Every year, some time around now, the morning post plops onto the doormat at 123 Somewhereintheblackcountry Street, Walsall, England (not a real address – or an impressive and unintended coincidence if it is). A stovepipe hat wearing septuagenarian hears the sound of the letterbox flap dropping back into place and shuffles along the hall to where among the myriad leaflets for home delivery pizza services that have spread across the floor, he finds and opens an envelope, in which lies a cheque made payable to a Mr N Holder for a very large sum of money. Attached to the cheque is a note which screams “IT’S CHRISTMAS!!!, Love you Noddy, from the people in charge of the dishing out the royalties.” All is well in the world and this famous pensioner will survive the year ahead in comfort and unaffected by the astronomical wholesale price increases in gas and electricity. All because of a song he sung as the front man of a band called Slade nearly fifty years ago that still gets blasted across the airwaves in every supermarket, every workplace and at every party across the land as soon as the bunting goes up in early November. Merry Christmas Everbody!
I really hate that song. In fact, that’s pretty much my position on all popular Christmas songs. In fact (and you may need to read the next bit with your eyes covered because it contains a blasphemy), I even hate “Fairytale of New York,” and that’s an undeniably wonderful record – everyone loves that one don’t they? I know that makes no sense, but when you hear these songs played on loop time after time, year after year wherever you go, whether you asked to hear them or not, you start to wonder how much more of it you can take. But most of all, I can’t stand that song by Slade; the one I’ve been forced to listen to for weeks on end every year since I was seven years old. Anyone coming into my office during the festive period (or any other period for that matter) was far more likely to be serenaded with Black Sabbath or Rainbow; or maybe Billie Holliday if I was in a more reflective mood. If they popped their heads through the door to say goodbye at the end of the day, then they might find me sitting at my desk with my head in my hands, lost somewhere amidst Dave Gilmour’s guitar break from “Comfortably Numb.” I always save Pink Floyd for the most important moments.
So you’re probably thinking to yourself, “what a miserable old curmudgeon he is, listening to Pink Floyd while we’re all being invited to Step into Christmas by Elton John” and you may be right, but it’s just that I’ve never been comfortable with what someone I once knew rather creatively referred to as “enforced jollity.” I like to enjoy things (including Christmas) in my own quiet way, and I never understand why people feel the need to almost bankrupt themselves in the annual budget race as they seek out the most extravagant crackers and a turkey the size of a small ostrich. Most people don’t even like turkey because no matter what recipe they follow, the resulting Christmas Day roast is a dry as a fortnight in Lanzarote. Answers on a postcard please. In fact, Ali and I were supposed to be in Lanzarote at the moment, but the arrival of Omicron B put the frighteners on us and we postponed that much wanted dose of winter Vitamin D. Although in retrospect it seems we may as well have gone in any case.
Lee and I were discussing the pleasures of the Yuletide season on the way to a place where you can’t hear Slade on Monday, and concluded that the best thing ever about Christmas is the break from work. He said his wife couldn’t wait to have thirteen days catching up on sleep and overdosing on cheese, which pretty much echoed my favourite memories of the festive period in the days when work ruled everything. A couple of days earlier, after some lengthy discussions around whether we were really bothered at all about it, Ali and I had finally decided to drag the decorations out of the loft. It was a slow process, interrupted by her insistence on singing the words of non Christmas songs to the wrong tunes; something she does deliberately at regular intervals to make me think I’ve finally lost the plot completely. Either that or she’s in the mood to amuse herself by awakening the uncontrollable pedant that lurks close to the surface, ever waiting to be invited to the table because she knows that the person who hates this trait in me most of all is myself. This time she was warbling happily away with the sparse lyrics of Lieutenant Pigeon’s “Mouldy Old Dough” to the tune of Roger Whittaker’s “Dirty of Town.” Try it for yourself – it works rather neatly in fact. So to correct her and also make sure my own memory was still intact, I located a YouTube video of the eternally bizarre “Mouldy Old Dough” and the next three minutes were lost to a bout of uncoordinated movements that were supposed to pass for dancing in the hallway as we procrastinated on the Christmas decorations. With further similar bouts of irrelevant and deliberate dithering, it took all day to finish assembling the fifteen year old artificial Virginia Pine and covering it in baubles and tinsel.
So, it seems appropriate that miserable old souls such as mine are cast into the wilderness, to a place where the strains of Slade’s annual reign can’t reach, and I can enjoy the sound of not very much at all. After all, a brain as full as much useless nonsense as this one contains needs a quiet space in which to recover. On Monday, we found such silent contentment in the misty and rainy wilds of Dartmoor, an early start delivering us to the abandoned Nun’s Cross Farm, where the only other human we saw was a lone trail runner who wasn’t playing Slade on his headphones as far as I could tell. Life seems so much easier in places where nobody is urging you to join in the fun and sing along with everyone else. And no, I’m not going to wear a paper crown either, just because we always do.
Today’s post is dedicated to all you similarly minded people whose only crime is to want to escape the madness of enforced jollity. For those of you who love the madness, do have fun, but please leave us out of it – we’re happy being miserable after all. It’s why we come to places like Nun’s Cross Farm in the pouring rain in December.
And as for Mariah Carey - let's not even go there..........
