Obiter Dicta

Tuesday December 6^th

No point in continuing to avoid it; it’s becoming impossible, anyway. Bloody Christmas again. King Herod is a much misunderstood man. He had a lot of good ideas going at one stage. Made the camels run on time, and all that. If he’d got his way, I wouldn’t have to put up with shops playing twee CDs of carols and Christmas songs. Or  seasonal delights like Strictly Come Dancing and the X factor.  Or jolly red-faced farts being plump-full of good will to all men.

What I hate about it, what I really utterly LOATHE about it, is the fact that you don’t have a choice. For those such as I, who are basically shrinking violets, who are not in the least Hail-Fellow-Well-Met (more Well-Fellow-Piss-Off-And-Leave-Me-In-Peace), who could just about tolerate all this spurious religious jollity if it were only for the three days of Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day, but who are obliged to tolerate it from an earlier date in the calendar with each passing year (this year Advent started after the cricket season finishe there should be a Not the Christmas Holiday. A Massacre of the Innocents Holiday or something. 

Is there any foodstuff in the world more bland and tasteless than turkey? Why the hell are we expected to consume this crap on Christmas Day? I’ll tell you this, boy: when Bob Cratchit’s family in Camden Town were sent the biggest turkey in the shop, I’m willing to wager that Mrs. Cratchit, in her twice-turned gown but brave in ribbons, took one look at it and told the poulterer’s boy to shove it where the sun don’t shine, and bring her a top goose,  something with a bit of a tang to it, toot de sweet - and the tooter de sweeter. Then she shut the door and, when Bob asked her who she’d been speaking to, said, “That old bastard Scrooge sent us a turkey. Time you were handing in your notice Bob and putting our names down for the work’us.”

Why, in God’s name, turkey? Why not Shepherds Pie? Altogether more appropriate. Or Straw in a Manger? Ox and Ass Goulash. Donkey Escalope.

But of all the teeth-grindingly awful conventions associated with the Season to be Jolly, fala-lala-la, nothing for me beats THE SECRET SANTA. It is now a ‘western Christmas tradition’ according to Wikipedia. A very recent ‘tradition’, unless I am mistaken. I first came across it in my teaching days when a gung-ho, jolly-hockeysticks sort of female teacher suggested we participate in this Roedean idea of fun as a staff. I sneered so much, I had to pull my top lip out of my left ear. Then, when I was a psychiatric orderly, the staff on the ward did it too.

I didn’t. Not then. Not before. Not ever. I never once participated in this wooflingly vapid exercise. I don’t want a cheap piece of tat that some numbskull thinks is what I would like for a fiver. Or that the same numbskull thinks is a ‘joke’ present for a man like me.  I mean it. There’s little I want or need, from the people who count; those I love. Spare me the strainings of the costive sense of humour of some halfwit…ach.

You get the point.

On another tack entirely, I got my authorial copies of my book yesterday – a box of nice spanking new first-edition copies of The Locked Ward, all nicely hardbacked and with a jacket bearing my mugshot and a real ISBN number and everything. I’ve got them all stood up on the shelf behind the bed. Makes the bedroom look like a Locked Ward bookshop. Now, there’s a Christmas present right up my alley.

Here’s to the next time.

Oh, and – rest you merry.