Have yourself a ridiculous Christmas

Well we’re really in the thick of it now aren’t we? You’re panicking, I’m panicking, everyone’s panicking.

Well I wasn’t panicking until my friend – let’s call her Friend on the Verge of Hysteria – came round yesterday and scooched into the kitchen shedding holly leaves and Quality Street wrappers and looked at me with wildly staring eyes.

I was sitting at the kitchen table, doing pretty much nothing. I’d been doing pretty much nothing all day, apart from some quite focused lolling about. I am hoping to improve my lolling-about skills this Christmas holidays; it’s something we can all strive to get better at I think.

Actually it wasn’t the lolling about that sent her over the edge. This is after all a woman with whom I have spent much of the last eight years lolling about with various intervals to give birth to children and open packets of food for them and so on.

What really set her off was that I was straightening my hair.

‘Number 6! For God’s sake! Stop straightening your hair!’

I did as she was asking, for a moment. After all she seemed very insistent and I thought that there must be a good reason for her imperative tone. Perhaps the straighteners were on fire for example. Or she had just noticed a small creature nestling in my head about to get smoothed and flattened.

But no.

‘There’s no time for that! IT’S CHRISTMAS!’

Well let’s leave aside for the moment the fact that there’s always time to straighten my hair, because I learned long ago that the natural look isn’t for me. Left to its own devices my hair has no sense at all of my image as a dignified and sophisticated woman. It clusters around my head in shaggy uneven clumps like Dill the dog from The Herbs caught in a humid climate.

More pertinently, it ISN’T Christmas. Not quite. At this point, it was a few long days before Christmas. I guess I should, probably, have been working on writing the rest of my Christmas cards*, maybe, but other than that there really wasn’t anything all that pressing to do.

But a few hours in the company of Friend on the Verge of Hysteria and I was starting to get dragged close to the edge of hysteria myself. That’s the thing about hysteria – especially the Christmas variety. It’s terribly contagious.

So when she left I found myself pulled to visit the supermarket to do the Big Shop. My days lolling around the kitchen table browsing the paper and drinking cups of tea were over; I was on the Merry go Round of Christmas Ridiculousness and I was not going to be able to get off until New Year.

It started in the fruit and veg aisle and it started like this:

‘Oh yeah a packet of fresh cranberries! Good idea. I’ll pop those in the trolley and make some cranberry sauce. ‘

WHAT? What the JEFF am I thinking? I don’t even massively like cranberry sauce myself and all the people around my Christmas table would be perfectly happy with a spoonful of Hartleys if I will insist on making them eat jam with their turkey.

Now don’t get me wrong, it’s not the excess of food and drink consumption at Christmas that I object to. I am wholeheartedly in favour of that kind of endeavour. It’s something I can get right behind. Drinking Cava at 11 in the morning and Matchmakers for breakfast – yes. Yes and a Happy New Year too.

But this ever-increasing expectation that we should be all hand crafting our Christmases from raw ingredients otherwise we are somehow cheating our families out of the REAL Christmas experience.

I am not naïve; I know that this is a function of the dying days of capitalism**. We’re all trying to buy and sweat ourselves back to such mythical, magical childhood Christmas when we were happy and create that for our own families. And that means, for some reason, elaborate Gingerbread houses and a colour-coordinated Christmas tree in each room and fourteen kinds of cheese and five types of fiddly canapés for your guests and brussel sprouts sauted with panacetta and guest-worthy tables settings and so many presents under the tree that it looks ready to topple over.

Yet even as we’re doing all this, spinning on this merry-go-round of overconsumption and vast overspending, even at the time we know it’s not what really makes Christmas magical and memorable. It’s certainly nothing resembling my own childhood Christmases, with a stubby Christmas tree like a wonky toilet brush and one set of Woolworths Christmas lights and a drinks tray made appropriately festive by being wrapped in foil. Whatever we’re creating, it’s not the past, or certainly not any past I recognise.

And who are we doing it for, really? It’s not for the children, for a start. Children aren’t impressed with homemade cranberry sauce and canapés; they want cheesy footballs and party rings. My children don’t want me in the kitchen basting and twiddling; they want me playing Guess Who for hours on end with them. God help me.

And we aren’t doing it for the men either. I was bemoaning the exhausting frantic Christmas mayhem to a male friend of mine and his response was genuine surprise. Oh, he said. I thought women enjoyed making all that effort. I thought it was what made you happy.

Well luckily he was many thousands of miles away when he said this otherwise he might have had a swift and close encounter with the festive end of Kirsty’s Home Made Decoupage Tealights. But you can see why he might think that.

So as we lurch giddily down the final few steps before collapsing on the snowy doorstep of Christmas, maybe we can try to scale back a bit. Ditch the most outrageously ridiculous parts of the Christmas preparations, and spend less time sweating in the kitchen and more time lolling on the sofa with the people we love.

Christmas doesn’t have to be perfect. Christmas will come, ready or not.
OH GOD IT’S ONLY TWO MORE DAYS.

Sorry must go. God there’s so much to DO isn’t there?

*If you are expecting a card from me well put it this way, if your surname falls between A-L you could be in luck and I swear I put a first class stamp on them. Honest. For everyone else well, er, MERRY CHRISTMAS! And, you know, sorry.

** said Number6, hopefully.

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Don we now our gay apparel

Tonight I’m off to my work Christmas party.

Now if I told you this in real life, what would you say in response to that. (Aside from, crikey Number6, you seem even more hysterical than usual this week and you could probably do with an early night. Yeah, tell me about it. Still, it’s the Christmas holidays soon and no doubt I’ll get to catch up with sleep then, right? RIGHT????)

Well your response to the idea of a work Christmas party will largely depend on your age and therefore how many of them you have actually been to.

If you are a young slip of a thing then you might still think, and say, oh well that should be fun?

Even if you are a little older, you might still be quite positive about the idea. We are an optimistic species after all and it takes many years of grim experience to counter our sweet perennial hopefulness.

If however, you are a little older, a little wiser, your reaction is likely to be – like mine – OH GOD REALLY? POOR YOU.

And don’t you all bah humbug me… you know it’s true. No one over the age of 25 actually looks forward to their office Christmas party; it’s is one of those things that has all the cultural baggage and weight of expectation that can only mean one thing – that we all get dragged down.

If you’re still not convinced, have a browse of my list of worst things about the office Christmas party:

1. The food. When you order the set dinner, back at the arse-end of the summer, you’re all sick of salad and couscous and what not. You are ready for the winter, even a bit excited about the anticipation of the festive season , the idea of a Turkey Roulade with red wine Jus sounds delicious. Well then it arrives, and it looks and tastes for all the world like a rolled up nappy smothered in that brown goo that you scrape off the bottom of the oven when you clean it*.
2. Too much drink. This often doesn’t end well, or even start well, especially when combined with all the various tensions of the workplace that have built up over the year. By December, we are all a little fractious and probably the addition of a large quantity of warm red wine to the mix isn’t going to help the situation.
3. This can make other people behave in ways that are not strictly admirable. In the olden days when I was an in house lawyer, there used to be a little influx of post-party harassment complaints that we nicknamed Mistletoe Madness. For some reason, the combination of tinsel and flashing reindeer antlers makes even the most inhibited think that we can cop a feel on the dance floor, despite the ever present risk of public humiliation and expensive litigation.
4. Not enough drink. Christmas when you’re pregnant, for example, is so shockingly dull that I have in fact pretty much blocked it out. The only upside to being stone cold sober is the fact that you get to collect a whole lot of scandalous stories about your colleagues, which is both amusing and potentially lucrative from a blackmail point of view.
5. The music. I wish it could be Christmas every day? Oh dear god no. The whole concept of ‘Christmas music’ is very interesting. The inclusion of some sleigh bells and the words ‘tinsel’, ‘stocking’ or ‘worst excesses of meaningless materialism**’ in the lyrics and LO it comes to pass – a Christmas HIT. And if you think I sound bitter, then you’re right. Every year I think I should write one of these and make myself a little annual pension. How hard can it be, right? Even Slade managed it after all. Even the pogging Darkness still gets played in the aisles of Sainsburys this time of year with what is effectively a three minute long knob joke.
6. The clothes. Obviously if you have the tremendous good luck to be a man you can skip this bit. No uncomfortable undergarments for you, I guess. In fact I have literally no idea what a man might wear to the office Christmas party. Who cares? Probably the same thing they wear to the office with perhaps the addition of a tie with a Rudolf on it. For women, though, there is almost overwhelming cultural pressure to Make An Effort by moisturising your heels and making your elbows all clean with cut lemons***. The bulk of the Effort though is centred around wearing extremely uncomfortable clothes. These include tightly elasticated underwear resembling what my mother would call a foundation garment. This has the dual effect of shoving all your rolls of fat upwards into a sort of wobbly shelf, and also squashing your stomach so you’re unable to eat or in any way digest your overcooked and overpriced meal. Shoes, also, that make it impossible to dance at the disco you have paid a premium for. Or indeed walk without some sort of jelly bag crammed in the front. And the kind of ludicrous heels that make walking on slippery pavements extremely dangerous. Luckily pavements aren’t usually slippery this time of year, eh? Oh, wait…

So yeah, thanks. I’ll try to have a good time. There’s only one real consolation. This year’s do is the same night as the Long Suffering Husband’s work do, and if there’s one thing worse than going to your own Christmas party, it’s being polite to a bunch of strangers then driving your tipsy partner home with gritted teeth.

I guess I’ll just have to use the same tactic I do every year: get outrageously drunk and dance like a lunatic before falling asleep in a taxi.

Actually, yeah. I’m looking forward to it now. See you in the morning. I’m off to don my gay apparel.

*obviously I am using my imagination here, because I don’t make it my business to clean the oven. At the point at which I can no longer turn on the oven without setting off the smoke alarm I tend to move house.

**what do you mean you don’t recognise this one? It’s that festive classic, ‘All I Want in My Stocking is Barbara Castle’ from the Santa Guevera and his Radical Socialist Elves.

*** I swear I read this in a magazine once. I may have imagined it, though. I can imagine all sorts of things this time of year, like it’s a good idea to spend £200 on food for a family of four for three days.

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Breaking up is hard to do

I want you all, all of you sitting out there right now on your laptops and iPads and Dingleberries and so on to just stop for a minute and think. And this is what I want you to think about.

I want you to think about your most painful, most unpleasant and distressing relationship breakup. Are you there?

OK now imagine going through that breakup, with all your raw emotion out there on display, but this time in a public forum. Say, on a stage. Or a market place. Or perhaps a television programme with a small local audience. But anyway, in public with a few hundred of your friends and acquaintances watching you, and your soon-to-be-ex-partner, going through it, minute by minute and in real time.

Are you sweating yet? Well, this isn’t some horrible imagined nightmare. This is what real life breakups are like for the Facebook generation.

For teenagers – not all of them, but many – the concept of a private life is just not really feasible any more. Their lives are lived in public: on Facebook, in texts, and to a lesser extent in email and Twitter. They are always available, and if they aren’t, it’s a deliberate choice and one that is noticeable. If you drop off the radar for even a short while – turn your phone off and hide – then people will comment.

This is all terrifically gruelling to watch as an adult, but imagine what it’s like to experience. When you’re 15 and your girlfriend has gone off with someone else, that’s bad enough. It feels like the End Of Everything. It IS, basically, the End Of Everything. But at least in the Olden Tymes, we could retreat for a bit. Hide in our rooms or with our friends. Have a bit of a play on Outlaw on your Atari. Or lie on your bed with the curtains closed listening to the Cure over and over until you had processed the feelings a little, felt a little better and more able to go out into the world. Now, there’s no escape. They’re always online; the phone is always buzzing or, even worse, not buzzing at all any more.

In the pre-Facebook days, while you were still feeling raw, you could stick with people who were on your side, Your ACTUAL friends, who would either not mention it at all (boys mainly) or in the case of the girls, maybe say something extremely comforting like – don’t worry, his new girlfriend looks like a fish. That might not sound all that comforting but at the time believe me, it was like a big cuddly blanket.

These days, you find out that your boyfriend was with another girl at a party because some snidey girl texts you to ‘helpfully’ suggest you should look at her photos. Which you do, by yourself, in your room, with a sick feeling in your stomach and the blood pumping in your ears. The camera may not lie, but it’s sometimes a bit hard to work out what the hell it’s saying.

And everyone has a camera in their pocket, all the time, to capture that ill-advised moment, and give it more prominence than it really merits. And preserve it, in public, for ever and ever amen.

There are other ways in which 21st century technology messes with young peoples’ lives too. At the beginning of a relationship, it seems to me that the constant availability via text and mobile makes everything very intense, very pressured. There’s no time to have a little think, to take things slowly, if you are texting before you go to sleep and expecting one to be there when you wake up. You have to keep committing yourself in writing, and that must have an effect on the ability of the relationship to develop naturally.

And before you point it out, I know I sound more middle aged than ever. But I promise this isn’t technophobia or even ‘in-my-day’-itis. I am genuinely worried by what I observe – that young people don’t get chance to process their emotions, properly, at a time in their lives when learning to deal with your emotions and keep them in check is so very crucial for your future well-being and happiness.

What does it do to someone’s mental health, especially if they’re someone who is already a naturally jealous person, to be able to scrutinise photographs endlessly, looking for clues? Or trying to read the subtext of flippant comments on your girlfriend’s Wall – who IS this Dan person and is that flirtation or just friendliness?

How can you deal with the pain of heartbreak when there’s not enough privacy to lick your wounds, and when the temptation is always there to just click on your ex’s Wall, and see the comments on his change of Relationship Status from In A Relationship to Single. And when, in the heat of the moment, you make a reckless and spontaneous nasty comment on Facebook, it’s not just between friends any more – it’s in front of hundreds, maybe even more than a thousand, Facebook Friends. And that’s quite a different audience, and not one that’s going to help you get over it and move on to be a balanced adult. Young people don’t get to learn from their mistakes when they have no chance to forget.

So what’s my solution for this? God I really don’t know. What do you do when you break up with someone – delete all their photos from your wall? Defriend them? What advice should we give the young folk, to navigate through the choppy waters of 21st century relationships?

I think, I guess, we should try to understand how different things are for them. Try and understand that they are facing pressures that no other generation has faced.

And try to avoid offering trite solutions – turn your Facebook off? Yeah, right.

That really would be the End of Everything.

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Never Make Friends With a Poet (a cautionary tale)

Never make friends with a poet.
One minute they’re sitting at the table
Shovelling couscous with you, polite conversation
Then – BAM – they’re gone:

They’ve thought of a radical rhyme or a snazzy
Bit
Of
Enjambment.

Never make friends with a poet.
All the time you’re talking, spilling
Your guts out, they’re greedily gobbling up the entrails
Laying them out, secretly, in bloody lines and gory stanzas.

Never make friends with a poet.
You can’t go for walk with them
Without them turning it
Into some sort of symbolic journey.

Of life.

Never make friends with a poet.
Those flowers they bring to your party,
Pull back the paper – there’s bound to be
Some hidden message.

A rose by any other name, is probably
The fragile ambiguity of friendship.

Never make friends with a poet.
Small talk looms large.
Nice weather for this time of year?
A cloud, is never just a cloud.

Never make friends with a poet.
That poem they’ve sent you
Just to see what you think.
It’s probably about you.

(Unless of course, it isn’t. You egotist.)

Never make friends with a poet.
It’s just not worth it. Even for the
Assonance. The sibilance. And it’s even worse
If they’re a blogger too.

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Act your age

My mother tells a story about me at the age of six. She asked if I would like a birthday party – a rare event for the youngest child of five. That would be nice, I replied. As long as I don’t have to have any children there.

Six years old! My mother tells this story with a mixture of amusement at how badly this reflects on me as a human being, but also some awe at how such an annoyingly-precocious creature could have emerged from an otherwise normal family.

I kind of remember what it was like to be that child, though. Because that child was me, is still me.

One of the most irritating things you can say to any child is act your age. But not only is it irritating, it’s also absolutely meaningless. I’ve said it before, and there’s nothing more true – age is a very very ambiguous concept. This seems to me to be more and more the case as I get older. Almost everything I thought I knew about age, about getting older, turns out to be a load of old baloney.

It is an absolute perceived wisdom in our culture that we have most in common with people your own age. But, as evidenced by my six year old self and her adults only party, I’ve never felt this strong affinity with my contemporaries. We all know of people who refuse to grow up, or to grow old. Why should age trump personality? Despite the cultural norms, it doesn’t.

We send babies to nursery because they need to be with babies their own age. So they can talk over their concerns about the Euro crisis with other toddlers I guess. Children on the other hand need to be herded into classrooms with people born within 12 months of them. This works, of course, to a certain extent. But not for everyone. Often in the classroom you come across the child completely out of place, like a character from those films where a grown up goes undercover in High School and pretends to be a teenager in an unconvincing fashion. What’s that programme called? Oh yeah – Glee. There’s plenty of unconvincing teenagers in my school, in every school I guess.

But the bigger question is what we miss out on, mixing with only people of our own age.

I have many friends who Home Educate, and one of the most frequent criticisms they have to face is that they are keeping their children separate from their contemporaries. But what’s so terrible about that? In fact, if you hang out with a pack of lentil weaver hippy types this is what you notice: rather than hang out with people of their own age, the children spend time with people they have most in common with. The Dragon Slayers hang out with the Dragon Slayers. Lego builders hang out with other Lego builders. Long and complicated games of Mums and Dads are enjoyed by a mixed group and the crucial decision about who gets to be the dog is decided with a great deal less fuss and fretting than usual.

The same happens in big families, like mine. At the intimate family gatherings of the Number6 clans (30 or so across the generations), different ages meet and come together over food and football chat and hair plaiting and oh did I tell you who’s died?

On the other hand, we all know the old person who refuses to acknowledge that their rightful place in the world is in the waiting room to die, flicking through adverts for funeral plans and not getting in anyone’s way. These old folk persist in thinking that they have something interesting to say despite the fact that they’re, you know, REALLY REALLY OLD. Worst of all, they think that they are due a little fun before they die and don’t really respond to the palpable sense of disapproval that this garners from those people who aren’t revoltingly old.

I have every intention of being this type of old person myself. The kind of old person like my ex-boyfriend’s Nana. We dropped round to see her one day; we would have been in our early 20s, she was nearly 80 I guess. She was, to our youthful surprise, going out. Sorry, she said, I can’t stop. I’m off out to look after the old people. Obviously she didn’t bracket herself in that category. The old folk were some other people, somewhere else, playing whist or possibly having a beetle drive. She remained in this delightful spirit for many years, almost reaching 100 before she finally conceded that she might be old enough to die.

I am well on the way to this right now, because I am the kind of irritating middle aged person that lurches from one midlife crisis to the next in a way that is no doubt slightly exhausting to watch. I would even buy an open topped car if only I had the money.

Actually, scratch that – an open topped car is all well and good and excellent for carrying home Christmas trees. But there’s not too much room for a party. If I had the money I’d buy a Routemaster bus and my friends, aged from 17 to 70, can ride it in and chat about all the things we like to chat about – grammar, etymology, physics, brownie recipes, sarcasm, books, poetry, life.

All aboard, move down the bus now. Plenty of room at the back, and feel free to put your feet on the seats.

Growing up is – it turns out – entirely optional.

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