The 12 Myths of Christmas

Let’s get a few things straight.  In fact, let’s get about 12 things straight, 12 Christmas myths that frolic around in the social ether like aimless snowflakes of disingenuousness.

Firstly, Christmas NOT being about Jesus anymore is not a BAD thing, and the reason why it’s not a BAD thing is because – and I’ll try to say this without jumping onto the fashionably militant atheist bandwagon of furiously trite pseudo-profundities – Jesus is a load of tosh.  Sorry if you believe in it, but without a shred of logical evidence or even a cigarette-paper-thin slice of POSSIBILITY that there is anything more to Jesus than a delusional Derren Brown who happened to be born into a society of incredible ignorance and superstition, I cannot begin to tolerate such pretensions.  Ditch the angels and stick a TARDIS on top of your Christmas tree (which I have, actually, this year), because Christmas Day is Doctor Who Day.  Fuck you if you think it’s a kids’ programme.  That’s just an unwarranted playground cuss, lazily flopped about by those with a gripe against too many other people enjoying something that they themselves happen to not enjoy.

Secondly, the time you spend ruminating over which Christmas card design is the most appropriate for all the people who will end up receiving it from you and your bumper box of identical cards is hugely disproportional to even the combined time that all of those recipients will spend looking at it.  It’ll be envelope open to card open to “oh it’s from those fuckers we never see” to mantelpiece in less than two seconds.  I couldn’t tell you what even ONE of the Christmas cards in my house has on it as a design (unless it happens to be particularly odd, like having a dog chewing a present open or something bizarrely un-Christmas like that) and it could well be that they’ve all got pictures of turds on, I wouldn’t know.

Thirdly, and still on the theme of cards, you are not a GOOD person because you choose to buy charity cards.  Have you ever read how much of the price is donated to charity?  Usually, peanuts.  So, you’re fooled into thinking that you’ve been morally erect and a paragon of altruistic righteousness and therefore you’ve done your bit and you don’t need to actually GIVE to charity or DO something for anyone who might need charity, because you’ve just allowed 30p of the retail price of a £5 box of cards to go to the NSPCC.

Fourthly, to batter down the inflated smugness of those who might have agreed with points 2 and 3 above and thus decided to Facebook everyone with the “we’re not sending cards this year, we’re making a donation to charity” get-out clause, can I just say one thing?  You lazy cunts.  Why can’t you give to charity AND send some bloody cards?  Oh, is it because you think it’s a waste of money and planetary resources sending cards, so you save on the latter and redirect the former to a worthier cause?  Well done you!  You’ve spread a worthy message and converted those of us living in the dark ages of consumerism and waste, so that now I too will save on at least one card, one envelope and one stamp, because I can guiltlessly cross you off my fucking Christmas card list.

The fifth myth of Christmas that I wish to burn to coal like the parsnip that fell down the back of the oven is yet another card-related snot-drop of fatuousness, and that’s the empty sentiment of the phrase “we must meet up in the New Year!”  Let’s be honest, this actually means, “I do like you, clearly enough to send you a card, but not enough to be arsed to leave my house and travel to an agreeable rendezvous location in order to converse with you, I didn’t last year and I am not going to next year, but if some force of nature flung us together, without any effort on either of our parts, for a short time, then it wouldn’t be unpleasant.”  And we put them off another year and then one year one of you will be dead and the other will muse on how you “should’ve met up.”

The sixth myth of Christmas is this:  Christmas songs are NOT annoying.  Stop being so bloody miserable!  They’re better than adverts and radio jingles and when they stay stuck in your head for days on end they give you a warm feeling, and not that warm piss feeling you had when you wet the bed as a kid, which then turns to horror as it cools and the realisation hits you, no, that’s what NOVELTY pop songs do to you.  Christmas songs are cosy familiar echoes of a past stripped of all its bitterness and misery.  I hated Wham when I was 13 (OBVIOUSLY) but I love Last Christmas.  I squirm with prudish discomfort at Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s video for Relax, but The Power of Love makes me weep.  And when I hear Walking in the Air I block out the memories of 1980s casual homophobia and the application of the Aled Jones insult to any boy at school who hadn’t quite met an accepted level of manliness, and I wallow in a snow-tinted nostalgia of Sunday evening tea in front of the telly, with the Woolworth Christmas tree lights flickering and the taste of Advocaat and lemonade and cigarette smoke in the air.

Finally, the seventh myth of Christmas, is that there aren’t 12 myths and furthermore, 12 of anything is too much.  Unless it’s those pig-in-blankets things, you know, the thin sausages wrapped in bacon that taste so good alongside turkey?  Jesus, I love those!

Merry Christmas, you bastards.

THIS.IS.THE.BASTARD.NEWS

“NELSON MANDELA IS… (only-just-perceptible pause for dramatic effect) …DEAD!”

The ITV News presenter was rolling around in the enormity of the headline like a coke-fuelled toddler in a ball pit.  He spat the line with Shakespearean tragic aplomb, as if we HADN’T been expecting this news for several years; but, more annoyingly, as if the news wasn’t in itself important enough to elicit emotion without such a crass whiff of sensationalism.

What’s wrong with, “Nelson Mandela has died”?  It is factual, objective and allows the listener to choose their own emotion in response.  I like “has died.”  We should use “has died” more often.  I wouldn’t advocate swinging so far away from “is dead” to some kind of twee euphemism like “has passed away” which carries all the nonsensical ballast of the fucking after-life as to suggest that we’d need Derek Acorah reading that particular news item.

And then we had SKY News, equalling ITV in its fondness for either sugar-coating or shit-coating each news item, coaxing us into staying tuned for “MANDELA – THE FUNERAL.”  There was even a trailer to this film.  It clearly looked like it would be an epic.  So good, in fact, that SKY executives were probably commissioning a creative team to brainstorm ideas for “MANDELA – THE FUNERAL 2.”

So, why is it that I watch the news with an expectation of being informed and those silly cunts who work in telly have decided that I should be entertained?  Because that’s what it is – entertainment.  That’s how it’s conceived, presented and edited – like a fucking variety show.  Perhaps because it’s all 24 hours now.

My favourite most galling feature of any particular such “News Show” is the sharing of viewers’ tweets and texts, as if another viewer would actually give a shit.  Do I want to know what Susan from Slough says about Mandela’s death, or do I want a sound-bite from someone who might have actually known him and is therefore ten trillion times more relevant than soppy Susan, who must suffer from some kind of social ineptitude to have even contemplated tweeting her comments to these telly folk.  (Oh look, they read out my tweet on telly, I’m famous!)

Groan.

The Terrible Beauty of Bastard Routine (Part Two)

This is going to be one of those blog posts that I write and make public with some degree of trepidation, anticipating a silent response confined to the minds of its readers which will most likely include feelings of pity and disdain; because this is the confession of an uptight and irritable human automaton as to how he spends a typical weekend.  I know what I am, a creature of habit, riled by the insignificant flaws in life’s rich tapestry and spurning all the clichéd measures of what our society deems to be necessary factors in LIVING LIFE TO THE FULL.  I aim my arrows of ambition at a cheap Argos dartboard of CONTENTMENT and demonstrate no interest in reaching for the sky or the stars as Douglas Bader and Steps might have encouraged.

Friday evening I return from work, moistened by an hour’s moderately-paced squash with my friend Tim, consequently confident that my weight-loss app will now credit me enough calories to eat and drink whatever the fuck I like that night.  Routinely, this means wine.  If the “squash with Tim” confession hasn’t already painted a picture of a middle-class bastard, then the suburban domesticity that has led to me unshackling myself from the beer-drinking conditioning of my youth must surely give you a clue.  Secondly – but only every few weeks, because we’re not fucking rolling in it, here in St Albans – we order a Chinese (same order every time) and sit in front of the telly gorging and boozing ourselves into a stupor  (I usually nod off during Graham Norton, despite the garish orange of the set burning into my retinas and the shrill laughter piercing my ear-drums like a maniacal Banshee).  This is quality family time.  Our boy, being 17, is usually out behaving better than this, but myself, Mrs B and our daughter will battle for control of the channels, with me coming out the loser and having to record whatever music shows are on BBC4 in favour of whatever tripe-for-eyes the females of the household wish to relax to.

Saturday morning arrives at about 9 am with lethargy, a dry mouth and a mild heaviness of the head.  Eventually, I will employ myself with the task of doing the housework, just like every modern man who is robbed of his need to hunt and fight and make things and who cannot ACTUALLY relax in a messy house, even though the perpetrators of nearly all of that mess can and would.  Yes, I am sorry to say, just for a couple of hours on these mornings, I fight back the loathing I have for the habits of those I love most, the untidy buggers.

The kitchen is cleared and swept and made in some respect more hygienic than a backstreet abattoir for plague-ridden Medieval dogs, before I move onto tidying and dusting and polishing the downstairs.  I studiously avoid getting any more polish on the new flat-screen HD telly, because within a week of buying the thing (having held out for years waiting for the old cathode ray tube antique to expire), I noticed a cloudy patch covering half the screen, reminiscent of a large piss-stain on a white bed-sheet, a point of ironic misadventure that galls me on a daily basis now.

The sound of dried sweetcorn kernels and other sizeable acrid debris being sucked into the hoover gives me an enormous sense of satisfaction.  I carry my machine of tidy-harmony up and down all three storeys, drumming up a second sweat of physical exertion in 24 hours and then reward myself with a late morning bath.

I measure out the rest of the weekend in laundry loads, the first of which will have hopefully completed by the end of my bath – I say “hopefully” because I own seven pairs of pants.  If it hasn’t completed, then I’ll have to wear swimming trunks or even some old underwear with a perished gusset for the next few hours.  To ensure that I am not rushed to hospital so embarrassingly attired, I avoid traffic for the rest of Saturday; but this is wise anyway, as Saturday afternoons tend to bring out the cunt in most drivers.

I bask in the clean tidiness of our home for the afternoon, devoting myself to work (I’m a teacher and a workaholic), while the football results trickle in and my family engage in more exciting pursuits, like shopping and socialising.  Some weeks we’ll have friends up for the evening, in which case I’ll be truer to my roots and switch to bitter as my booze of choice.  I’ll inflict my vinyls on the visitors for a few hours and congratulate myself on a level of sociable normality that the rest of my misanthropic existence belies.  Most Saturday evenings, however, it’s crap telly, wine and an unhealthy amount of distraction from the social media on my mobile.

Sundays tend to be more laundry loads and more school work and an impending sense of grief that the weekend is dying a slow death, occasionally punctuated by an Arsenal game on telly or the less common venture out of the house for some worthy reason.  If I have washed up the pans from a roast dinner and pulled the last pile of washing out of the dryer before 10 pm, then I don’t wallow in a desolate mood of abject irritation before bed and I reflect upon a weekend of productive contentment and unambitious joy.