why I love Christmas

On the way back from the work Christmas meal (one of them) we got stuck behind a slow-moving learner driver whose school was (ironically) named 'XLR8'. No doubt they were right to keep the speed down; certainly it doesn't seem the most suitable name for a driving school, as if you would get in the car for the first time and the instructor would say: 'The first rule of driving is - accelerate!' And off you'd go.

Christmas is really here again it seems. I went to London in search of the odd gift. I had a specific type of hat in mind, but it must have suddenly gone out of fashion, or alternatively had become so incredibly fashionable that everyone had bought it, because it was very hard to find. Plenty were visible, but always on the heads of fellow shoppers, and I couldn't just rip them off their heads. Could I?

In my increasingly wearisome travels I found it necessary to adopt a rule of thumb: if the dummies don't have heads, the shop probably doesn't sell hats. It didn't help much. One thing I did discover was that it is a lot easier to find the way into shops than it is to find the way out. It's almost as if they planned it like that. While I was trying to escape one place, a man with a European accent asked me if I was looking for something for 'a special lady'. Such was his unctuous tone, it was almost as if he was asking if I wanted 'a special lady', which he, for a fee, would procure. I reacted in 'how very dare you' horror, telling him I was looking for a present for my Mum - as if there were a clear distinction between my Mum and 'a special lady'. He persisted, and asked to look at my fingernails. What mad universe was this? I fled, screaming - to Dorothy Perkins.

consternation street

Coronation Street has celebrated it's 50th anniversary by traumatising and killing off its characters in a tram disaster. Now that's what I call a celebration! This event has also caused ex-characters to come crawling out of their graves into satellite programmes like (the inevitable) Come Dine With Me special, featuring Reg Holdsworth (I mean, actor Ken Morley) who is practically indistinguishable from his character (I mean, phenomenally irritating). He is still compulsively watchable, though predictably he came fourth out of four; 'I just hope I'm the fourth to die', he quipped.

Amazingly, some people weren't watching the live special: they were too busy rioting in the streets. Bloody students. Their activities were soon conveniently summarised by the 'iconic' (as it has no doubt already been called) image of Charles and Camilla cowering in their car from the protestors, she with (according to a Daily Mail headline) 'terror in her eyes' (it looked more like irritation to me). This would have been shocking in the 70's, but the reaction seems more ambivalent now, and the recent revelation that Camilla might have been 'poked with a stick' may well tip the balance into outright hilarity.

Had he been a more enterprising Royal, Charles might have leapt out onto the roof of the car to make a stirring speech to the rioters, perhaps leading them in a march on Parliament ('My ears are large enough to accommodate all your demands! Follow me, I shall be your King!') But nobody does that kind of thing anymore. The riots are just an opportunity for money-grubbing photographers to coerce protestors (or anyone really) into taking a shit on a statue of Winston Churchill, so that they can sell a picture of this 'outrage' to the Mail. It may not have happened yet, but I'm sure it will. Especially now I've mentioned it to Chad, who seemed quite keen.

chilling

A team telecon at work began with an invitation to share any adverse incidents or near misses, Health and Safety-wise. As if we were going to volunteer to give a hilarious account of our pratfalls (and near-pratfalls) for the amusement of the team! Mind you, I did fall over on the way to work the other day, and although nobody saw, I seem to feel the need to tell everybody. Perhaps I think it will humanise me.

It happened on Thursday, during my epic journey to work across the frozen fields from Ingrave, just me and my i-pod. This is when your so-called 'avant-garde' sensibilities can come back to haunt you. It might well be appropriate for my slow death in a snowdrift to be accompanied by a punishing industrial drone, or someone squawking about death - when it comes to it, I'll probably be wishing for Relight My Fire.

Meanwhile, strange events have been happening in the new house - Dave's razor practically throwing itself out of the bathroom cabinet when I open the door - mysterious spots of blood appearing on the living room floor - and a strange milky ectoplasmic substance obscuring one shelf in the fridge. Dave insists that the razor only fell, that the blood came from some or other human being, and that the milky substance was, in fact, milk, which had leaked out of a milk carton. I'm not so sure. To paraphrase Sherlock Holmes: once you have eliminated the impossible, everything else is too boring to bother thinking about.