christmas new year double issue
Mat got an application from some young woman at Barking College wanting to do work experience in his company. Her ambition is to be a high-powered businesswoman; imagine her face when she arrives at ‘Redstudio’ and discovers that she’s sharing a bed with Mat. Her only previous experience is in a hairdresser’s, where she learned to ‘shampoo, condition and neutralise hair’. Neutralise! I’m sure this is a perfectly proper use of the word, its just my mind that comes up with images of perms gone so wrong that only napalm can deal with them.
In a break with tradition, we enjoyed Christmas dinner at Bobs’ and Justin’s. In their bedroom, in fact (suitably rearranged). It’s a small flat, and soon to be smaller, because they had news: Saskia is to have a sibling; also, my parents are to become grandparents; and in addition, I am to be an uncle. In July. I don’t feel ready for it. They might have discussed it with me - still I tendered, and still tender, my congratulations.
Later that evening we went to Bobs’ sister’s place. It was the usual chaotic scene. The garden was ankle deep in soap suds from a snow machine perched above the kitchen door. Sally Ann, Bobs’ sister, was trolleyed and trying to get kids to play with her in the ‘snow’; a couple of small children were inching politely away. Later, she got Chad, her brother, out there: I vividly remember seeing him flying past with Sally Ann directly behind him, her hand down the back of his jeans, grabbing his underwear. ‘This is disturbing!’, was his cry.
New Year produced similarly excessive scenes. We were in the wilds of Suffolk, in cottages. A dead rabbit greeted us on our arrival, positioned feet away from an apparently deserted hutch. We were then greeted (more literally) by an impossibly nice woman, who showed us round. Too nice, Dave thought, though only the casual admission that she was ‘forced’ to give up smoking offered any hint of rural nastiness.
My New Year’s resolution is never to drink black absinthe again. I only had to have one glass and I immediately felt sick and fell also into a kind of dazed stupor in which it was possible only to stumble around taking photographs. (Or so I thought. In fact, as other people’s photographs show, I danced - at the very least - and, according to eyewitness reports, looked as though I was enjoying myself, which is nice to know.)
By the time I had more or less recovered half the assembled had gone to bed and most of the other half were stripped to their underwear and indulging in mock-lascivious activities, while Phil, Vicki and I looked on, feeling like the audience for a Channel 5 ‘documentary’. Or possibly Channel 4, since Chad, at the far reaches of drunkenness, had unaccountably turned into Russell Brand - a personality transplant that his body rejected not long after, with unfortunate consequences for the kitchen floor in Amanda and Mat’s cottage.
Things calmed down somewhat after that. We watched Seabiscuit (with Meryl Streep very good in the title role) and then Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. The Child Catcher is less frightening than the children, with their perfect enunciation and unfailing optimism, though no doubt this is just the attitude to get us through 2007.
In a break with tradition, we enjoyed Christmas dinner at Bobs’ and Justin’s. In their bedroom, in fact (suitably rearranged). It’s a small flat, and soon to be smaller, because they had news: Saskia is to have a sibling; also, my parents are to become grandparents; and in addition, I am to be an uncle. In July. I don’t feel ready for it. They might have discussed it with me - still I tendered, and still tender, my congratulations.
Later that evening we went to Bobs’ sister’s place. It was the usual chaotic scene. The garden was ankle deep in soap suds from a snow machine perched above the kitchen door. Sally Ann, Bobs’ sister, was trolleyed and trying to get kids to play with her in the ‘snow’; a couple of small children were inching politely away. Later, she got Chad, her brother, out there: I vividly remember seeing him flying past with Sally Ann directly behind him, her hand down the back of his jeans, grabbing his underwear. ‘This is disturbing!’, was his cry.
New Year produced similarly excessive scenes. We were in the wilds of Suffolk, in cottages. A dead rabbit greeted us on our arrival, positioned feet away from an apparently deserted hutch. We were then greeted (more literally) by an impossibly nice woman, who showed us round. Too nice, Dave thought, though only the casual admission that she was ‘forced’ to give up smoking offered any hint of rural nastiness.
My New Year’s resolution is never to drink black absinthe again. I only had to have one glass and I immediately felt sick and fell also into a kind of dazed stupor in which it was possible only to stumble around taking photographs. (Or so I thought. In fact, as other people’s photographs show, I danced - at the very least - and, according to eyewitness reports, looked as though I was enjoying myself, which is nice to know.)
By the time I had more or less recovered half the assembled had gone to bed and most of the other half were stripped to their underwear and indulging in mock-lascivious activities, while Phil, Vicki and I looked on, feeling like the audience for a Channel 5 ‘documentary’. Or possibly Channel 4, since Chad, at the far reaches of drunkenness, had unaccountably turned into Russell Brand - a personality transplant that his body rejected not long after, with unfortunate consequences for the kitchen floor in Amanda and Mat’s cottage.
Things calmed down somewhat after that. We watched Seabiscuit (with Meryl Streep very good in the title role) and then Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. The Child Catcher is less frightening than the children, with their perfect enunciation and unfailing optimism, though no doubt this is just the attitude to get us through 2007.
posted by martin at 8:04 AM
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