THE POISON CHALICE

Over the course of a year, I write many things, some of which I exaggerate, some of which are - so far as I can tell - true, and some of which are flights of fancy… However, I’m still struggling to write anything new of any substance about anything very much (there are those who maintain that I never could...) but when I struggled to manage to write the eight Christmas cards which I still feel honour-bound to actually send, it’s hardly surprising if words of a more deep and meaningful nature fail to spring to mind.

Hey, what can I say?

It’s a… complicated time of the year for me… and, whilst there is a system, you could quite realistically point out to me that, if that system were a wagon, then you could quite rightly say that all of the wheels have recently fallen off it. Mind you, with a little bit of advanced planning, I did manage to create a whole advent calendar of telly-related whimsy and, if many of those who could have taken a peek behind those doors chose not to, so that they didn’t read what I wrote when I was actually trying to put a smidgen of effort in, then I suppose that they shouldn’t be surprised not to receive a piece of decorated cardboard written to them in person.

Meanwhile, despite my absolute sureness that no events of any social significance ever trouble me across the festive season and my presence not being required at any of those ghastly embarrassments which others seem to regard as being “fun” of some obscure sort known as “parties” (shudder!), I was sitting at my desk, quietly going about my business when not one but two potential social events drew me into their terrifying orbits. A tap on the door, and the mysterious woman who seems to have taken it upon herself to manage the affairs of our office with regards to our general place in the grand scheme of the cardboard building we occupy (albeit in a small way), was explaining the “little party” they were planning for a weekday lunchtime and whether we wanted to contribute four quid each towards a buffet and “the opportunity to get to know” everyone else in the building. That I managed to let her go away without babbling incoherently at her about how I’d rather gnaw my own legs off with a pair of borrowed false teeth is testament, I feel, to how far I’ve come during these last three months of renewed daily interaction with the wider world (albeit in a small way).

With that potential minefield safely negotiated, or, as I immediately feared, possibly merely fobbed off to bite me back another day, I was then rather alarmed to get an email from m’colleague who had been safely considering the choppy waters of the Christmas rush in other harbours lately, wondering whether an outing for a work-related Christmas dinner event was on the cards.

“What fresh hell is this?” was the thought my mind immediately transmitted into my frontal lobes, but, in the end, we went, and it was fine… once I’d got my usual list of notifications about my abject fear of social situations across, which led to me being less than gracious company in the run up to said event, and might have explained why m’colls spent much of the time staring at little screens instead of indulging in post-meal chat with their Scroogesque companion.

Actually, I portrayed Jacob Marley in a school play once, you know, Scrooge’s even meaner partner (as I like to think of him). Perhaps I was typecast at an early age and, to be honest, I do seem to have spent every Christmas since feeling rather disappointed that those three spirits haven’t turned up to give me a shot at redemption. Ah, well… perhaps it is too late for me after all. Those chains must be very long by now… Instead I just get thrown curve balls like the poison chalice to make the whole hideous experience if possible even slightly worse than it has been before.

So, sadly, despite my hopes being cruelly raised each year, Christmas time remains, as it has for as long as I can remember, the most monumentally depressing time of the year for me, and to have it’s head above the rest of the grim days, it truly has to be going some to achieve that. Nevertheless, despite always having been a difficult time of the year for me, it somehow managed to get even more so this time around, since the handing over of what I am coming to regard as “the poison chalice” which my mother so delicately gift wrapped for me a few weeks ago:

“Don’t worry about running around after us, we’ll make our own plans. I want you to have the Christmas you want this year!”

A veritable time bomb if ever there was one, or, no, perhaps more of a minefield of emotional cluster bombs just waiting to go off and which will then expect me to be grateful for the maimings that they will have inflicted upon me.

Ever since this announcement was “gifted” to me a few weeks ago. it has been followed by endless enquiries as to what we were actually planning to do with this “gift” so graciously given, combined with the less-than-subtlest of hints that the correct answer should obviously have been “I want nothing more than to spend it with you, mother dearest!” There was, of course, never much chance of that, but the brewing disappointments are going to have consequences that last well into the coming year, mark my words.

Once upon a time, in the heights of summer, I happened to mention that I didn’t think it was feasible for my mother to come to the house in the depths of winter any more. It gets too dark and too icy, and the cobbles and the stone steps and the cracked paving slabs become far too treacherous for both her and her beloved to safely negotiate as they have both now reached a very delicate and vulnerable age. Equally, there far more personal issues, the swift solution of which would be impeded by attempting to negotiate our steep and narrow staircase, and frankly, the subsequent disaster is not something I wanted to be dealing with in my own home upon Christmas Day whilst I’m trying to cook a meal that neither of them would eat all that much of.

Faces pulled. No further comment. The subject quietly forgotten about.

I rang my sister at the time to see if she could drop a few subtle hints that she concurred with this notion and nothing more was said until that chalice was passed in early November, far, far too late, you’ll perhaps have realised, for us to be able to book in somewhere if we did think of any other plans, which, of course, we then failed to do anyway. However, unfortunately, as it turned out, if we had decided to revert to plan “A” there would have been another disastrous last minute cancellation anyway, so, all-in-all, and despite an overwhelming sense of Teflon coated beams of purest disappointment tuning in to my location from that very local and very specific radar tracking station not too far away from me both physically and emotionally (AKA Massively Over Theatrical Harbinger of Enduring Resentment – you can work out the acronym for yourselves), it did turn out that the selected option was probably for the best and, whilst I am sure that the fallout is yet to manifest itself, meant that, at least from a personal point of view, this year turned out to be more relaxing than most, which, for me, is saying rather a lot.

And so, another Christmas has now been endured, and the whole ghastly business can be put safely onto the back burner for another 52 weeks, whilst I try and put my head in the sand as the other ghastly ritual of New Year’s Eve steams over the horizon on its inevitable collision course, gawd-elp-us...