped being scary and became either thrilling or thought-provoking or, God help us, sensitive.  Vampires and zombies became just another group with food intolerances (garlic) and a specific dietary requirement (Type O, brains).  Like vegans, but healthier looking and less likely to bang on about it.

Fashions change but traditions are maintained, the Christmas ghost story being one of them.  There is a convention that the Christmas Ghost Story was invented by Charles Dickens, and perfected by M R James and arguably the BBC.  Some might contend that the practice of telling weird tales at Christmas might well pre-date Christmas, when a storyteller round a campfire might choose to spook the hell out of an audience on a long winter night by telling them when might be waiting for them in the shadows, in the darkness or beyond the cave mouth, tent flap or door depending on your epoch or cultural frame of reference.

Certainly though Dickens, in ‘A Christmas Carol’ refined and defined the Christmas Ghost Story.  It has ghosts, it has a redemptive message of new life which is so necessary in a midwinter’s tale, it has a strong social message about combating want and ignorance, an enduring message for the sort of people who read it in the comfort of their own homes while others are in want or ignorance, a contrast always particularly sharp at Christmas.  And it’s actually fairly scary, if you don’t find the notion of knockers transforming or being visited by ghosts in the middle of the night terrifying, then I’d question whether you are the sort of person who has the emotional development required to be allowed unfettered access to a knife draw.

M R James was a school-master and a writer of ghost stories.  Every Christmas Eve he would invite schoolboys to his study and read a ghost story to them.  Behaviour that was charming then is, of course, the sort of thing that would land you with a visit from Ofsted, possibly the local constabulary and probably reporters from certain tabloids today.  And the world is the worse for that.

Luckily, the BBC embarked on a series of programmes in the 1970’s and 1980’s that allowed all of us to attend James’s study, with their classic ‘Ghost Story for Christmas’ strand.  Some were dramatisations of M R James stories, the best was Robert Powell as a schoolmaster, telling a James story, like the scariest episodes of Jackanory ever broadcast.

The attraction is, I suppose, twofold.  Firstly, certainly in the James tradition where the protagonist comes to a sticky spectral end, the protagonist somehow brings things upon himself, as does Scrooge.  Our viewer sitting at home need not fear such folly, but will at the conclusion of the tale hopefully consider how they can improve themselves.  The second is that Christmas is a time of dark nights, candlelight and port, all excellent accompaniments to a good ghost story.

The undisputed modern master of horror, Stephen King, recognised the importance of the ghost story for Christmas in ‘the Breathing Method’, where the horror story itself is nested within a tale far less conventional; that of a club for storytellers where there is a tradition of ghost stories for Christmas.  This, we learn, is about all that is traditional about the club.

Maybe it’s just that a good shiver in the dark makes us appreciate the light and the laughter of Christmas, makes us appreciate comfort and company, family and friends.  Makes us appreciate Christmas.

Countdown to Christmas and Selection Box Sets

Winter is, for certain mammals, a time of hibernation.  Snug in burrows or caves, they sleep away the long nights and the short days in blissful inactivity drawing on the fat reserves they have built up over the preceding year, possibly augmented by the occasional Ocado delivery depending on the sophistication of the mammal in question.

Christmas can also be a time involving, for certain mammals, human males in particular, long periods of inactivity and the wearing of pyjamas round the clock even though you are not ill.  The difference is that instead of combining this prolonged period of low metabolic activity with drawing on fat reserves, it’s very much combined by, if one is lucky, continually topping up those fat reserves by ingesting more cheese of more varieties in six days than one would normally consume in six months.  Simply put, it’s not normal for an average person to consume that much brie at all hours of the day, simply Because It’s There.

Christmas comes with its own dietary regime.  Firstly there is the food itself.  People eat things at Christmas they would not eat for the rest of the year.  Turkey.  If turkey is so great, why are we not eating it throughout the year?  Of course the answer is that we are, except that it its usually served in Twizzler form to children who have yet to develop the skill of sending food back.  Faced with a choice and the ability to be able to exercise that choice, an adult human will walk past the turkeys and pick out a nice joint of beef or lamb.  At Christmas, faced with the sort of pressure to conform usually only experienced by teenagers, we rush to the supermarket shelves and grab the biggest bird we can get our hands on, and then commence to pimp it out with stuffing, cranberry sauce and no doubt some day soon, little costumes.  We eat mince pies, we eat more nuts than a simian going ape in a nut shop and as mentioned, we eat so much cheese that when we perspire there’s a slight smell of cheddar.

And we drink.  We drink in the morning.  No better evidence of the suspension of normal rules is required than it being socially acceptable to drink before noon, usually the sole preserve of shift workers or people with problems.

Luckily, we offset this enhanced calorific intake with vigorous exercise, if you can call getting up from the sofa, padding into the kitchen and rummaging in the fridge every forty minutes or so vigorous exercise which, seasonally adjusted, it may well be.  And I do mean rummaging in the fridge.  Christmas is a time when the shops are closed for the day remember, an event that causes the modern consumer to prepare by stockpiling food and drink as if preparing for a zombie apocalypse, or Brexit.  In order to locate the afternoon snacking cheese, you first have to move the after dinner cheese out of the way on the cheese shelf, formally the salad shelf, a shelf that is redesigned as the cheese shelf for the festive period because the only green food permitted at Christmas are the brussel sprouts that are another example of a food only consumed during the yuletide festivities, and the grapes used to garnish the cheeseboard.

But more than turkey, more than cheese, more than even sprouts one tasty treat defines Christmas.  The selection box.  If you thought drinking before noon was a treat, then that’s as nothing to offing a Curlywurly before breakfast.  You could give a child a new bike, that flies, and their delight would still be eclipsed by their finding a perfect purple box of chocolate treats under the tree.  The bars may be smaller, gone is the game with the spinner on the back of the box and there may be a guilt twinge about all that plastic packaging but by God a bar of dairy milk first thing is glorious.

Presumably, the rise in popularity of the sporting of sleepwear in daylight hours at Christmas is due not just to a desire to hibernate, but to the comfort of a garment with an elasticised waistband.

Countdown to Christmas and Christmas Hits

Around this time of year, articles start to appear in newspapers and magazines, at least in the on-line editions, about Christmas Hits.  The articles tend to cover Christmas Hits up until about a decade ago, which is about the last time that what was Number One at Christmas had any impact on the national consciousness.

The articles allow the reporter to give their views on what the magic formula might be for achieving a seasonal classic, and to demonstrate their knowledge and skills in music journalism in an age where everyone is invited to review tracks on streaming services, and somebody with 70 years in the business, a fuck-off vinyl collection and a byline in ‘Rolling Stone’, ‘Kerrang’ or a purple-printed stinky fanzine has no more critical clout on iTunes than somebody who reviews the last Bowie album as ‘* Ya basik’.

Such articles also allow the artists in question to contribute a quote that reminds readers that they are still alive, and makes an impassioned plea for any remaining fans to come see the tour, tickets still available.  This is usually finessed into a remark about the Christmas Hit still being popular when they perform their December shows.

July gigs. Not so much.

There is also a list of favourite or most popular Christmas Hits, and again these usually run up to about ten years ago before stopping being a thing.

This is for two reasons.

The first is that while dark forces have always been at work in the music industry, it was only when they started judging talent shows, signing the winners to their labels and promoting the hell out of them to make sure they had sensational sales during the lucrative Christmas period, that people started to resent the hell out of it and journalists wanted to deny such people the oxygen of publicity, with even ITV restricting their activities to two hours of prime time on a Saturday and a results show on a Sunday.

The other reason is that on-line sales of music buggered the Christmas Single.

The reason the Christmas Single mattered was that it outsold all other record sales.  This was because people who never buy records would go to Woolies and buy a single for their young relatives.

Woolies going tits up was a disaster for more than the employees, the High Street and for people who liked to shoplift pick n’ mix on a Saturday.  It was a problem for record sales.  Woolies is a safe environment for the shopper.  Our Price, less so.

Downloads buggered things further.  Grandparents, even silver surfers, are unlikely to gift the kiddies a particular song.  More likely they will give them a pair of socks.  That’s right, they know iTunes vouchers exist but fuck you Jane and Johnny, I don’t recall a single costing £15.  When they bring out the 99p iTunes voucher, text us, we’ll be on a Viking River Cruise.

Then came streaming and who, basically, had a fucking clue about what constituted a record sale anymore?  The last time I checked, record sales consisted of physical sales, downloads, streams, airplay, mentions in the playgrounds of state funded schools, and the passing from one kid to another of a cassette with the song taped from the wireless with the DJ talking over the first and last ten seconds.

The Christmas Number One hasn’t mattered for many years now, for a couple of reasons.

The first is that, rightly, everyone can listen to what they want to listen to and that the cultural measures like the chart countdown don’t really matter anymore.

The second?  Nobody is recording decent, bespoke, jingly, seasonal Christmas hits anymore.  Adele, step up.

The last important Christmas pop music event?  George Michael, who wrote and recorded the perfect Christmas Hit, died on 25 December 2016.  I remember turning on Radio 2 on Boxing Day, a tribute show, learning the news.  It was sad, it was uplifting, it was a radio community and a demonstration that radio is a medium like no other for marking these moments.

Oh, and ‘Fairytale of New York’ is the greatest Christmas Hit.  Unbelievably, some have sought to criticise it recently.  Beware these people.

Countdown to Christmas and Christmas Films

Back in the day, as J. P. Kenyon used to put it, there used to be something called the Elevator Pitch.  This was, as you can tell from the use of the word Elevator, an American thing, and was based around the idea that if you found yourself in a lift with a movie producer, you would have the time it takes for you to travel a few floors to pitch your idea for a movie.  Elevator Pitches are now things of the past, because today movie producers are so terrified of being implicated in a MeToo type scandal that they travel with packs of lawyers who ask anyone coming into contact with the producer to sign a disclaimer before engaging with the producer, and by the time the paperwork has been completed, the producer has reached the penthouse and the ride, and opportunity, is over.

Obviously though, the Elevator Pitch had not faded from being common industry practice before a number of encounters happened that resembled this conversation.

“Small town girl who now lives a successful but unfulfilling life in the big city returns to her small town, reconnects with the folksy folk, reunites with her childhood sweetheart and leans a valuable lesson about community.”

“That’s the plot of ‘Sweet Home Alabama”, idiot.”

“It’s set at Christmas.”

“Genius, let’s do it.”

Ping.  Penthouse.

Now, I like Christmas.  I like Netflix.  And I like a Christmas movie, so I have to say that the Algorithm In Chief is really pulling it out of the Santa hat at the moment.  Because I watched a documentary about the Swedish shoe trade, Netflix thinks I’d like ‘Holiday Homecoming’, ‘Christmas Homecoming’, ‘Homecoming at Christmas’, ‘Home Holiday Christmas’ and ‘Blonde Girl in Snowy Small Town’.  And while I resent the hell out of the presumption, I love the result.

How many times can you watch the same movie with slight variations?  As it turns out, about seventeen.

Here in England Wetherspoons is a successful chain of popular pubs with a business model including reasonably priced food and drink and serving cider at breakfast time, indoors.  In America, Witherspoons is the collective term for the clones of the popular actress that populate movies requiring a small town girl to return home and learn a valuable lesson about community.

Films at Christmas used to be a seasonal extravaganza of Technicolor, and black and white.  Technicolor for Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Year’s Day, black and white for late night, usually a run of classics featuring Bogart.  Fun fact, from 1982 to 1991, fedora and trenchcoat sales in January were 12 – 17% higher than the rest of the year.

This also fed sales of three packs of blank VHS cassettes in December.  Nothing promoted family harmony quite like the ability to tape ‘You Only Live Twice’, ‘The Maltese Falcon’ and a 30 minute comedy special one tape, to be stored, treasured and then thrown out thirty years later because you have not owned a VHS player in a decade.

There are films that are set at Christmas, and there are films with a Christmas theme.  The greatest Christmas film ever is, of course ‘Die Hard’.  This is because not only is it set at Christmas, but it also has a Christmas theme, family togetherness and throwing terrorists off of skyscrapers.  It also has a jingly soundtrack that neatly counterpoints the ballistic mayhem.

A close second is ‘Jingle All The Way’, in which Arnold plays a dad who promises to get his son a doll, sorry, action figure, for Christmas, but it turns out that this is the Must Have toy for Christmas and it’s really difficult to get hold of.  Much of the enjoyment of watching the movie is derived from watching Arnold flex his comedy muscles, which is not as much like watching a penguin trying to box as you might imagine.

If you need the plot of Die Hard explained to you, well, really.

Christmas is no time for cynicism and Home For The Holidays movies prove that it’s not just the Christmas diet that can be heartwarming.

Now.  I have an idea for a movie.  Witherspoon 127AAB/Beta is attached.  It’s set at…Thanksgiving.  Interested? 

Countdown to Christmas and Food and Drink

In the last blog post, it was suggested that the correct way to conclude a Christmas journey was to put aside the kettle (heresy!) and uncork some liquid festive cheer.  Certainly, this is accepted wisdom for the jolly fat chap who clocks up all those air miles on Christmas Eve, consuming so many glasses of sherry that it’s a wonder his nose isn’t as red as Rudolph’s.  And it’s good to note that with a properly prepared plate, there will be a mince pie for the old fella and a carrot, which used to be for the reindeer but is now considered the vegan option.

The term ‘vegan option’ is a somewhat contentious one at Christmas, traditionally a time for seeing just how many foods you can eat that contain, knowingly or unknowingly, suet.  Some consider using the term ‘vegan’ at Christmas on a par with using the word ‘Herod’.  Both put a downer on the whole festive experience but only one will go on Twitter to bloody moan about it if they feel in any way slighted because you are cooking dinner for twelve people and frankly have not got the time, energy, inclination or moral laxity necessary to have Quorn anywhere near your kitchen between 1^st December to 7^th January inclusive.

Remember a few years ago and it was suggested that it was fashionable to have an upside down Christmas tree?*  Would you have an upside down Christmas tree?  No.  No matter what glossy magazines are telling you, you would not have an upside down Christmas tree.  This is because if you are the sort or person that has a Christmas tree at all, you are a traditionalist and so your Christmas tree, and call me old fashioned here, your Christmas tree has the wide bit at the bottom and the pointy bit at the top.  You know, like trees have.  FFS.  Also, if you have your Christmas tree upside down, all the decorations would fall off.  Likewise, a traditionalist would not serve anything that has not been in some way made from, coated with, cooked in or soaked in some sort of animal product.  Case in point, roast potatoes.  Rest of the year, cook them with olive oil.  Christmas?  Goose fat.

There are certain foods that are exclusively consumed at Christmas, like dates.  There are certain drinks that are exclusively consumed at Christmas, like bucks fizz.  This is an excellent way of ruining two perfectly acceptable drinks, by combining them, and is only acceptable because it allows conformity to the Christmas social norm of drinking at breakfast.  The rest of the year, if you want to drink at breakfast, it’s vodka and tomato juice.  If you’re a vegan, you can have a sprig of celery too.  You are unlikely though to add Worcestershire Sauce.

So Christmas is a time for a traditional menu.  This is a problem for those who decide to go abroad for Christmas.  This is a fairly unwholesome practice in any case, as the only person who should be flying on Christmas Eve travels by sleigh.  I have never understood this compulsion to go to an airport, queue, get touched up in the security aisle, sit in a cramped seat and then decant somewhere unnaturally hot for December, only to be greeted on Christmas Morning by a slice of fruit and the promise of a beach barbeque later.

Unless you are flying home to see family, your place is at home, with your feet on the ground on Christmas Morning, with a glass of bucks fizz in your hand as you put the oven on and start peeling sprouts.

Christmas may be a time when we eat food we don’t eat at any other time of the year, but this should not include red snapper.

Many are in want.  If you are lucky enough to be able to serve your loved ones a traditional once-in-a-year dinner, then maybe take the opportunity to enjoy the tradition rather than rebel.  Just remember that the most important thing at the dinner table is each other.  Also, crackers.  Also, booze.

*Just Googled it.  Apparently it’s an Eastern European thing.  So not only is it wrong, it’s cultural appropriation.

Countdown to Christmas and Travel

Travelling at Christmas, especially travelling with gifts on Christmas Eve, is not restricted to a fat chap in a red suit.

Travel is famously connected to Christmas.  The whole thing started with a journey, when a young woman travelled on a donkey, a little donkey to be precise, with her husband to a small Middle Eastern town to take part in the census.  This was in more enlightened times, and the young woman was allowed to drive the donkey.  Also on the road that Christmas were three Oriental monarchs, using faith and what passed for sat-nav in 0BCE/0AD to guide them to the birthplace of the baby Jesus.  Add to this shepherds coming down from the hills, a little drummer boy and angels.

So the tradition continues.  Christmas is a time for visiting/inflicting yourself on relatives, and so the roads are full of folk who are going to spend various lengths of time with people they love, or people they are related to, or even people that are the reason Facebook was such a success, allowing people to keep in touch without actually having to spend time in one another’s company.

There are also, to be sure, those who actually enjoy the ritual of visiting at Christmas, and it’s the one time of the year when the parcel shelf at the back of a car actually fulfils the function it was named for.  Just as in September we see family cars on the motorway full of duvets and other paraphernalia of sending your sullen teen away to study so you can turn their bedroom into either a home gym, cinema room, or both, at Christmas you see cars with brightly wrapped prezzies in the back, a golden rule of hospitality being if you are going to spend three days at a relative’s house and you want to enjoy yourself, and enjoy the sporting subscriptions on their telly package that allows you to spend the wee small hours watching cricket beamed from a Caribbean clime, then you had best rock up with something substantial from John Lewis in a bow as a gift.  Of course a gift such as a crate of wine or a cheeseboard that weighs as much as a fully grown Labrador is also an excellent way of ensuring that you will have a fabulous Yule wherever you might be.

It’s a mystery why they shut down the train service on Christmas Day.  Executives who travel everywhere by BMW explain that it is because fewer people travel on bank holidays than at other times.  This is true for two reasons.  The first is a reduced or non-existent train service.  The other is that far fewer people are travelling to get to work.  Take it from me, if a train service ran on Christmas Day, people would use it and, what’s more, the people using it would all be happy to be using it.  If you want to shut down the rail network for two days for maintenance, can I suggest sometime in the second week of January, when everyone would be glad of a day or two off.

My favourite festive train journey was a few years ago, London to Ely on Christmas Eve.  There was a festive and upbeat atmosphere as people took their seats in the carriage, like a Christmassy version of everyone getting on the last helicopter off of the embassy roof, in this case everyone getting on one of the last trains leaving London before they closed down the network.  Lots of people had gifts, most were going home to loved ones, everyone had been drinking.

And car journeys can be pleasant too.  There’s traffic and there’s crap driving and there’s probably roadworks, but there’s the chance to put ‘Driving Home for Christmas’ on the car stereo, on a loop, and there is that sensation of turning off of the motorway, then turning off of the main roads and onto the minor roads before pulling up outside somewhere which, if all is as it should be, will be illuminated by twinkling lights and where somebody is putting on the kettle, thinking better of it, and uncorking the good stuff in anticipation of your arrival.

Countdown to Christmas and Great Expectations

Sooner or later, probably sooner, somebody is going to produce (not ‘invent’, I’m just about to do that) the two month advent calendar.  This is not a much needed innovation that would allow you to open a window every day in January to be greeted by a cheering scene or a piece of chocolate as you count your way through what some consider the Most Miserable Month and others, actually wholly in that group, also call Dry January, rather it is an advent calendar that starts not on 1 December but on 1 November and would be a cynical exploitation of the phenomenon of Christmas seemingly starting earlier every year.

Why anyone would have a problem with Christmas, traditionally the season of goodwill, lasting longer is anyone’s guess, but there’s no pleasing some people, just ask anyone who voted ‘Leave’, they won and they are all still fuming.  Maybe they are just angry people generally, and an excellent illustration of the maxim ‘don’t vote angry’.

Just as the seasons are actually marked by phases of the moon, flowers flowering and animals wandering, so mankind has introduced artificial markers of seasonal change.  Hence, the end of Christmas is traditionally marked by Christmas chocolate going on sale at half price, and Easter Eggs appearing next to the discounted confectionary at full price.  Christmas Eve is traditionally the last time for eleven months that you will see perfume adverts in heavy rotation, Boxing Day is when you see adverts for holidays replace them.  January sees the launch of part works, where you can spend £4,000 purchasing many magazines that will allow you to build your own traction engine, free flywheel with part one.  And so on.

The first sign of impending Yule is usually an innocuous one, it will be an ‘A’ board outside a pub, restaurant and possibly even a roadside café that bookings are now being taken for Christmas.  Actually I am rather attracted to a roadside café, a proper one, meaning a caravan in a layby with some mismatched patio furniture next to it and a sign next to a length of hedge that instructs that the concealing vegetation is ‘for customers’ use only’ doing Christmas functions, surely such a venue would be an ideal place for truckers or sales reps to have their Christmas party?

This is followed by other signs, such as the Halloween decorations on sale in the seasonal aisle of the supermarket being replaced by gift boxes of chocolate and booze, particularly the sort of booze that you only buy at Christmas, and then only as a gift. Then before you know it, the first bit of tinsel has appeared in a shop window, it’s December and people start hoarding cheese in expectation of the big day.

Our family ritual around the start of December is to do the draw for the secret Santa.  A modest spending limit results in people having to exercise their imaginations although now that the children are growing up, we can thank God, just panic and buy booze for them.

The long run up to Christmas can put pressure on people.  Are you enjoying yourself as much as other people?  Are you enjoying yourself as much as you think you should be doing?  Are you enjoying yourself too much, oh God the guilt the guilt.  It’s like opening up the gift of a new iPhone and being confronted with a picture of the person who made it as the lock screen.  Your first reaction is not ‘My God that kid looks miserable’ it’s ‘Somebody has been fucking with my iPhone!’ before the shame kicks in.

If you are an adult you start drinking Christmas morning because you realise you are never going to be able to recapture the sheer joy unwrapping cheap plastic crap when you were nine years old brought.

Christmas has been idealised since Dickens.  Obtaining somebody else’s idea of a perfect Christmas is an unreasonable expectation, especially since they moved the Doctor Who special to New Year’s Day, so maybe the thing to do is to realise you had your perfect Christmas when you were a kid, and try to make Christmas better, if not perfect, for others.

Sober January? Oh do please fuck off

G&P is the first to admit that the benefits of sobriety, in the short, medium, and long term are inarguable.  The benefits of inebriety are mostly confined to tolerating situations and people, and even then it’s a stretch.  Still, drinking must have some benefits, otherwise why would so many people do it, in so many different forms, so often and for so long?
Having reread that last sentence, one could well ask the same about smoking, the point of which really is lost on me unless it’s to satisfy an addiction.
People drink for many reasons, to relax, because of social convention, or because their universe is a lot better when observed through the bottom of a pint glass that was until recently full of cider.
Drinking, obviously, has its drawbacks.  Too much alcohol prevents one from enjoying many of life’s pleasures.  However, in fairness, it also allows one to enjoy drinking, and beer gardens, and starchy snacks, in a way that just does not happen in Soberland.
Here at G&P, it’s fair to say that we like a drink, by which we mean booze.  We love the idea of situation specific booze most of all, with port on Christmas Eve when listening to a Ghost Story for Christmas, fizz on Christmas Morning, wine with lunch, and spirits throughout the Yule period.  Being visited by spirits at Christmas should not be the exclusive preserve of repentant Dickens characters.  This indulgence, one might argue, is the springboard for sober January.
But it’s not just Christmas that provides opportunities for booze.  Any visit to the theatre requires a gin and tonic during the interval.  Social occasions increasingly rely on fizz.  Wine is appropriate with dinner and lunch on Sunday, although tea remains the only beverage to drink while having a bacon roll, champagne is an option when enjoying fish and chips.  Keith Waterhouse was right about that, at least.  During the summer one can enjoy long drinks, such as a two litre bottle of Strongbow.  And of course the cocktail is the perfect way to mark the transition from dressing gong to dinner gong.
Booze has yet to go out of fashion.
Sobriety is, increasingly, becoming fashionable.
It used to be that the only long term sober people were recovering, lapse free, alcoholics.  Now we witness people giving up booze for a month, ‘going sober for October’.  They profess to feel good, sleep better and have more energy, and yet the day after Halloween they are back on the sauce like an HP quality assurance taster.
January is both the best and the worst month to go sober.  Best because after the Yule period you are probably ready for a few days off the sauce, worst because January is longer than a few days.
If you do decide to go sober, get ready for a long haul through some long dark evenings.  You may not be going to bed when it’s still light out, but that’s only because it’s winter, it’s still seven thirty by the time you are in your jim jams and ready for bed.  This is because sober television is no fun.
If you do decide to go sober, please keep it to yourself.  Vegetarians and their militant wing, vegans, have recently found the confidence to start talking to people about diet at barbeques.  And yet any chap taking a healthy bite of his bacon cheeseburger, while being talked at by some lettuce licker, will notice the way that any veggievegan’s gaze will be drawn to the glorious grease dribbling down your chin, and disquietingly wonder if the fellow is about to crack and lick about 8,000 calories of beefy goodness from your chops.
Similarly, any fellow doing dry January, and letting you know it will, if you are both in a pub, be looking at you taking deep, refreshing, draughts of your pint like a desert dweller regarding an oasis that does both still and sparkling water, and has a lemon grove attached.
Self control is of course laudable.  G&P recommends periods of sobriety, extending to lunchtime in normal circumstances and prolonged if operating heavy machinery, such as a 747.
Naturally, G&P recommends drinking if flying in one.

Reboots

In recent times, meaning the period in which social media has risen and conquered the recording of history present and past, along with so much else (also known as the New Dark Ages among the enlightened and the Knew Dark Ages among the wits, so called because of the effect that social media has had on truth and by extension knowledge), the time of year associated with rebirth has shifted, from New Year’s Day to Midwinter’s Day.
This is in part because of the association of Midwinter’s Day with the longest period of darkness, meaning that once the Shortest Day is over, the days start getting longer and lighter and generally better, until the wonder that is the Clock Change arrives and everyone is back to commuting in darkness again until summer arrives in England, usually scheduled for late August.
There is something undeniably rebirthy about Midwinter’s Day, the Shortest Day, call it what you will.  Oddly, few if any refer to it as the Longest Night.  This is probably because there is an ancestor-memory aversion to contemplating extended periods of darkness, doing so will lead one to Google cures for Seasonal Affected Disorder, and also give rise to an odd compulsion to light fires in caves, or inconveniently the modern equivalent thereof - normally an airing cupboard, or paint the walls with pictures of woolly mammoths.
There is no doubt that days getting longer and lighter are a good thing, good for those who like to sport shorts, good for those who enjoy outdoor stuff, bad for vampires yes but, you know, everything comes at a cost and since the Brexit referendum those Transylvanian bloodsuckers, literally, can bugger off back to their own country.
What hasn’t happened, yet, is the moneytisation of Midwinter’s Day, with the exception of the National Trust who treble the cost of parking at Stonehenge that day.
New Year’s Day, however, now that’s all about the rebirth.  It’s all about the Brand New You, because the Old You is fucked, let’s face it.
First of all, you’re too fat.  You must be, given the huge number of diets that launch in the New Year.  Possibly the problem is down to the increasing use of fats and sugars in our processed food and food manufacturers not being as transparent as they might be about what’s in the food, while food sellers push two for one deals on unhealthy stuff and fizzy drinks but rarely on lobster.
In addition, let’s be honest, you have just come out of a Christmas where you, as an adult, had an entire selection box for breakfast at least once, and have, if you have the means and are lucky enough, have not stopped eating leftovers since 3:15pm on Christmas Day.  Let us be quite clear, there is no upper limit to the tolerance of the average British male to a turkey sandwich if he is offered one.
Second of all, you’re too stupid.  That’s why at New Year you will be offered the opportunity to begin collecting partworks about WWII, HMS Victory, or Elizabethan knot gardens (free seed packet with first issue).  You may think that you could educate yourself by watching the ‘Yesterday’ channel, a lot, but the real scholar recognises that only by buying what is essentially a collection of Wikipedia articles, printed out in 200 separate weekly magazines, will you become an authority on any subject.
Know a male by his strata of literature.
Lying on his bed, a paperback by Stephen King.
Under the mattress, Razzle (other mags are available, I am given to understand).
Under the bed, 74 copies of ‘History and that’ or similar, collection abandoned when interest waned because they had covered all the good stuff by issue 12.
So the new year can be a time of rebirth or, this being the Century of the Fruitbat, reboot, or even reimagining.
G&P has been on a two year sabbatical, more or less.  There have been some specials, some more special than others, but bluntly there is so much going on that one feels it is almost a moral duty to write blog posts that nobody will ever read.  Time to reboot.  Up the arse.

Christmas Traditions

Christmas is, traditionally, a time of traditions, both old and new.  It is possible, indeed desirable, to have new traditions and although social media can induce ultra short term nostalgia, may I suggest that we all agree that a tradition is based upon a length of time no shorter than an annual cycle.  Going to get your coffee from the same place every Sunday for a couple of months is not a tradition, it’s a habit, you addict.

You can certainly expand upon existing traditions.  My favourite Christmas traditions include switching off the television promptly as soon as the broadcast of ‘Carols from Kings’ begins, and enjoying ‘A Ghost Story for Christmas’ with a glass of port, just as the schoolboys in the charge of M R James used to do many Christmasses ago when he would invite them up to his rooms, give them alcohol and tell them disquieting stories.  Simpler, kinder, times.

If you are lucky enough to be spending Christmas with your family, you probably have your own traditions.  These can be the traditional ones of traditional games, like ‘Hunt the AAA Batteries’ or ‘Some Assembly Swearing’, they can also be ones that are unique to your nation, region, village, culture or indeed family.  Cherish especially the family traditions that appear so, so normal because everyone does them unthinkingly each year.  The first time you spend a Christmas in the company of another family is also the first time you realise that others might do stuff differently.  Surely it is a test of the manners of any gentleman not to scream ‘barbarians’ at anyone who does not stand for the start of The Queen, and who can forget that moment when you realised that a guest wasn’t joking about being a vegan and you hastily rinsed the duck fat roasted potatoes, beans, sprouts and carrots.

Walking into a room splashed with gore and remarking ‘you mean you don’t batter badgers on Christmas Day, but how do you keep down TB in this area, and what do you serve in butties later?’ might be unusual, but possibly no more so than rousing a guest early on Boxing Day and informing them they are about to hunt down and kill a fox, as is traditional in many villages and hamlets in England.  Fox hunting, on Boxing day or any other time of the year, never really took off in cities, which is a shame really because if there is one pest that needs controlled it’s an urban fox, and the sight of a pack of hounds and several dozen horses going full tilt through a pedestrianised city centre on the first day of the sales would I think we can all agree be unforgettable, no matter how much one subsequently tried.  A Christmas Day hunt is in and of itself a typically English tradition, it has everything the English love, it has posh people and posher ponies, it has dogs, it has a plucky underdog, well, underfox, and it has the voice of dissent in the form of hunt protestors.  All of whom probably meet up at a local country pub before the off, because no bugger is going to go tearing across the countryside and leap hedges when sober, that’s for sure.

The best traditions are, of course, the ones you make yourself.  Like making a Christmas playlist to drive to, ensuring that ‘Driving Home for Christmas’ is on what the radio folk like to call ‘heavy rotation’.

Of course, when creating a new tradition one should have a care, what if, years from now, your child spends their first Christmas with their loved one and their family and embarks on performing an action that has gone unremarked upon and unquestioned at home for years, ever since you first created that tradition.  Will it appear charming, or some weird shit that other folks will think one step away from a ritual?  If the latter, I recommend you go for it, traditions are mannerisms given legitimacy through longevity, no matter how weird.  Kissing under some mistletoe?  Try to invent that today, in the office, and explain it away as a charming festive idea you think will really catch on.

Crolling

Carolling, as distinct from wassailing which is like carolling only more fun because it involves cider, is a festive seasonal fixture of the Yuletide period, like new socks or being told by malicious kids in the playground that Father Christmas is really your dad.  A truly jaw dropping revelation because you thought your father worked in an office and if he is, in fact, Santa, then where the fuck is that new bike you’ve been lusting after for the last two years, and why are there not more reindeer milling about in the back garden, or on the roof?

Carolling is a seasonally appropriate activity.  If gangs of youths roamed the streets at any other time of the year, going from door to door and singing what are in effect folk songs, for money, then they would get abridged shrift.  Folk songs at other times of the year are anyway best confined to festivals where the seating is hay bales, or pub car parks where men who work in offices (secret Santas?) all week like to dress up in white, strap bells to their ankles, grab a stick and dance like nobody is watching.  Very much the case usually, as Morris dancing in a pub car park is the opposite of a fight in the same location, in that spectators rush from the car park to the security of the snug, rather than forming a circle round the protagonists and enjoying the only boxing that remains, literally, free to air.

The prospect of a group of children turning up on your doorstep January through November and giving an off-tune but spirited rendition of ‘Greensleeves’ before chapping the door and expecting a quid for their services is, thankfully, a remote one.  But come Christmas one can expect a small band of urchin singers to give an excellent demonstration of why their evenings are free at this time of year when any of their talented peers are practicing as choristers, through the medium of ‘song’.  A quid, or a bucket of water, are both ideal ways of dispersing the little darlings.

There are some who hold the opinion that ‘Christmas really starts’ when ‘Carols from Kings’ is broadcast by the BBC on Christmas Eve.  I can understand the attraction, a trinity of beloved establishments; the BBC, Christmas Eve, selective education, all coming together.  I myself consider that when ‘Carols from Kings’ comes on, it’s time to turn off the telly, make sure the sherry, mince pie and carrot are near the fireplace, and then go to bed to get in that all important one more sleep ‘till Christmas and, with any luck, a new Action Man.

Carolling starts a lot earlier than Christmas Eve, from about mid-December arrival at, or departure from, many a train station is enlivened by the sound of a group carolling for charity, be they singing or blowing enthusiastically into brass objects.  And it’s not just terminals.  Every Christmas for the last few years I’ve alighted at my local station, the sort of place where people stepping off the train are greeted by a spooky stationmaster who informs them that no train has stopped here for decades, to be confronted by Brownies singing ‘Oh Come All Ye Faithful’ and ‘Oh Little Town of Bethlehem’.  Sometimes simultaneously.

All for a good cause and, it has to be remarked, tremendously festive.

Christmas marks the time when one puts together a Christmas playlist.  Usually exactly the same as the one from last year, possibly reordered a bit, possibly with a new song added provided it meets the Christmas song requirements of sleighbells making an appearance somewhere.

‘Classical Christmas’ is a separate playlist consisting of songs from that CD you got free with a bottle of port a few years ago, and songs from that CD you bought in a moment of weakness because you thought it would be classy to decorate the tree to something festive that doesn’t feature an electric guitar, and which permits you to consider yourself ‘cultured’.

There may also be a CD of carols sung by a classical singer cashing in, featuring an album cover with her, or possibly him, in a frock with a plunging neckline.

Christmas Coffee Cups

A few posts ago, I was ranting about coffee cups and Christmas as a marketing ploy.  Thinking about it, it’s only natural that coffee shops should have seasonal cups.  They’ve been trying to personalise the coffee experience, just like the cola companies have been trying to, and so no wonder that they changed the design of their beverage containers to make us think ‘ahhh, lovely, let me guzzle this and go out and buy another, this is fun!’.

It does lead me to wonder why the hell aren’t these people making a bit more of an effort during the rest of the year.  Christmas is not the main Christian holiday, Easter is, and so why don’t we have special; designs for Easter.  Or for other seasons or holiday, God knows the shops seem pretty bloody keen to sell us stuff related to Halloween, why not cups and cola cans too.  (Honourable exception here, Krispy Kreme, they make one hell of an effort.  I don’t know what’s in that orange icing they use, but it’s practically a legal high).

Given the drive for personalisation of your gulping experience by cola companies and coffee shops alike it is unsurprising that they seek to make the experience special with a seasonally decorated beverage holder.

Gentleman & Player’s favourite though is, you will be unsurprised to learn, the Waitrose coffee cup.

Let’s pause for a second to consider the Waitrose beverage.  If you have a ‘My Waitrose’ card (which is one of those customer loyalty cards that allows, depending on your point of view, either you to get reward points and vouchers and special offers or for the store to build up a profile of you based on your shopping meaning they know what you eat, what you drink, when you go on holiday, what birth control you use, when you menstruate, and can sell all this to, in ascending order of dreadfulness, other companies, foreign powers or Our Own Government!) you can get a free tea or coffee every day.  The idea is of course that you go in there thinking ‘just a free coffee, just a free coffee’, start getting your coffee, think ‘must…be…strong’ and then exit with at the very least a pastry and more likely a 42 inch telly.  Such is the acknowledged power of going to the shops for a bottle of HP sauce and coming back with an HP printer.

The Waitrose seasonal coffee cup is…it’s…well…it’s very Waitrose.  It’s a white reindeer and seasonal scene on a green background.

Two things.

Firstly, tradition.  Apparently, before the evil elves at the marketing department of a certain cola company got busy, the traditional colours of Christmas were green and white, not red and white.  This makes sense, as we have green Christmas trees in the house and the only red traditionally on offer is the breast of a robin and the claret spilled during the traditional family punch up (always after the Queen’s Speech, we’re not savages).

Secondly, it’s just so very classy and understated.

But surely they can do more.  Costa have four different characters, with the occasional variation, Waitrose can turn a cup into a collectable.

Obviously, a simple red dot on the snout of the animal turns a random reindeer into a beloved character.

A tartan bow, and we have a wee ‘Monarch of the Glen’ moment.

For our American Friends, who think nature is best admired when mounted on the wall of their double-wide trailer, a cross hairs on the forehead.  Actually, that’s the Scottish stalking method, if it’s an American, it’ll be a green haze and a line of print along the bottom that reads ‘cluster bomb option selected’.

I actually rather liked the Waitrose coffee cup.  Possibly because it was full of free coffee but probably because it was astatically pleasing.  The reindeer in question actually looked quite jolly, the green (Waitrose corporate colour though it was) was understated but festive, and appropriate, it was the sort of green you might encounter in nature.  Possibly in woods where fir trees grow.  Possibly at night, armed with a hacksaw, I couldn’t possibly comment.

A sobering thought

Christmas is a time of traditions both old and new.  It’s a time of traditions that seem ancient but are actually relatively modern, being that Victoria and Albert essentially invented the modern Christmas, she by having an enormous family to avoid over the Yule period, he by importing Tutonic ideas such as having a Christmas tree indoors instead of in the forest, wood or local car park being sold by Scouts, although thinking about it that last example may be a modern thing.

The idea of a winter celebration of some kind is an ancient one, the idea of a celebration of the birth of Christ is, if not ancient, then at least old rather than antique or vintage.

The practice of panic buying groceries as if you were preparing for a long sea voyage, or stocking your bunker in the event of an apocalypse, just because the shops are closed for one single sodding day, is very much a modern phenomenon.  Not for nothing do Ocado charge customers for Christmas delivery slots, they need the money to pay for all the extra deliveries they have to do, as the entire contents of one van now equates to one delivery.

I rather enjoy Christmas grocery shopping.  It’s pleasant to plan a menu and, for somebody who has the notion that ‘food is love’ as firmly embedded in their mangled excuse for a psyche as I have, buying many nuts for people to enjoy is the closest thing to a public display of affection my repressed self is likely to get.

There are things that one buys only at this time of year, specifically to consume over the festive period.  Not just Brussels sprouts (brussel?  Brussels sounds odd.  No, it’s Brussels, I looked it up.  But they grow those things all over, shouldn’t it be like Champagne and cheese and pork pies and kippers and so on, you can only call a thing a thing if it’s produced in a specific location, like real porn only comes from the Netherlands?  No matter.) and turkey, which if they were tasty we’d all year round, but nuts that require cracking, dates, and fancy cheese.  I love buying a cheeseboard for Christmas.  It’s the one thing you unwrap knowing there won’t be a disappointment.  Cheese is so versatile, you can snack on it at any time, and you can pair it with other festive treats, like pickles, and booze.

The Christmas booze shop is a thing of wonder.  This is when you pair not booze with food, but booze with the company you will be keeping over Christmas.  Planning is essential.

You need to think of others at Christmas.  Specifically, for the purposes of this exercise, you need to think of giving them booze and keeping on giving them booze to make sure that if they are good company they become great company, and if they are poor company they are practically sedated.  Why do you think booze was free for so long on long haul flights?  Passengers are a lot easier to deal with when they are happy or sleepy, or both.  This is the time of year when you buy strong continental lager, brewed under license on an industrial estate in Milton Keynes, in cans, just to keep your student age relatives and adult friends and relations who should know better happy.  It’s the time of year when you buy port, because old ladies like it an you do too, especially when paired with cheese or with reading an M R James story on Christmas Eve.

It’s the time of year when you pick up a bottle of advocaat, think better of it and then replace it.  It’s the time of year when you think about buying a mulled wine kit before wisely recognising that if you want a warm beverage at Christmas, a cuppa will do.

It’s the time of year when your shopping bags can clink on the way to the car and nobody judges you.  Make the most of it.

Enjoy, this is the time of year when it is acceptable to pop a cork at breakfast and traditional to mix with spirits even if your name isn’t Scrooge.

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas

If you needed reminding that the festive season is upon us, you need look no further than your beverage cup.  Cola companies, of course, have a long tradition of festive cans, one even going as far as to adopt the festive colours of red and white as a permanent design feature of their cans (although there is a story that the red and white we now associate with Christmas is in fact a result of that particular cola company imposing their company colour scheme on the season.  Frankly, although the idea is cynical, it’s believable as, asked the questions ‘do you believe in Father Christmas?’ and ‘do you believe those bastards in marketing would even try to hi-jack Christmas for their own evil ends?’, I know which of the two I would be more confident in answering in the affirmative.  Having said that, if a cola company was responsible for the clothing colours of any character beloved of children, then, given the sugar content of the stuff they peddle, I’d of thought the tooth fairy would be a better example).

Cola cans now come in festive designs and, if you like that sort if thing, it’s all very jolly.  Ho Ho Ho.

But the fun doesn’t stop with a tin can.  Coffee cups now come with Christmas characters on them.  Costa are an excellent example of this, with four different designs of paper beaker, a snowman, a reindeer, an elf I think and, possibly, Santa.  Given the design limitations of a receptacle that, to be at all useful, has to have a rather abrupt straight edge to the top, they all look like beloved characters that have been in an industrial accident, but they are sort of jolly all the same.

Naturally, as soon as I saw them, I wanted to ‘collect the set’.  Be advised, drinking four cups of coffee in one day is sensational for productivity, next to useless for producing anything of worth.  You may well be typing like a demon, but the word ‘wheeeeeeeeee’, with another 274 ‘ees’ is not, as I soon discovered, acceptable content for an e mail or text.  At least not on its own.

In case you are wondering, coffee saturation is not best dealt with by drinking alcohol in a classic ‘you give a drunk guy coffee, so it’s best to give an over-stimulated fellow booze, right?’.  That’s the sort of idea you have after your forth store-bought latte.  I discovered.  It doesn’t work.

Elsewhere, the commercial signs of Christmas are everywhere.  The worse thing about them…they work.

Day to day, I have very little interest in port.  If I am at a restaurant and am having the cheese board, I’ll probably order a glass because a socially acceptable way to drink fortified wine and gives you the necessary courage to try the stilton brooding thuggishly and untouched at the end of the slate of cheeses that these bloody people insist you eat from left to right.  However, wandering down the ‘seasonal’ aisle of the supermarket at Christmas (in effect, the entire shop), if I see a half bottle, boxed with a cheese knife and a cheese board, I want it.  I don’t need it, I don’t particularly like it, but I want it.

The same goes for whisky.  I feel manipulated, I should not be thinking ‘must…have…scotch’ just because it comes packaged with a couple of engraved glasses.

In days of yore, Christmas was heralded by perfume adverts on telly (switching, at 5:30 on Christmas Eve, to holiday adverts, because in yore, Dads earned the money and had to be told how to spend it), now, it’s the same stuff you walk past every day, in a new box, that lets you know that the season of peace and goodwill to all men, and especially consumers, is upon us.

Nature Notes Special - Floody Hell!

Water used to be our friend, our playmate.  We shower in the stuff, we add bubbles to it and bath in it, sometimes with candles.  We add bubbles to it and we drink the stuff, sometimes with a slice of lemon.  We water our plants with it, we water ourselves with it, we fill big pools and swim in it, we fill slightly smaller pools and communally bath in it after rugby games.  We even swim with dolphins in it, we like water so much that we can stop thinking 'fish poo' for long enough to splash about with Flipper in it.
Recently though, water has become the implacable foe, the slow creeping menace that inches towards the nation's doorsteps, or the rushing torrent, the same brown as the underwear of anyone unlucky enough to be caught in it.  The floods have come, and come, and come.
It is now, officially, beyond a joke.  What started before Christmas as the 'storm surge' turned to filthy weather at Christmas, leaving people with no power, a big raw turkey and realising that KFC for your Christmas dinner isn't really all that bad, as it means no sprouts and extra chips all round.  Ironically there was an advert doing the rounds over the festive season that posed the question 'can you barbecue a turkey?'.  Yes, you can is the answer, but you'd only know that if you had a telly, meaning you had power, in which case, you wouldn't be wrestling a reluctant barbecue from the back of the shed where it's become entangled with hose pipe, bicycles, cobwebs and the other Summer paraphernalia, but instead sitting snug getting hammered on red and waiting for the oven timer to ping before forgetting to put the scouts on, like any civilised person.
For future reference, yes, you can barbecue a turkey.  A mate of mine did it one year, even though he didn't have to.  A Webber kettle barbecue is best, lots of coals that are well banked for a constant heat, then drink red wine until its ready and you are pissed enough not to notice you've barbecue a turkey.  As with most cooking, it's all in the preparation, in this case, uncorking breakfast.
As the days turned to weeks, the rain continued to fall.  The television showed spectacular pictures of huge waves crashing over sea defences and nightly heart-rending images of flooded front rooms.  There was nothing to be done, it would appear.

Then Prince Charles visited a flooded village.
Several things then happened, very quickly indeed.
The first was that question 'what use is the monarchy in the twenty first century?' was answered, as the Prince got blanket TV coverage and sympathised with the plight of the flooded villagers.  He then, one imagined, 'phoned the prime minister and gave him a Royal bollocking.  Because the next day the prime minister was chairing the government's emergency committee after which the army was deployed.
Following Prince Charles's example, politicians unwisely began popping up in wellies in villages.  Unlike the Prince, they were bollocked by very angry villagers who wondered what the fucking fuck they had been doing for the last few weeks.  Hint: if the answer was not 'filling sandbags' they you looked like a prize tool.
The other question that was answered was 'Is there more to UKIP than racism?'.  Yes, yes there is.  There's stupidity too.  UKIP's leader, Nigel Farage, was seen dressed in what one imagines a repressed country squire might look like, in suspiciously new wax jacket and wellies, droning on about how we should cut the foreign aid budget and use it for flood defences.  The BBC bloke then asked what he was doing to get relief money from Europe, which is available.  The answer - f**k all, Mr Farage apparently believing that the entire structure of the European Union closes down on a Sunday.  Next item on the news, EU officials making a statement about some ruling or other, on a Sunday.
As with many disasters, this adversity has brought out the best in people.  Communities coming together to help one another, the British Army doing their usual spectacular job in crap conditions, and monarchy leading.

Merry Christmas

This should have been all brussel sprouts.  Instead, it's mostly trout.

With the flooding hitting so many people and so many travel plans, it’s clear to see that for many, the pre-Christmas periood is about getting home to see your family, because wherever you live , your home is where your family is.

This migration home was evident on the motorway at the weekend.

One of the best train journeys I ever had was on a Christmas Eve, the carriage looked like a scene from a seasonal Hallmark made for tee vee schmaltsfest, with the luggage rack silver and gold and green and red with wrapped presents poking out of plastic bags, and the travellers either glad to be going home, or glad to be going home for Christmas.  Possibly the general atmosphere of goodwill towards all men was assisted by the noble English tradition of opening the booze at twelve sharp on Christmas Eve, especially if intending to use public transport, but so what?

On the motorway, instead of the usual lone traveller in their car, one could peek into mobile bubbles of Christmas, making their way to relatives.  Back seats were crammed with kids and boots were crammed with presents.  The journey gave rise to an impromptu game of awarding the best presented back sill of a car.  If you are going to totally obscure your rear view, you may as well do so with some jolly packages.

And while a strong contender for most Christmassy car was the one where the lady in the passenger seat had a large, beautifully wrapped box on her lap, the winner without a doubt was the large car with the parents in the front, the kids in the back and the presents and a dog in the large rear boot space.  The dog was well out of sight and reach of any humans and was just beginning to realise this, as it started to carefully shred the wrapping on the box nearest to it.

Loaded cars are part of Chjristmas.  I have friends who make a journey between various family members, clocking up many miles and many hours of radio listening.  They call packing the boot ‘loading up the sleigh’.

With the floods and the rain and the weather stopping trains in the south and ferries in the north, it’s taking some people a lot of effort to get to their loved ones. But weather your present is beautifully wrapped, or in the dog, or just their presence, it’s worth it.

Here's to all the travelers - may they arrive safely to a warm welcome.

Merry Christmas!

Postcard from Winchester

The Christmas market, a feature of many European towns, as indeed are markets.  English markets are, traditionally, the place you go to buy fresh veg and knock-off DVDs, most other shopping taking place in the supermarket or on-line.  There is, however, a growing taste for Christmas Markets that may or may not be linked directly to a growing taste for hot sausage and mulled wine from November onwards.  If Sainsbury’s had discovered in 1974 that all you needed to keep customers coming back was to serve them alcohol and hot sausage while they shopped, the world might be a very different place, with lots less Tesco in it.

Birmingham has an enormous Christmas market.  The press used to have an annual story of reporting that the council has re-branded Christmas as ‘Winterval’, however, realising that a) nobody actually believed this for a second and b) even if they did, nobody cared, the press now report annually that Birmingham’s German Market is causing friction because it takes trade away from the rest of the traders in Birmingham.  I don’t know if this is true but I can make an assumption – it’s not.  This assumption is made not on the number of times I have visited Birmingham’s Christmas Market (once, I had a hot sausage, it was lovely) but on the number of times I have visited Christmas markets in general both here and in Europe and, unless Birmingham’s resident traders get rid of all of the stock they sell for the other eleven months of the year and stock wooden Christmas tree decorations, scented candles, warm wine or hot sausage, then I really don’t see that the German Market is going to be taking an awful lot of trade away from the Bull Ring.

Winchester has a Christmas Market, and it’s well worth a visit, also obviously the opinion of everyone that lives in the South of England.  Staying for the weekend in the centre of the city, I was lucky enough to be able to visit early in the morning and late in the evening and to get there on foot.  It was charming, it was lively and if you wanted either scented candles or wooden Christmas tree decorations, it was the place to be.  I’m not sure it would have had quite the same charm if you had arrived after ten o’clock, failed to get parked, eventually got parked, walked to the Christmas Market and discovered a crowd roughly the size of the ones normally associated with the overthrowing of despots, but tetchier.

Winchester though is an exceptionally charming town and this year, as well as having that extra jingle-scented sparkle that comes with the season, there was an added attraction.

‘Sound II’ is a sculpture by Anthony Gormley that stands in the crypt of Winchester cathedral.  The crypt itself is devoid of decoration; white stone, with Normal arches.  Apart from the statue it is unremarkable except for having that sense of peace that buildings that measure their span in millennia acquire.  It is, however, prone to flooding and when there has been rain in the chalk hills surrounding Winchester, then a couple of weeks later the crypt first becomes damp, then wet, then home to a foot or two of standing water.

Which Sound II stands in, the figure upright and holding a bowl, listening to the sound of his soul, standing up to his knees in water.

I have never been anywhere quite like it.  The sense of quiet, of stillness, is quite extraordinary, as people automatically either lower their voices or edit anything unnecessary out of their conversation.  One could stand and stare for hours, or do the next best thing and take many photographs to look at later.

Above ground, the Christmas Market is hustle, bustle, and in fairness charming if busy, with the shopkeepers resident in posh garden sheds looking for all the world like elves running an arts and craft business.  Below ground, silence and stillness.  And all around, people moving from shop to shop and stall to stall, looking for a gift that will make a loved one’s face light up on Christmas Day, or at least a hot sausage.