FILLING THE GAPS

A Zombie Santa in a shop on the High Street...

In the run up to this rather non-Christmas, I did rather feel the need to abandon the blog and try to get on with other things, not least because my own headspace was feeling so very un-festive that it didn't seem fair to burden you, my loyal reader, with the darkest corners of my soul at this jolliest time of the year…

Of course, in the year my father died, his death occurred a couple of weeks nearer to Christmas than my mother's recent demise did, and we still "did" Christmas that year. Back then, perhaps it was because there were more of us to endure it, or perhaps it was because we believed that it was what he would have wanted, or maybe it was simply just because we had more of the "Keep Calm and Carry On" attitude back in the day, we sort of just got on and did it.

This time, however, despite mum's voice ringing in my mind saying in that way she had, that "Christmas is very important to me" I just couldn't bring myself to get involved with it. No decorations have been put up, no cards have been written, and somehow I've managed not to engage with the glitter and sparkle and optimism of the decorations I've passed in other peoples houses and gardens as I've driven around.

Apart from the fact that I have picked up one or two small tokens for my very nearest and most dearest, and have even managed to force myself to wrap them in shiny paper, this year Christmas really seems to be something that will be happening to other people.

Maybe it's not having kids, I don't know…

So what have I done with the time since I last bothered posting my words to the big, wide world of web…?

I spent some time rediscovering (in the nicest possible sense of the words) Kate Bush as I explored her "Greatest Hits" and experimented with the brave new world of downloads courtesy of all the brand new accounts and passwords which I had to concoct to get my sparkly new work telephone to do its particular thang…

"Rolling the ball, rolling the ball…"

Those were all very "ear worm-y" and took me back a decade or three in a pleasantly nostalgic way, although my mind slammed right into the "Not The Nine O'Clock News" spoof by Pamela Stephenson which reminded me that, amongst those we have lost this year, was dear old Mel Smith, which kind of tainted the mood.

Of course, that last full week before Christmas was quite heavy on the "celebrities not quite making it to the end of the year" front, with both Peter O'Toole and Joan Fontaine joining the tally of the dead as it grows (as it must) with each and every year...

Also added to the list, although it was to the "Not Really a Celebrity as such" list, Ronnie Biggs, died, with immaculate timing, on the day a new dramatisation of the so-called "Great Train Robbery" was due to be broadcast, grabbing the front pages to the last with his usual skill. However, the newspapers using headlines like "Great Train Robber Dies" seemed somehow inappropriate given that, even if the robbery was dubbed to be "Great", I never got the impression that the Robber himself was. After all, as far as the rest of us are concerned he only did it once and he got caught….

At least people were sensitive enough to remember Jack Mills, the victim of that terrible night which resonated through the years in a most significant manner and did its bit to shape a generation and their own sense of history.

Because my Beloved is far more sociable than I am, I got to spend another evening alone which led to one small victory as I got a five point answer to a question about Abu Simbel on "Only Connect" (with no-one to witness it, sadly), had a bath, watched another programme (about shipwrecks), and spent the rest of the time ringing my sister to explain the latest on the probate situation, and heating through a frozen curry for one, a.k.a. "A Lonely Man Meal…"

The call I made was due to the fact that there had been an administrative cock-up over the issuing of the Executor's Certificate because the issuing body had failed to read the Declaration properly which will delay matters still further and mean that one or two of the things which I was hoping to address over the Christmas period will now be pushed back into the New Year and no doubt trigger yet more of those "demand" letters which cause me to feel so very anxious all of the time at the moment.

Whilst they were out enjoying themselves, the Beloved and her friends apparently discussed what their partners (i.e. the likes of me), might be doing with our evenings alone, and I was surprised to discover that one of them might very well be sitting watching horror films because I thought that he would be far more likely to be spending a quiet evening translating ancient documents from Latin back into Sanskrit just for the hell of it…

(In my mind, at least, He's THAT intellectual…!)

The Beloved also went off with her family on another afternoon to visit the Christmas markets which, as far as I was concerned, they would be filling up on expensive sausage sandwiches which would mean that, when I went to collect her in the evening, there would probably be no dinner being served which was, quite naturally, just as things turned out.

Instead we ventured back home through the wildest of wild storms and I cooked myself a couple of fish cakes before we settled down unspoilered to watch the "Red John" episode of "The Mentalist" which we'd recorded the night before and which had almost been ruined (but for my quick actions in averting my gaze) by  John Challis (Boycie from "Only Fools And Horses") in a moment of Twitter weakness that afternoon.

Happily, our fatigue was such that we were able to postpone watching "Mad, Mad Kirstie McMad" at least until another evening. To my mind at least, she does rather come across as a presenter with such emphatic views that I fully expect that her kids will end up in therapy for being such a great disappointment to her and her "child trapped in a woman's body" ways...

Meanwhile, another show was being trailed for next week, one which looks totally designed to completely put everyone off their Christmas dinner as it looks into the farming methods used in order that each and every one of those meals can be cooked to our various needs…

("Joy to the world…")

I do try my very best not to get sucked in too much into what I refer to as "Bad Telly" but, once the exhausting revelations about Red John were concluded, we stopped the recorder only to find the channel that the TV had defaulted back to required us to be looking at the human wreckage displaying itself during a programme called "Excessive and Compulsive Collectors" although - happily - we dragged ourselves away after only ten massively disturbing minutes of this…

Nevertheless, it was enough for me to be exposed to the psychological horrors of "Captain Beany" (the baked bean obsessive) and the very scary world of Reborns (those facsimile - and very dead looking - baby dolls) as well as the (relatively) sane world of a vacuum cleaner collector.

Honestly, these people just seemed as if they needed help and, given that mental health care coverage has been woefully underfunded over the past couple of decades or so, instead, these people, alongside the strangely worrying (but probably only dressed up for TV) Gnome Guy, are allowed to parade their insanity in front of the whole world as the equivalent of some modern take on the idea of visits to Bedlam…

Once upon a time, such people would most probably been under some sort of mental health care and, whilst I accept that their obsessions are obviously just replacing something missing in their lives, it seems more than a little exploitative to expose them to such public mockery. In fact, to be perfectly honest with you, overall I believe that I was more disturbed by the programme than entertained by it…

Oh well, at least I can suppose that they're not harming anyone else with their strange obsessions and getting inside anyone else's head like something like, I dunno, a blog might do...

Mid-evening on Thursday brought the shocking news of the Apollo Theatre ceiling collapse which did, perhaps surprisingly, shift the awful story about the verdicts in the Lee Rigby murder trial from the top of the headlines where it had lurked since lunchtime when it's presence on the various TV screens around the room had put something of a dampener upon our work Christmas lunch outing to the pub.

For a while, the BBC didn't seem to know quite how to deal with this new story as it broke during the evening, as it ranged in tone from perhaps a few people over-reacting to some plaster falling on their heads, to an entire balcony collapsing and trapping hundreds, but, by the morning, 76 people were being treated for injuries and their decision to run with the story and let it take them where it would.

Such is the tricky juggling act which needs to be performed in an era of 24 Hour rolling news...

The last morning commute of the year found me witnessing so much driving idiocy that I felt compelled to warn the world that it simply wasn't safe as, time and again, people in a huge hurry to get somewhere else burned along filter lanes and cut in at the lights just to show how clever they were and how it's only the rest of us losers who are prepared to wait in the queues we'd so patiently joined...

Happy bloody holidays, ho, ho, ho…