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Preparing for a winter of discontent
STACIA BRIGGS
17 November 2008
Practically everyone I speak to these days is unrelentingly miserable.
This may, of course, be because they are speaking to me, but most claim that their woes begin and end with the credit crunch, now officially the two most boring words in the English language, not counting 'Amy Winehouse' or 'Kerry Katona'.
If people aren't worrying about a forthcoming P45 landing in their in-tray, they're moaning about the price of food, Christmas, utility bills, petrol prices, interest rates, school fees, mortgages, credit card bills and bank charges.
You'd think everyone would be relatively cheerful, what with the fact that we all escaped oblivion a few months ago when the CERN Super Collider threatened to create a vast black hole that the Earth would collapse into.
Those days of potential total destruction sound like good times now, in comparison to the credit crunch.
Blue wheelie bins knocked the economic crisis from the top spot of the 'most depressing things to talk about' list for a few weeks in the Golden Triangle, but even we're beginning to see the point of them now we're on the brink of repossession.
One of those big ones they give to blocks of flats could easily house a family of four AND we'd be able to roll it to somewhere more desirable, like Eaton, where no one complains about wheelie bins because they're Above That Kind of Thing.
I've now had three or four people tell me that they're 'cancelling' Christmas on the grounds of financial penury, because nothing helps an economic downturn like everyone shunning the High Street and spending the festive season huddled round a roll-up, drinking meths and tucking into a dead pigeon found under the wheels of next door's 4x4.
Worse still, several people have shyly confided in me that this year they will be making their own presents - cue a host of poorly-packed peppermint creams that resemble and taste like dishwasher tablets and an apron constructed entirely from old tea towels and string. Oh, you shouldn't have. No, really.
Christmas, as I recall, has always been financially challenging even when the country hasn't been going to hell in a handcart, but there have always been our gold fillings to wrench out and sell for scrap, or our grandmother to pimp out so that everyone has a lovely December 25.
In fact, if we didn't spend January eating the Unidentified Frozen Objects in the freezer, eyeing up the gin and Paracetamol after looking at our credit card bill and weeping inconsolably as we realise that there are less than 50 weeks until we have to do it all over again, it just wouldn't be January.
But if you're set on having a frugal Yule, it might be best to prepare the children in advance for the bad news that this year Santa is planning to leave them a fistful of nothing in their stocking. This is, if you were wondering, a different conversation to the one you usually have with your kids about why Father Christmas hasn't left them a space rocket, a pony, or a holiday home in Florida.
Here are some suggestions:
1) Present your child with a paid-for utility bill and tell them that this Christmas, you have given them the gift of light and heat (or water. Or gas).
2) On Christmas Day, when there are no presents under the tree, point out to them that Father Christmas only visits good children. Then lock them in the cellar.
3) Give gifts that keep on giving - a school uniform, sensible shoes, a new set of bathroom taps, a year's supply of Calpol and head-lice treatment.
4) During Christmas Eve, slip downstairs, take all the decorations down and in the morning feign surprise that anyone could be quite so excited about January 17.
5) Give them a large cardboard box instead of a gift, thereby putting to bed the long-held myth that children always prefer the boxes to the presents. No they don't, unless they are under a year old or mental.
Merry Christmas!
DECOR FOR THE DEAD
A few years ago, I visited the grave of First World War soldier and poet Wilfred Owen who died in action just days before Armistice Day.
It was an emotional moment (not least because I'd spent the last few days as a vegetarian in France and was therefore on the brink of starvation) as I, and the group of journalists I had travelled across the Channel with, gazed at Owen's final resting place.
Commonwealth graves in France totally rule when it comes to aesthetics. Simple white headstones, wonderfully spare prose, row upon row of quiet, reflective beauty. The modern French graves next door, on the other hand, look like a dog's dinner served in a pound shop by a colour-blind flamenco dancer.
Practically every grave is covered in every imaginable shade of plastic flower, there are dolls, gonks, hideous religious tat, vile ornaments, lanterns, photographs and day-glo gravel scattered under the stone itself and some graves even boast recorded messages from the deceased. It was great.
I've spent my entire life cloaked in black in the misguided hope that it will render me partially invisible, or at the very least make my arse look a bit smaller. My addiction to looking like an ambulatory storm cloud is one I can only imagine being kicked when I myself kick the bucket, at which point I'm going to demand in my will that my grave is the gaudiest in the boneyard.
In Britain, personal expression at a graveyard is as welcome as a syphilitic member at an orgy. Try and place a teddy or a trinket on a grave in certain areas and you'll be surrounded by armed police by the time you stand up to leave.
This week, cemeteries in Somerset managed by the Diocese of Bath and Wells have banned anything 'aesthetically unattractive' (presumably they're referring to grave adornments, not mourners, gravediggers or clergy) and the Chancellor of the Diocese, the Worshipful Timothy Briden, has issued a set of new guidelines to ensure taste prevails over the valley of the dead.
On this note, can you imagine your name being preceded by 'the Worshipful'? It's a lot of pressure, isn't it? I mean my name literally translates as 'God's Gracious Gift to Men', but that's a moniker I more than live up to on a day-to-day basis.
“Things such as gnomes and plastic flowers are not permitted because they are aesthetically unattractive and they make it harder to maintain the grounds,” said a spokesman.
“If people want their loved ones to be buried in one of our churchyards then they have to stick to the rules which are clearly displayed at all churchyards.”
Isn't that just typical. There you are, dead, and you're still having to follow a set of bloody rules.
The spokesman added: “There is no such thing as a real gnome, so why should we have such unnatural creatures in churchyards?”
I tell you what, mate, you bring me a real, live gargoyle and I'll ditch the tat. Until that time, touch my gnome and I'll haunt you for life.
PARENTAL CONTROL IS OUT OF CONTROL
Guy Ritchie is beginning to find out that divorcing Madonna is as much a barrel of laughs as being married to her.
Although he's now allowed to eat meat, dairy, sugar, watch television, read the newspaper, go to the pub and have sex 'off-schedule' with women who don't look like carved gristle, Guy now has to contend with Madonna's lists.
There was the pre-separation list (tips on how to argue effectively and how to look in photographs), the post-separation list (an address for Dignitas in Switzerland) and now there's the custody list, which sets out the dos and don'ts of looking after the couple's two sons.
Gems include the fact that the children should only drink blessed Kabbalah water, should eat a vegetarian macrobiotic diet, should only be bought ethical and spiritually sound toys, shouldn't wear manmade fabrics, should have their hands disinfected if they're in public places, should be available to Madonna on the phone up to four times a day, shouldn't watch TV or read newspapers and that at bedtime they should be read extracts of her dire English Roses books.
Like Madonna, I'm a control freak too. So in the unlikelihood that I ever find someone insane enough to take both kids on for a few nights, here's my list of dos and don'ts.
Under no circumstances should the children be read any of my columns in which I mercilessly exploit them for cheap laughs in order to fill my copy quota.
Use of electronic gaming devices, the television and MP3 players should be limited to 12 hours a day, 13 if they're staying up late and you want to watch the catch-up episode of EastEnders in peace at 10pm.
On no account should the children be served anything that isn't beige. They fear coloured food, particularly anything without artificial flavouring, colouring or preservatives.
Dress the kids in natural fibres at your peril. Five minutes in linen and they will look as if they have just crawled out of a skip, even if you've kept them in a hermetically-sealed, empty Perspex box since the moment they got changed.
Water should be from the tap and NOT the cat's bowl, whatever the children say.
Public places should regularly be cleaned with disinfectant spray after the children visit. And possibly fumigated, condemned and burnt to the ground.
The children should not be bought toys that are annoyingly loud or which are too large to hide.
Try to keep mobile phones away from both children at all times, especially the ones I have to top up at vast and eye-watering expense. They do not need to vote for JSL from X Factor 200 times, nor should they be encouraged to text 'Is my PE kit ready?' to save themselves the effort of shouting downstairs.
Feel free to palm the kids off on whoever will have them, within reason (they are a handful - I don't want to be sued). I have, after all.
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