Sometimes they get it right.

The nights are drawing back out again already, if you can believe it.  Time seems to just fly by these days, and the shortest day of the year has already been and gone.  I was in the car on Thursday looking at the fog coming down and icing up the pavement, when I realised that in six months it will all be over and it’ll be another British summer.  Clearly recognising the cycle of time is a sign that (a) I’m getting old and (b) I think too much, but these are the kinds of epiphanies that hit you while you’re waiting at the lights.  I always say that I love winter till Christmas (and summer till my birthday) but this year I am really hoping it snows in January, February and March: if the Australian Government agree I’ll be spending next Christmas on the beach.  I realised in the car that this could be my last wintry Christmas ever.

There are any number of reasons that moving to Australia is preferable to living in Britain (I have obviously been persuaded that it’s a move worth making since I spoke about it in July) and I am beginning to look forward to it, but I think the complete reversal of the seasons will be one of the hardest things to handle.  I’m used to dark afternoons in December and a nice temperate evening on my birthday, and it will be the wrong way around down under.  I’ve been trying to savour the season, but finding time to enjoy it has been impossible.

Last week’s cop out list post could have been written by anyone: every single person I have spoken to seems to have been surprised by Christmas this year, and the number of things we all try to fit in before the big day just gets longer and longer.  Even trying to do the fun things gets to be a bit of a chore: another Christmas party, more meeting people for drinks that means shopping has to be moved to tomorrow lunchtime, make sure that you only take stuff to work on Friday you can leave there till the new year.  What a headache!  Friday was the last day at work and I tried to squeeze in so much work in the morning it turned into a comedy scene.  The anticipated early finish got earlier and earlier so that I found myself actually wishing I had more time in the office rather than hitting the red wine early doors.  And I was dressed as an elf.  I was finally wrenched away from my desk just before midday and the minute I was out I realised it didn’t matter: everything would still be there when I got back.

If you start drinking at lunchtime and you don’t have to go back to the office you know you are in trouble; especially when you have a party with your co-workers later the same night.  In an effort to break up the cocktail chaos, I had insisted that we all go to Light Up Bristol.  I had been expecting an enormous rowdy fayre with toffee apples and screaming kids, but at least there would be fresh air and a limited bar.  When we arrived it was completely different.  

 

Firstly, it was almost silent.  Light Up Bristol projects a light show onto the Council House (Bristol’s ‘City Hall’) and the Cathedral, all set to music.  There were no waltzers, hawkers or chip vans: everyone was transfixed.  There were a couple of kids racing around and jumping about, but even they sat down and watched after a while.  Second: the concept was so simple.  Project light onto a building; play music over it.  What’s complicated about that?  And yet it was totally effective.  The few of us who had walked through town to catch the show watched with our mouths open as our toes shrivelled up and our fingers went numb.

Pascale put it best: sometimes they get it right.  There are one hundred things to complain about in Bristol – the inept local council and rising taxes, the gang violence and gun crime, the laughably poor town planning and the non-existent transport policy – but every now and then something happens here that makes the shit all worthwhile: sometimes they get it right.  This is what Christmas should be about: quietly taking time to appreciate the good stuff; getting cold and not caring about it because you are enjoying the simple things.  I’ve got two weeks off to enjoy this Christmas and I plan to take it easy and enjoy it all.  This might be last one I spend with my friends and family for a while, so what is the point in racing around like a mad thing?  Take a breath, chill out and take it easy.  Everything else can wait.

 

Happy Christmas, all!  

Scrooge, eat your heart out.

Twenty-two shopping days till Christmas.   Everywhere I’ve been lately you can’t escape someone bemoaning how quickly it comes around and how it seems to get faster every year.  I was thinking about this: does it come quicker or is it just that we have more and more to do and not enough time to fit it all in?  I think the latter: even if you only make one new friend every year, it still accumulates into more parties, drinks, cards and presents than there are days in December.  No wonder everyone is knackered in January.  Christmas, like everything, is a double-edged sword.  For every great thing in the festive season, there’s something guaranteed to rile you, or more specifically, me.  

1. Perfume ads.  Deck your romantic existentialism with boughs of holly and shove it up your ass.  If life were really all beaches and soft focus we’d all be short-sighted and living in Tahiti.  Buying aftershave will not make you beautiful/successful/sporty/thin.  It will make you poor.
2. Slow moving shoppers.  I am 6′3″.  I have a very wide stride.  As a child my mother never made concessions for our being short and forced us to keep up with her.  I am a very fast walker.  At Christmas, all the dawdlers and gawkers hit the streets and get in my way.  I spend my lunch hours looking cross, tutting and sighing as people cut me up on the pavement.  I am also a master at the filthy look when some old codger smacks me with their shopping because they realised they just passed Laura Ashley without popping in.  This one especially annoys me because, being so tall, my groin is about elbow height for most elderly ladies.  A few years ago there was a fabulous suggestion to put pedestrian speed lanes on Oxford Street.  When I am Prime Minister, these will be everywhere and law-breakers will be shot in the knees.
3. Clubbing at Christmas.  There are some great Christmas tunes out there – Slade, Wizzard, Mariah Carey – and as the Big Day approaches you would think that the dancefloors might capitulate under the strain of festive revellers and play some of the classics towards the end of the night, but no: whilst every other whippoorwill is forcing Christmas cheer down your throats with shocking immodesty, the dancefloors seem determined to resist its very existence.  The temerity to ask for a Christmas tune earns scornful and shocked looks from DJs up and down the land.  What is so wrong with a spot of ‘Step Into Christmas’ in the season?  I want festive cheese!
4. Christmas countdowns.  Channel 4 are the worst for this.  The merest hint of festivity and normal scheduling goes out of the window in favour of Jimmy Carr presenting a four-hour marathon on ‘The Top 100 Greatest Sheds”.  No wonder everyone is so busy at Christmas: they’re all out on the streets pissing me off because they’re trying to avoid another mind-numbing instalment of “The World’s Greatest Vegetable Recipes”.
5. The weather.  Where is the snow, eh?
6. Sprouts.

I know these are all minor things, but the next time you are turning around in Waterstone’s and bash someone with your shopping, consider this: one man’s accidental knock is another man’s bollock-bashing biddy.  Now, if you will excuse me, ‘Cranford’ is on, and it’s just not Christmas without a BBC period drama at the start of winter.