Tag: Christmas

Twenty Twenty Three

Jan 2nd, 2023

Christmas passed off nicely in our tiny corner of the north Norfolk coast. Sid’s interest in astronomy gathered pace after I told him that the stars flash and change colour during the festive season, and he picked up some agricultural experience as a shepherd in a local nativity play. Elsewhere, I thought the King did well in his first Christmas speech. I was still eating dinner when it started, so stood in the doorway to the front room so I could see the telly while leaning back into the dining room to chew when he was off camera, so as not to be disrespectful. At one point the dog acted in a potentially treasonous manner by barking at a wandering horse outside while he was talking, however, I suspect it was a republican horse and in any case King Charles is named after a type of spaniel so I am sure he wouldn’t have minded.

At work, I was able to tell patients that we’d got them a stent for Christmas, but we’ve kept the receipt in case it isn’t the one they wanted, and so forth. This was against the backdrop of the Training Mania outlined here and here, still raging like wildfire to the probable dismay of our Minor Injuries Unit, which deals with burns patients. As a shortlisted candidate, I have to present the school certificates I don’t have to the selection panel on Wednesday. There has been a great deal of to-ing and fro-ing in my quest to find these. Not getting a job because you make a mess of the interview is fair enough, but not getting the interview because your education authority no longer exists and there have been too many Bank Holidays to make alternative provision would be a bit annoying. I’d have to leave and be a social worker instead, and I don’t want to do that because at least when you deal with people in the hospital, there is a chance of them getting better.

The year closed with a blizzard of Star Wars Lego and an afternoon of classic war films with Sid, who thinks Hitler and Darth Vader are the same person. This did not prevent him from raising philosophical questions regarding the nature of good and bad during the Battle of Britain. Struggling to think of a definition that would make sense to someone who has just turned six, I focussed upon the difference between action and intent, which after all is the basis of law in a civilised country. Therefore, the German pilots are doing a bad thing but are not necessarily bad people, and so on. He seemed happy enough with this, pointing out that another way to tell the good guys is that they always play the badpipes, as per the arrival of the 92^nd Highlanders in Waterloo. I agreed that, yes, this is probably true and, thusly armed, we marched into 2023.

Picters:

Main: Badpipers arriving at the battle of Waterloo.

Top inset: Leads, for wearing in the room during procedures.

Lower inset: 05:30, and about to set off on the commute.
Herbie Rides Again

Jan 16th, 2021

2020 was a difficult year to love, as you may have noticed, and thus far 2021 isn’t shaping up to be much of a giggle, either. As I discovered shortly before Christmas, you can’t even try and do something nice, such as visit your old dear to reminisce about Christmases past over Gold Blend and shortbread fingers, without someone driving their fucking car through the garden wall. I use the word ‘driving’ generously, because there was no one actually in the car at the time. The owner appeared a few moments later, with the happy-go-lucky explanation it wasn’t really her fault. I mused aloud that it must be someone’s fault, because her ‘…Ford Focus isn’t fucking Herbie, is it?’, referencing a self-driving Volkswagon from an obscure cinema franchise that I had forgotten about until that moment. What had happened, she said, was this: she had parked and nipped into the shop, but the car’s handbrake had then disengaged itself, causing it to reverse out from between two other cars and down a hill, whereupon it turned right and mounted the pavement, before 9/11-ing my old dear’s garden. I said that seeing that as this was obviously a miracle, we should leave the car where it is and charge people to touch it for good luck. With the concept of plausibility looking on in stunned silence, she drove out of the garden again. I offered directions in case she wanted to finish the job by parking in the kitchen, but there was no further calamity.

The incident raised the ethical question of whether calling the insurance people counted as snitching – something that, to say the least of it, we frown upon in our family. Back in the living room, we weighed the evidence. By way of opening remarks, I suggested that having insurance in the first place could be considered Intent to Snitch and that, if my old dear hadn’t been looking over her shoulder since taking the policy out, she is already at ease with snitching as a concept. Furthermore, if this was the case, she could no longer have Sid round after nursery, because I will not have a grass in the family. She countered with the assertion that insurance is for burst pipes and what not, and not people talking panicky nonsense about traffic accidents. I seized upon a compromise: I had asked the woman if there was ‘anything she wanted to tell me about’ off the record that might help us settle the matter between ourselves, instead of trying to play us for chumps. She had declined to do so, sticking to her story. Therefore, I concluded, we were snitching on the car for crashing itself, which is no worse than snitching on the pipe in my old dear’s example for bursting itself all over the upstairs landing. Satisfied, I set about ringing the insurance company which, I have discovered, is significantly more annoying than having a Ford Focus take out sixteen feet of garden wall. Happily, they are going to pay out, and everyone around here who isn’t a dog or a horse is a handyman of some description, so it should be alright.

Sid, and the several tons of Christmas presents my old dear had bought him, were the main focus of our pre-incident conversation, of course. He is growing fast and describes himself as ‘not a baby, but a tobbler’ when he is in fact a bona fide little man who can almost spell Christmas, despite his insistence that the middle part of the alphabet is ‘H I J K mellow mellow P’. This academic breakthrough was not enough to avert another tiny COVID Yuletide tragedy when, shortly after eight thirty in the evening of the 23^rd, he thumped downstairs, hid under the dinner table and then, in a hysterical, gulping, sobbing, wailing outburst explained that he had ‘been up all night’ and missed Father Christmas because his bedroom doesn’t have a ‘…chin me for him to come down’. I explained that chimneys don’t really exist and that Father Christmas would come through the lean-to by the back door like everyone else. After half an hour of Elf he fell asleep reassured and, when Christmas finally arrived, had a lovely time.

The same cannot be said of many other residents of North Norfolk. Being remote, a tiny bit creepy, but undeniably glorious, it is a great place to forget about a world that often, in return, appears to have forgotten about it. It also showed itself to also be a great place for people from the nicer London boroughs to forget about how a virus is transmitted, as hundreds of them descended on the place in hastily-purchased luxury caravans, elevating the region from the lowest rate of infection in the country to the second highest, behind only London itself. There are now no functioning medical services within thirty miles of where I am sitting. Still, the incoming Bens and Lauras are right to blame the Government, as they assuredly will – like many of us, I was appalled when the Prime Minister told them to fuck off to the countryside and directly contribute to the deaths of vulnerable people by tactically annihilating the NHS they are so fond of banging on about. Flashing blue lights now regularly illuminate Sid’s bedroom at night, and he likes to count the ambulances, more common than agricultural machinery – which is very common indeed – as they trawl up and down the inland road. I’ve never been entirely convinced by the general coronavirus narrative, but something out there is certainly happening, and happening often. I feel like someone in Pompeii looking on curiously as the first specks of ash begin to gather on the roof.

Chin up, though. I have volunteered to cycle around the frozen lanes delivering medicines and such to the elderly and isolated, and feel that I am, in a small way, fighting back. ‘Elderly and isolated’ does not necessarily equal vulnerable, incidentally. I discovered this via a lady who has lived in the same house for 87 years and refuses any help whatsoever, including me delivering her medicine. I offered to throw it into the garden so she could find it herself, explaining that I do this with the dog and a chicken leg sometimes and he loves it. After some to-ing and fro-ing, we agreed that I would leave it just outside her garden gate so technically she is still getting it herself, but won’t risk renal failure trying to fish it out of her pond, and she agreed that yes, this was a good compromise, and that I was a very clever young man. This was on New Year’s Eve, and to see 2020 off I drank two bottles of rioja in front of Withnail and I, which seemed appropriate. With the first days of 2021 annoying almost everyone, I have been heartened by the actions of Suffield Park post office, whose employees refuse to take down their enormous Christmas tree and the strings of fairy lights criss-crossing the road outside because ‘…it’s something a bit bloody cheerful’. And yes, it is. It looks really nice. Well done. We should all do it.

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Photards

Main: Oh for fucks sake.

Top inset: Dog in snow. Considering he belongs to a breed intended to chase animals across the Egyptian Sahara until they collapse, he is surprisingly delighted by snow.

Middle inset: Can’t even keep an extremely heavy jumpoline at the end of the garden without a freak coastal storm almost demolishing the house with it these days.

Lower inset: Sid and my old dear, before the Pestilence.
Death On The Sofa

Dec 11th, 2020

And so the useless days grind by, a living death on the sofa. Well, I say that, but I have been able to binge watch The Crown on Netflix, so that’s something. I’ve mainly done this with Nid, whose nursery has temporarily closed, and he enjoys it although, as a monarchist, I insist we stand up whenever the Queen comes on, which he finds tiring after a while. I’ve also used our unexpected time together to introduce the phrase ‘Get off me, you bender’ to his vernacular, so that should be a talking point at the next parents’ evening. In addition, I make up stories for him, although unlike pretty much every other parent who does this I don’t now consider myself a budding children’s author as a result. No, The Phantom Flying Bum of Old London Town is unlikely to get beyond our Norfolk cottage, where we chart sightings of this portent of non-specific doom in an old A-Z from the cupboard under the telly. Between that, his frequent renditions of Old McFarmer Had A Dog and maintaining Government advice to count to twenty while washing his hands, which I’ve trained him to do in under five seconds, we wander through the days.

As if this were not excitement enough, sports fans will be pleased to note that I have also commenced his boxing training with a simple jab-jab-cross combination. I boxed – well, let’s not get carried away, I trained and sparred with the people who actually did the boxing – till I was 22, and it was great. The development has been met with particular approval from ‘Anton’ who, for many of our market trading years, was obsessed with how he might defend himself when societal breakdown engulfs the streets of Maidstone, where he lived before moving to Leeds, where it has already happened. I would usually point out that under those circumstances you would just carry a gun, although getting insurance for it might be difficult. ‘That was a surprise for you, wasn’t it Daddy?’, Nid correctly concluded one afternoon, shortly after belting me in the face unannounced as the Queen stopped Princess Margaret marrying RAF Group Captain Peter Townshend, later of the Who. Princess Margaret, always referred to as ‘that poor cow, Princess Margaret’ by my old dear, instead went on to marry Lord Snowdon, who was a dick. Checking for nosebleeds, I explained the importance of not getting thrown out of nursery for punching people and having to stay home till proper school

starts, thereby causing Daddy to lose his fucking mind. Still, it was a good solid punch, and he seemed chuffed with it. You reap what you sow, I suppose.

As is by now apparent, it is in everyone’s interest that I find regular employment soon. There is little of this in Norfolk, unless you want to be an agricultural labourer in what Nid refers to as the sugarbeef fields or work up the Council. I’d prefer the latter obviously, because at least you’re indoors, although neither particularly appeals. Ho hum. As ever, it is Socialism for the rich and Capitalism for everyone else, to paraphrase Martin Luther King. With this in mind, and with the countdown to dashing through the snow in one whore’s open sleigh now upon us, the annual conversation in which I fail to persuade Joe to start a Christmas decorating business with me has taken place. In these troubled times, I’m sure the public would be delighted and entranced by two blokey and clearly enthusiastically heterosexual men pretending to be gay in order to appear less threatening traipsing around the front room with tinsel and what not, with some of Joe’s kids in tow dressed up as elves. In fact, this conversation is such a traditional part of the calendar that I’m reasonably sure I have mentioned it here before. Anyway. Putting up Christmas decorations for lazy people could work, once the main obstacles of us not wanting to do it, and the other main obstacle of no one else wanting us to do it either, were overcome, but I suspect the idea will once again be shelved.

Other recent brainstorms included literally becoming saints. This, too, is not without a few rocks on the runway – for example, not being Catholic and therefore not believing in saints is a bit of a stumbling block. Also, according to Joe’s degree in Comparative Theology, enjoying a moment of usefulness for the first time since the late 1990s, we would also need to perform two verifiable miracles to qualify. While I have done some pretty remarkable things in my time – for example, I ate three boxes of chocolate fingers last week when feeling poorly, which Nid put down to having a dog in my tummy and sad arms, there has been little in the way of the verifiably miraculous. In light of my chocolate finger achievement, Joe suggested I do a reverse Feeding of the Five Thousand, whereby a load of people turn up by the Sea of Galilee with lots of food, and I eat it all. Obviously, travel restrictions bought about by Coronavirus would prevent that happening, so unless being Norfolk-based Cockney urchins becomes recognised by the Vatican as a path to sainthood, which I am reluctantly forced to admit is unlikely, stained glass windows may forever be unadorned by our image. On the other hand, as a saint, your work only tends to be recognised several hundred years after an arduous life and horrible death, which is bugger all use to us. All in all, being a saint seems a bit of a carry on, especially if you have to fit it around your kids, which we would have to, and I can see why most of them were single.
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Photos:

Main – Fat horse in a field.

Top inset: Joe’s van, which will have to get a bit more festive before we can run a Christmas decorating business out of it.

Middle inset: Lucky prosperity-bringing Chinese cat in our kitchen. Must see if we still have the receipt for it.

Lower inset: Euston Station and surrounding areas, where the Phantom Flying Bum of Old London Town was spotted boarding the Northern Line southbound to Colliers Wood.
Reindeer, Abba and Solitude

Dec 18th, 2017

Runton Hall is not the only stately home in Norfolk. There are others, and at this time of year many of them put ‘enchanted’ in front of their name, string lights all over the place and let reindeer loose in the grounds for the delight of local children. At Runton as December deepens, Joe and Becka dress their numerous offspring as Christmas puddings, whereupon the smaller ones are rolled around like marbles by their older siblings, no matter much they cry and/or throw up. Elsewhere, ‘Anton’ can often be heard shouting at a peacock to fuck off. This is Sebastopol the Peacock, Runton’s mascot, hated by all and fortunate to dodge the festive roasting tin. There are other reasons I feel that ‘Runton’ and ‘enchanted’ do not sit easily in the same sentence. Certainly, it looks nice if you like endless skies, meadows silver’d with frost, birch trees in the midday mist and all the other things that make the countryside so insufferable. At heart though, Runton is a workplace, and better for it. In any case, if a reindeer wandered around Runton, Graham would shoot it – that’s why Santa comes here last.

One of the years that the shooting of a reindeer would’ve caused me irreparable psychological damage is 1977, when I believe Douggie Muggeridge was head of scheduling at Radio 2. I was barely conscious of anything at the time, but his decision to broadcast the best selling singles of the year on Christmas morning still reverberates in my yuletide Spotify playlist, because whenever I hear Abba’s Name Of The Game, I smell cardboard. The cardboard was the box to something I was unwrapping, and amid the delirious excitement were Abba and their six part harmonies about bashful children and seeing someone twice in a short time, and a Christmas association was born. Played next that morning would have been Mull of Kintyre by Paul McBeatle, which replaced Name Of The Game at number one, and to which I credit my genuine love of bagpipe music. It was a significant ten minutes in a tiny life, and both tunes, yuletide playlist stalwarts, are as Christmassy to me as mistletoe and mittens.

They appear after a selection of Carols from King’s College, Cambridge. I am fond of these, even though they tend to show off – I’m not sure we need lengthy fanfares before Oh Come All Ye Faithful and Hark The Herald Angels Sing, and I don’t like how they muck about with Silent Night. Myself, I prefer Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht in the original Hun, having heard it one Christmas eve at Berlin cathedral, and it sits in the playlist after I Saw Three Ships, rendered as ‘I Saw Three Gits’ at Camden when announcing the approach of Stanton, Plastic Dave and the Goat Bag Man. Also featured is Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau* by the redoubtable Rhos male voice choir. This is to remember a Welsh yule during which, standing at a bus stop bathed in melodic, robust singing from a flint church opposite, I overheard two boys tell a third that they ‘had bought Nana a lighter for Christmas’ and a mother tell her small daughter that ‘you don’t want to sing in a choir, Bronwen – you want to work for Money Supermarket’, who at that time had a call centre in the area. I hope Bronwen does not forever associate Ding Ding Merrily On High, which the flint church choir were singing, with feelings of disappointment in the same way that I associate Name Of The Game with the smell of cardboard. Then again, it is one of the few carols I do not like – it is ridiculous – so perhaps it’s for the best.

My playlist has permeated the Old Servants’ Quarters, where ‘Anton’ and I are tidying up a couple of bits prior to departing for Christmas. Other than us, Runton is almost deserted. The film crew are long gone. The yoga groups are not back until January. Even the conspiracy theorists have gone home to tiresomely point out over and over again that Christmas is the Christian appropriation of a Pagan festival, overlooking the fact that before that it was the Pagan appropriation of a perfectly ordinary day of the week. Joe, Becka and their numerous children are housesitting elsewhere for the duration. Graham is still here, feeding some animals and killing others, but his children are with their mother, who he refers to as Stabby Onassis, in a caravan on Harlow Common. ‘Anton’ leaves for Deptford tomorrow, and while there are things I could be doing about the place over the festive season, I am simply too frightened to be here on my own, being a civilised person in the middle of nowhere. The whole point of civilisation is to eradicate the middle of nowhere, something that passes most country people by. Leaving aside intelligence and overall physical attractiveness, attitudes towards solitude are the major difference between urban dwellers, typically engaged in honest toil, producing the Excel spreadsheets and Powerpoint presentations that benefit us all, and their country counterparts, scratching about in fields and polishing cattle. I would find being at Runton alone terrifying because there is no one around for miles. A country person would find it comforting, for exactly the same reason. In turn, this reminds us that there is a serious side to Britain leaving the EU, all-too-easily lost amid the amusing spectacle of Guardian readers dying of rage and shrillness: after Brexit, we’ll have to subsidise our country folk ourselves, without seven hundred and fifty million other Europeans doing it for us. This, surely, is madness.

*Land Of My Fathers

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Photards:

Main: Runton donkeys having a lovely time.

Inset top: Christmas tree, Leadenhall Market, London EC1. Often, my last trading of the year would take place here, a frantic three hours of shifting as much stock as possible before walking up Bishopsgate and into the Duke of Wellington public house, Toynbee Street, London E1 for a ‘Christmas Feast’ courtesy of Vinny the Landlord. This would consist of a perfectly ordinary fried egg sandwich with a tiny sprig of plastic holly on top, served with a hearty ‘Ho ho ho – that’s three pounds fifty’.

Inset middle: Berlin cathedral. I don’t know who the people are.

Inset lower: The market place at North Walsham. My bikes are maintained in North Walsham by Dr Wheelgood, who has a small shop near this very picture.