Three
days to Christmas. All presents wrapped and safely stashed behind
the tree. I had three to wrap. It took two hours, and I ended up
with yards of ruined golden striped paper and with shards of sellotape sticking to
each of my fingers. The finished presents looked as if they had
simply been rolled up, like dough, and flung against a wall to give
them some sort of shape. Christmas music blares out over the
speakers. The current account lies snugly in the red. No more
Christmas cards to write, nor, for that matter, to receive.
Neighbours have finished sidling up to the front door, hoping not to
be seen, and posting minuscule cards that must have cost about a penny each through the letter-box. The cards invariably say 'Best wishes from all at number 17.' I have done the same, only
I waited until it was dark and I wore a balaclava.
Christmas lights
adorn many of the hedges and trees of the houses in the street. One
neighbour went so far as to climb fifteen feet up a ladder and
festoon his leylandii with red, green and gold lamps, like sets of Lilliputian traffic lights. Oneupmanship in the
community is alive and well. The same chap has the number of his
house engraved on a block of sandstone and planted firmly in his
front garden.
Outside, the temperature is twelve degrees and
everything is soaking wet after several days of more or less constant rain. The birds look
thoroughly bedraggled and fed up. The squirrel keeps stealing their fat, contained
in half a coconut and hanging from the winter cherry tree. A wren
scratches around in the border looking for something, anything, to
eat amongst the sodden porridge of wet leaves. Fat and ungainly wood
pigeons peck around the bird table at the back of the garden, finding
the odd crumb or seed that was carelessly scattered when they ate
their breakfast.
The Christmas edition of the Radio Times, thick as
a telephone directory, lies handily on the coffee table. We are about
to be bombarded with endless repeats, schmaltzy films and Doctor Who.
Turkey and brussels sprouts wait in the freezer to be cooked and
consumed to order on the great day itself. I never much cared for
turkey. It often tasted like I was eating a piece of string. Now it
will be on the menu for several days – with baked potatoes, then cauliflower cheese, then
side salad, finally in sandwiches. At least we haven't got to the
level of putting the disjecta membra of the bird into a pan, adding
an Oxo cube and making soup.
I checked my stock of board games.
They're not inspiring. A DVD version of 'Who Wants To Be A
Millionaire,' a spin-off of 'Call My Bluff' and an idiotic game where
you are handed a card with a song title on it and you have to hum the
tune so that other players can guess it will hardly see us through
the festive season. The last-named, incidentally, usually results in
the hummer breaking down in helpless fits of laughter, or making such
an appalling job of the tune that you guess 'Fairytale of New York'
is the theme from 'Grandstand'. For someone whose sole object in
playing these foolish games is to win, these absurdities merely serve
to irritate and to sharpen further already shredded nerves. There is
always 'Scrabble' of course, but that leads to furious arguments
about the validity of the words. 'Of
course 'Vaisya' is a word', I say, 'It's a Hindu of the upper caste'.
'No it's not,' the others say, 'We've never heard of it. In any
case, it's not allowed, because it's a proper name.' 'No it isn't,'
I reply, 'it's a noun.' 'Fetch the dictionary,' someone says. The
dictionary is one of those pocket things that contains about a fifth
of the words in the English language and, of course, 'Vaisya' is not
one of them, so I end up losing, being overhauled for the lead when one of the others finishes with a sixty-point triple-word score with the word 'Zydeco', which turns out to be a Louisianian folk dance which, by some miracle, is in
the dictionary. No wonder Christmas is fraught with tension.
However, it's here again, it will always be here, and it's up to us all to make the best of it.
