Jamie’s Special Festive Message…Em, About Haircuts?

I always like to mark Christmas on this site with a nice festive message. Except instead of ‘nice’, ‘festive’ and ‘message’ imagine I said ‘hearty’, ‘fuck’ and ‘you’. Come on, you surely aren’t coming to me expecting a merry glug from the milk of human kindness, and if you are then – if I may inexplicably lapse into southern US patois for a moment – there’s masochism in them thar bones o’ yours, boy.

I’ve thought about what festive topics I could cover. I usually give Jesus a swift kick in the ghoulies this time of year, but where’s the fun in that when he’s only going to turn the other testicle? Shame, really, because I had the germs of a few good ideas (probably the wrong choice of cliché given the year we’ve just had). For instance, I was thinking about how religious scholars and priests of all stripes are like literary critics who keep reviewing the same book again and again and again. Imagine if you tried that if you were on a newspaper.

“Nice column in last week’s edition reviewing ‘The Biography of Rod Hull’. What have you got for us this week?”

“Well, I liked it so much I’ve reviewed ‘The Biography of Rod Hull’ again, to be honest.”

“But… there are hundreds of thousands of books out there. You can’t just… you can’t just review the same one again.”

“It’s just so good though. I’ll be honest, I’m just not interested in any other book, not when ‘The Biography of Rod Hull’ is so fucking good.”

That person would be sacked, wouldn’t they? On the spot. Unless their father happened to own the newspaper, in which case the editor would be forced to publish a review of ‘The Biography of Rod Hull’ every single bloody week. A few years of that and the editor would be ready to garrotte himself with a garland of tinsel.

“I think you’re going to be pleasantly surprised by the 2,647th book review I’ll be turning in today.”

“Is it ‘The Biography of Rod Hull’?”

“Yeah. Yeah it is….”

“So where’s the fucking surprise?”

“Well, I tie it in with the coronavirus, and I finish with this absolutely killer line, you’ll love it, it goes like this: ‘And, in a way… isn’t the coronavirus a little bit like Emu?’”

But I’m not going to do that one, or any of the other ideas that were swirling around inside my head. Instead, I’m going to tell you about my haircut today. And what could be more festive than that?

I always seem to go for a haircut at the same time as approximately 98 per cent of the rest of the male population. Each time that door chimes to announce my arrival into the barbers’ I utter a silent ‘fuck’ under my breath as I process the sight of twenty other guys crammed along the wall-length couch. They always look up at me, half-apologetically, half-indifferently, and then we all sit there together in uncomfortable silence, like inmates waiting to be processed.

It won’t surprise you to learn that Christmas Eve’s Eve, just prior to a recently announced national coronavirus lockdown, isn’t a great time to mosey in hoping for a quick hair-cut. I would’ve been quicker putting myself on a waiting list for a new kidney.

I see haircuts as an evil necessity. I only tend to go for one once I start looking like a hobo that’s just crawled out of a bin, and admittedly it’s hard to decide when to draw that line, given that this is arguably my base-line. I’m always amazed by the multitude of men who turn up at the barbers with only a mere dusting of hair on their bonces. Why are they bothering?

Sometimes they’re old men. In their defence, they probably don’t have all that much to occupy them from now until they cark it, so being able to knock ‘HAVE THREE HAIRS SNIPPED FROM HEAD’ off their daily to-do list must give them an enormous sense of achievement and self-worth. Most of the time, though, the culprits are young men: guys who look like they’ve only just had their hair cut yesterday. What the hell has happened to men? It used to be you’d go to the barbers, an old guy in a white coat would run an electric razor over your head exactly twice like you were a fucking sheep, and then chuck you out the door with a lollypop or a slap of aftershave. Bish bash bosh. In and out.

A single men’s haircut doesn’t cost all that much per unit, much cheaper than a woman’s haircut, but women only go to the hairdressers about four times a year; some of these fuckers must be going to get their precious, metro-sexual crowns re-styled four times a month. How can they afford it? Is there a special ‘men’s hair-cut grant’ no one has told me about that I can apply for through the Scottish government?

Guys under thirty these days all want to look like the cast of Peaky Blinders or the Only Way is Essex, or whichever coke-addled, madam-manhandling footballer happens to be the tabloid press’s pick of the month. And what’s more amazing than the fact that these quasi-bald men actually go to the barbers in the first place, is how long the barber spends on them once they’re in there. They seem to agonise over every bit of stubble, like they’re sculpting a privet hedge into the shape of a boat, or shaving Michaelangelo’s David into the back of Big Tam from the Scheme’s heid. Jesus Christ, there aren’t any scouts for Vidal Sassoon in here: just get the fuck on with it!

That’s not to denigrate the work. Hairdressing is one of those things that looks and seems simple, but really isn’t, as any unskilled parent who’s ever picked up a pair of scissors can attest. My youngest boy, Chris, needed a haircut earlier this year. His fringe was so long it was dive-bombing his eyes. OK, I thought, no need to rush for an appointment, I can buy some extra time with a few precision snips. Dear reader, I left that poor little boy looking like a Franciscan monk who’d just auditioned for a 60s boy band. He was more cartoon character than boy. It gave me a new-found respect for that brother-and-sister-hood of the blade. From now on, I’ll leave it to the professionals.

Back to the shop. Waiting in that couch-based queue always necessitates a lot of mental arithmetic and weighing up the odds. You sit there trying to put together the Da Vinci Code in your mind: “Right, three seats, ten guys, one of the hairdressers is probably going to have to go for a break half-way through, so if that next guy takes twenty minutes – actually he looks like he’ll take about forty minutes cause he’s hardly got any hair which doesn’t make any sense but there it is – and then the next guy, well, he’ll be quick, he’ll go on that seat, they’ll be finished first, which means he’ll get that hairdresser, the next guy will get that hairdresser, which means that I… right, all I really want to know is, am I going to get my hair cut by the really attractive woman, or the troll? Or the guy who’s literally got a tattoo of a pair of scissors on his face?” (Last year I really did have my haircut by a man with a tattoo of a pair of scissors on his face. He must really love his job. Lucky he never trained to be a gynaecologist) “Please, please let it be the attractive woman…”

Yes, I know I’m shallow, as are most of my fellow willy-wearers, but what can you do? There’s no sexual component to it, of course. Nobody goes to the hairdressers for kicks (unless they’re a massive pervert); it’s too weird and anti-septic an environment for that – like getting a lap-dance in a disused hospital while you’re off your tits on heroin. Truth be told, I usually end up falling asleep, or almost falling asleep. It’s relaxing to the point of being soporific. Same with a visit to the optician. My optician usually has to X-Ray me through my eyelids, and then wake me up by bashing me across the skull with a pair of heavy NHS specs. But, anyway, shallowness dictates that you would always prefer an attractive person to be cutting your hair, even if the task at hand is disconnected from any predatory or sexual impulse. It’s aesthetics, pure and simple.

The odds are usually against me on that one, though.

It’s the same on the bus. Long time since I’ve been on one, mind you, but I’m sure the dynamics remain the same. When you’ve got an empty seat next to you, you always imagine that some gorgeous starlet will sashay up the aisle, flicking her hair back and forth like something out of a Timotei advert, before sliding in next to you with a purring ‘hiiii’. But they never do. It’s always an enormous man who smells of shit and fish. Every. Single. Time.

It got to the point where I considered just surrendering to fate, putting down a piece of cardboard on any empty patch of seat next to me that said: ‘RESERVED FOR THE MAN WITH HALF HIS DINNER DOWN HIS FACE AND THE MUSTY AROMA OF A BLACK PUDDING SUPPER THAT’S BEEN SHAT OUT BY A RHINO.’

Anyway, it barely matters who I get to cut my hair, because I’m a little hard of hearing, so I can’t normally engage with them all that well. I usually find myself nodding like an imbecile, not hearing or understanding anything all that well, and hoping that I haven’t just given my seal of approval to something truly awful. Or that I haven’t accidentally just missed the hairdresser saying: “So you want me to make you look like a Peaky Blinder, huh?”

Merry Christmas everyone.

Father Christmas’s Covid Countdown

Santa lumbered towards the gantry. The platform jolted and quivered as his fat frame thumped down onto it, one tree-trunk-like leg at a time. His head elf, Grogu, jumped. Not because he was scared, which he certainly was, but because of physics. The jump was entirely involuntarily. Each one of Santa’s crashing steps sent him flying into the air and back down again, the world’s most reluctant astronaut. Santa suddenly stopped. Once the aftershocks had settled Grogu bowed his tiny head, scrunched up his face, and braced himself for impact. Santa usually liked to announce his arrival with a swift, open-handed slap. This time he didn’t. He simply ignored Grogu. Either that or he’d decided to leave the violence until the end of their exchange for once. After all, versatility is the key to good management.

Santa looked down over the half-empty factory floor below, a wave of steadily mounting disgust ruffling the corners of his nicotine-tinged moustache. He gripped the railings as if they were elf necks.

“What in the name of sixteen sodomised snowmen is going on down there, Grogu?” he boomed. “There’s next to fuck-all elves on that shop floor! What am I paying them for?”

Grogu shuffled uncomfortably. “You, eh…” he mumbled, “You aren’t paying them, Mr Claus.”

“And they still get too much!”

Santa looked down at Grogu. Well, there wasn’t really any other way for Santa to look at him. A thoroughly contemptuous sneer fanned its way through Santa’s moustache. “What sort of a f***ing name is Grogu anyway?”

Grogu kept still and quiet, like you would if there was a T Rex in the vicinity.

“Well?” asked Santa. “Where are they all?”

“I think Covid is to blame, sir.”

“Covid? Is he the little one with the warty face and the funny eye? I’ll f***ing swing him by the ears into a polar bear’s arsehole, by Christ. Called a strike has he?”

“Covid is a disease, sir.”

“You’re f***ing right he is, Grogu, and my boot’s the cure.”

“No, no, no. Covid isn’t an elf. It’s an infectious virus. We’ve been issued with directives insisting that we socially distance while on the shop floor.”

Santa’s face twisted into the furious sort of shape you’d normally associate with people who’d just had an arse fart directly into their face. “WHO ISSUED THESE DIRECTIVES?” he roared.

“Em… Elf and Safety.”

Santa thumped the railing with a giant pink fist, the clang reverberating across the entire factory. It sounded like the tolling of a bell calling the elves to execution, which perhaps it was. Grogu’s heart started hammering so quickly that if you’d seen his bare chest you’d have sworn there was a woodpecker trapped inside it. The elves below all looked up in unison, the collective cricking-snap of their up-thrust necks plainly audible. Santa went a deep sheen of ruddy pink as he noticed the coverings over the elves mouths.

“IF THAT’S MRS CLAUS’S KNICKERS YOU’VE GOT STRAPPED TO YOUR F***ING FACES I’LL THUMP EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU INTO THE SNOW WITH A FROZEN DEAD WALRUS! DON’T THINK I DON’T KNOW THEY’VE BEEN GOING MISSING FROM HER DRAWER!”

“Sir, they’re masks,” said Grogu, half-apologetically, half-terrified. “To… to make it less likely the infection will spread if one of the elves contracts it.’ Grogu squinted down into the sparsely dotted collection of his fellow elves. ‘Em, except for Yulper and Chimrick in the far corner there, they actually do seem to have pairs of your wife’s skiffs stretched over their lips.’”

Santa’s face turned as red as his suit. He reached deep into a pocket of his coat, and in a finger-click of a second pulled out and threw a hard, green Christmas bauble. It zapped across the room like a comet, making an ominous thunk-clunk noise at it struck first Yulper’s skull and then Chimrick’s, ping-ponging between them and knocking them both to the floor, where they sprawled like chalk outlines.

“I WANT THEM BURNED IMMEDIATELY!”

Grogu nodded and leaned over the railing. He shouted down in his loudest voice, which admittedly wasn’t all that loud. ‘BURN THE PANTS!’

“NOT THE F***ING PANTS!’ corrected Santa. ‘THOSE TWO FILTHY, CROTCH-SNIFFING, TRIANGLE-EARED C***S WHO SWIPED MY WIFE’S LIP-LOADERS!”

A couple of burly gnomes in leather jackets jogged onto the factory floor , grabbed Yulper’s and Chimrick’s legs and dragged their unconscious bodies out of sight. The elves continued to stand there, gazing up at Santa with bulging, unblinking eyes.

“How did this happen, Grogu?”

“Well, best guess, she left some of her sexier undies drying on the radiator by an unlocked window and the temptation was just too…”

Grogu raised his head from the cold steel that was pressing against his cheek. It took him a few seconds to realise he’d just been punched half-way across the gantry.

“I MEAN THE VIRUS, YOU UNSHAKEABLE DANGLEBERRY!”

Grogu staggered to his feet like a reanimated corpse and shambled up the gantry to Santa. “Well, the scientists, em, aren’t sure, sir, but there’s a popular theory that all this started when a gnome in the South Pole ate a penguin. Or fucked it. No-one’s quite sure.”

Santa stamped a foot and sent Grogu flipping over onto his bum. “OF COURSE THEY FUCKED IT, THOSE FILTHY, FISHING-POLE MOTHER-F***ERS! THEY’D ROUST A MALE WHALE’S BLOW-HOLE IF THEY THOUGHT NO-ONE WAS LOOKING! AND I’VE GOT ABOUT FIFTY OF THE VIRUS-RIDDLED BASTARDS RIGHT HERE IN THE NORTH POLE!”

Santa again grasped the railing. He leaned over the top of it like he was going to be sick, but only angry words vomited out onto the elves below, who were all still staring up at him.

“WHAT ARE YOU ALL STILL GAWPING AT, YOU DIMINUTIVE DICKBAGS? GET SOME BLOODY WORK DONE!”

There was a momentary silence during which the elves were either too brave or too stupid to move. Santa’s eyes bored into them all with the strength of a superhero’s laser-beam. One of the elves coughed, and then one of them said:

“Fat c**t.”

You could have heard a pin drop. Santa was far too furious to react. His system was overloaded with rage to the point of impotence. His head twitched from mask to mask, mask to mask, in the vain hope of detecting some minute disturbance in the fabric suggestive of recent speech. Those jaggy-eared rats! He turned to Grogu, who’d just managed to get back on his feet, ordering him calmly:

“Grogu, I want standard issue masks issued to each of the elves on duty, with North Pole branding. Every elf must wear one, supplied by me, no exceptions, from now on, a fresh one each day. Bring a box of them to my office first though, just before my 12 o’clock shit. I’ll teach those mouthy little f***ers to gob off.”

***

Santa thundered to his office and called an urgent Zoom meeting with corporate. He sat at his desk, feet up, eating tubes of Pringles like they were Smarties, and intermittently scratching his balls. The oily, smarmy, eminently punchable head of the Head of North Pole Corporate Strategy flashed onto the large screen mounted on the office wall in-front of him. Santa reached into one of the desk drawers and fished out a bottle of whiskey; started glugging it straight.

“Claus, you old son of a gun, you!” schmoozed the Head, an obscene grin bisecting his face.

“Graham, you fucking c***!” Santa growled back, with no trace of a smile at all. “Question: I’ve only got about a third of the workforce on the shop floor because of this stupid virus thing, productivity is down 300 per cent and I’m way behind on quota. What am I supposed to do? Move Christmas to f***ing April? Cause that’s the only way I’ll be able to pull this shit off.”

“I know it’s a challenging time for you,” said Graham, and then nothing further. He just stood smiling. Santa thought for a second that the connection had frozen.

“Anything else?”

“We’re behind you one hundred per cent.”

“No help though? No ideas, no suggestions?”

The waxy-skinned corporate statue grinned at him for another few seconds more. “We’ve got one hundred per cent faith in you.”

“Graham, I’ve got to make toys for every little c*** in the world and then deliver them to every little c*** in the world. These are impossible circumstances.”

“Not the Muslim world.”

“What?”

“Well, you said the whole world. It’s not the whole world, though, is it? Barely one per cent of China, almost none of Africa. The majority of your work goes to the English-speaking ‘A’s: Australia, America and the Arseholes Who Still Think They Rule the World. Tell you what, if you think it’ll help, you can cut out Switzerland. No one really likes Switzerland anyway.”

“Oh great, so I can knock some chocolate and cuckoo clocks off the f***ing list. That still leaves countless hundreds of millions of houses!”

Graham’s smile cracked, quivered, went flat, then returned to normal. “You’re being outperformed by Amazon, do you know that? They’re making your operation look like the amateur cluster-copulation that it is. They’re doing what you do once a year, once a day, and they’re doing it perfectly. And let’s put something in perspective here. You’re living in a shack in a snowy wilderness surrounded by your wife’s underwear and dying polar bears, while Jeff Bezos is living in a billion dollar fortress on the moon. The moon! All your sponsors, Coca Cola, Mattell, every single one of them would pull out today if not for the high Santa brand recognition and the advertising revenue that comes from it, and the fact that you maximise their profits by using slave labour. Sorry… zero pay contracts.”

Santa slammed his whiskey bottle down on the desk. Not to make any dramatic point. Just because it was finished. “Exactly: we use slave labour. So we bring back those lazy ass elves from furlough and we make them all work together, harder than ever, round the clock, and who gives a f*** if they get sick. I’ll put the gnomes on a plane to the South Pole and they can bring in the New Year gang-banging penguins. Problem solved.”

Graham winced. “Ooooh, bad PR, Mr Claus, bad PR.”

Santa leaned back in his chair. “So people don’t care if the little f***ers are being worked to death, just so long as they don’t get sick from a virus while they’re doing it?”

“Absolutely,” smiled Graham. “The market research confirms it.”

Santa leaned back in his seat and smiled thinly. “Jesus Christ, and I thought I was the evil bastard. So, in summary, Graham, you’ve been absolutely and completely f*** all help.”

“Always here for you, Mr Claus.”

“Always here to do f*** all, you mean.”

“I feel this has been a most productive meeting. Oh, before I go, just one more thing: you can’t go into any houses this year.”

Santa shot upright. “Come again?”

“Covid restrictions. We can’t risk the spread of infection, especially since you’ll be flitting between hundreds of millions of homes.”

Santa laughed. “So what the f*** am I supposed to do? Drop a payload of presents from the sky like I’m a drone above Fallujah? Shout ‘HEIDS’ as I rain down animatronic puppies over Paisley?”

Graham smiled his widest smile. This was the smile finale. The big one he’d been working up to. “I trust your judgement, Mr Claus.”

And with that, he was gone, smile and all.

“We’ll see about that, you grinning plastic prick,” growled Santa mischievously.

***

Grogu was a little surprised to find himself standing in-front of a mounted camera dressed as a slutty nun, complete with crotchless panties and blood-red lipstick.

“Em, remind me how this is going to help save Christmas again, Mr Claus?”

Santa stood tweaking the camera and laughing. “Well, now that all of you workshy little twerps have got OnlyFans accounts set up, you’re going to be raking in money from all the world’s perverts, money that I’m going to use to order all the world’s presents through f***ing Amazon. Let Jeff Bezos take the strain, the swotting, bald, Bond-villain c***.”

What a fantastic idea of Santa’s. Even better that he’d stopped the gnomes from burning Yulper and Chimrick. Their OnlyFans account featured them parading around in his wife’s pants while wearing shit-covered face masks, intermittently kissing each other, and it was his biggest earner. There really was a frightful amount of perverts out there, and between them and their deep pockets they were saving Christmas for a generation of hopeful, cherubic children.

“And, em, what’s this?” asked Grogu, holding up a bendy latex implement that possessed the dimensions of a large poloni sausage.

“That’s a double-ended dildo, son.”

“And…em… what am I supposed to do with it?”

“I trust your judgement, Grogu,” said Santa, as he lumbered from the room.

“SANTA?” wailed Grogu, “WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WITH IT?”

“Go f*** yourself, Grogu!” he called back.

It was the best Xmas Eve ever. Santa didn’t have any presents to deliver, so he spent the evening flying through the skies, from Coatbridge to Copenhagen, Berlin to Brisbane, halting the reindeer every now and then to hover over a FedEx or DPD van and take a great big curly shit on it from the air.

At precisely 5am on Christmas morning, Santa snapped the reins and called to Rudolph: “Make haste for the moon, you red-nosed nobber. I’ve saved a bit of supper for that shiny-headed son of a bitch, Bezos, and it’ll soon be time for my six o’clock shit.”

Merry Christmas everyone!

 

Christmas: A One-Star Review

If the Christmas season was an Amazon product I’d give it four stars. Not because it’s all that good, but because I’m nice, you see. I wouldn’t want to hurt Christmas’s feelings.

If the Christmas season was a place of interest, or a restaurant or something, I’d give it four stars on Trip Advisor, and I’d probably write something like, ‘Loved the bit where the little people opened the presents and smiled, and couldn’t fault the bit where everybody ate the bitter-tasting green Maltesers and the dead bird with Bovril poured all over it, but if I’ve any mild criticism to offer – and it seems churlish even to mention it – and, really, it’s very, very mild criticism indeed – mild as an Amish curry – it’s that for well over ninety per cent of that small handful of festive weeks I felt like I wanted to raid a private scorpion breeder’s aquarium and stab myself to death with their collection, and then run over a cliff onto a field of landmines screaming, ‘Why? WHY won’t you JUST let me DIE, God?’

‘Apart from that though… excellent.’

The kids were fuelled by a cocktail of excitement and chocolate, making them psychotic whirling scarecrows of tears, screams and laughter, their behaviour made all the worse by them being unbound from routine and purpose. We tried to take them out and about, and occupy their time as much as possible, but bad weather, worse finances and a dearth of places to go in the middle of a winter holiday didn’t make that easy. If they weren’t fighting over each other’s new toys, they were fighting over each other’s old toys; sometimes they just fought because of muscle memory. Separately they were fine, angelic even, and together they could be wurlitzers of warmth and unity, but most of the time they squabbled like pigeons on meth, pecking at each other over the smallest of injustices and infractions. ‘I WANTED THE BLUE SPOON!’ ‘THAT’S MY ONE!’ ‘BUT I ALWAYS HAVE THE BLUE ONE!’ ‘IT’S MINE!’ ‘YOU’RE NAUGHTY!’ ‘I’M NOT NAUGHTY, YOU’RE NAUGHTY!’

Standing there amid the screams and recriminations, I could feel my blood pressure rising like a thermometer inside the sun’s arse. Even on otherwise tranquil trips away, the ghost of Stressmas was never too far from my heart. I took our eldest, 5, to the local country park so we could don our wellies on, trudge through the mud and shout borderline abuse at farm animals, but on the road there some geriatric jerk-off in a gleaming BMW decided to dangerously tailgate me in the rain and wet on a dangerous stretch of road, with my little boy buckled helplessly into the site of impact like a tiny Crash Test Dummy.

In my usual calm manner, I gesticulated wildly and hammered the horn, calling him a murderer and a few other choice names besides, before totally losing it and punching the rear-view mirror off its perch and down onto the floor. The old man gunned his engine and revved past me at high speed, staring straight ahead to avoid my furious glare, which begs the question: why was he tailgating me in the first place? Anyway, I wasn’t proud of my little outburst, and I apologised to the boy for losing my temper, telling him that big people made mistakes sometimes, too. I asked if we could keep this little outburst between the two of us so I’d have time to replace the cracked glass in the mirror, so naturally he grassed me up to his mum the next time he had a chance. I guess I’m proud. I’ve taught him well by instruction, if not always by example.

The festive season had genuine highlights, of course, with Christmas Day being the obvious top dog. What’s not to love? Looks of surprise, delight and gratitude on our children’s faces; getting to spend the day with close family; eating well,  laughing, being merry and beating those sons of bitches at every parlour game, board game and quiz game brought to the table. Budge over, Jesus. There’s a new God in town.

So there’s no point writing about how lovely the loveliest bits were, because I want to make you laugh and/or nod in shamed recognition, not start cooing and ooing and aahing.

My second favourite part of the season was our eldest kid’s nativity play, which I enjoyed enormously, mostly because our lad was the star of the segment. He played the grumpy, boom-voiced inn keeper around whom the well-worn story of baby Jesus revolved. Although he was natural and confident in his poise and delivery, I can’t deny it hurt my feelings a little that he disobeyed my instruction to holler out ‘ALL HAIL LORD SATAN’ at the end of the big musical number. I’ll remember that, you little (Peter O’) tool!

The nativity was merely the opening act of a two-hour long extravaganza. We watched each of the remaining six classes perform their medleys of music and madness. I took particular delight in spotting those kids who were hating every agonising second of the experience; the ones who’d rather be out in the playground being smashed in the face with a lead pipe than standing on stage in full view of their community wearing a silly hat and dancing awkwardly to an old Boyzone song from 1992. Around 95 per cent of these squirming, dead-eyed children were boys. It may surprise you, but the overwhelmingly hyper-masculine, working class culture of this part of Central Scotland doesn’t always lend itself well to theatrical exuberance.

My kid’s performance aside, the best –the absolute best – bit of the show was definitely when they brought out the cardboard Twin Towers. OH NO THEY DIDN’T! Oh YES they did. Each class’s segment was built around the theme of a particular decade in the school’s history. Primary 2 had the 2000s, which covered 9/11, an atrocity that not for one second I thought they’d cover. When the curtains opened, I even whispered jokingly in my wife’s ear, ‘2000s? What are they going to do here: recreate 9/11?’ Then out came those two big pieces of cardboard with lots of little windows drawn on them in black marker, and down fell my jaw. What the hell was coming next?: two six-year-olds running out from the wings of the stage wearing pantomime airplanes and screaming ALLAHU AKHBAR?

Mercifully, the action segued from mention of the deadliest terrorist attack on US soil, to the many sporting successes of 2002. Tonally, it was like flicking through a classic women’s magazine. (’10 SECRETS TO A MORE LOVING YOU’ ‘KIDS SAY THE FUNNIEST THINGS’ ‘MY UNCLE CHOPPED OFF MY MUM’S HEAD AND USED IT AS A COCK WARMER’) There was no mention of the second Iraq War, but I figured the teacher’s main goal probably wasn’t to stage a live, theatrical documentary worthy of John Pilger.

Before the morning’s entertainment was over we’d had the wedding of Princess Di and Prince Charles (thankfully they omitted the Paris-based sequel: Di Hard); a nine-year-old girl stomping out on stage in character as Margaret Thatcher, and a ten-year-old Joey from Friends repeatedly shouting out ‘How YOU doin’?’. It was surreal as merry shit, and of course, for that reason, I loved every ridiculous second. I prayed that the finale would be JR Ewing and Jimmy Savile conveying the Iran Contra affair through the medium of Michael Jackson’s Thriller video, but, alas, they just sang a Christmas song. I hereby offer my writing services for next year’s Chrimbo concert. I’m thinking ‘Miracle on 34th Street’ meets ‘The Hills Have Eyes’. Get your people to call my people. I think we might have a hit on our hands…

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JOIN ME LATER IN THE WEEK FOR A TALE OF TICKETS, TERROR, PISS AND VOMIT AT THE EDINBURGH CHRISTMAS MARKET

Lying to Your Kids: Your Questions About Santa (Part 4 of 6)

I wrote a mostly serious think-piece called ‘Why the Santa Myth is Bad for Your Children’s Elf’, which you can read by clicking on the highlighted link. The article inspired a set of questions, challenges and accusations, which I’ve been addressing in bite-sized pieces, day-by-day (well, day-by-every-other-day), in the run-up to Christmas. I hope it makes you laugh if we’re sympatico on the subject, and still makes you laugh even if you think I’m a monster (even though it’s clearly you who are the monster). No questions this time. I just want you to imagine an alternate universe where Christmas was never celebrated, and instead…

Yee-Haw! It’s Sharkmas!

Imagine if you heard about a culture where every June the 15th a fat cowboy called Finn Clintson sped around the world on the back of a flying great white shark, stopping off along the way to eat piles of air fresheners from people’s cars, his mission to deliver millions of boxes of rice to the kids of the world, but only those who can play darts to a professional standard.

As early as May, families start putting neon sharks in their windows. They take their kids to aquariums where they sit on Finn Clintson’s great white shark (a stuffed one, of course) and tell Finn what kind of rice they’d like for Sharkmas. On Sharkmas Eve, all the dads go out to their cars and lay fresh stacks of air fresheners on the passenger seats. They leave the doors unlocked so Finn Clintson doesn’t have to break through a window.

Between April and June the cries of ONE HUNDRED AND EIIIIIIIGGGHTTTYY can be heard bellowing from every window, and down every street, as kids everywhere pepper their houses with dart-holes in their zeal to emulate their Sharkmas hero, Les ‘Danger’ Wallace. Listen carefully at any window behind which a pushy parent is coaching a kid to be the best darts’ player they can be, and you’ll hear things like: “DO YOU EVEN WANT TEMPURA RICE THIS YEAR, ABIGAIL?” and “YOU MISSED DOUBLE-TOP? IT’S LIKE YOU WANT TO MAKE FINN CLINTSON’S SHARK DIE OF SADNESS!!”

And no-one’s allowed to tell their kids that Finn Clintson isn’t real, or where the rice really comes from, or that sharks can’t fly. Even the schools keep up the charade, bringing Finn Clintsons into the school and having the kids make little wooden great white shark decorations to dangle from their Sharkmas Hat Rack. Churches teach how the world was created by a giant basking shark called Tony.

What would you think of that culture? Absolutely bloody mental, right?

Happy Sharkmas, you douchebags.

Why the Santa myth is bad for your children’s elf

We live in a time of great freedom, however illusory or temporary that freedom might yet prove.

For instance, I could sit in a circle of peers and announce that I don’t believe in Yahweh, God, Vishnu, Allah, or a giant turtle that holds the known world atop its back as it crawls through the cosmos, and most of the people in that circle would probably accept this declaration with a silent nod or a shrug of the shoulders. Never mind that in certain countries, among certain people and cultures, such a vow would earn me a spell in prison, a steak knife to the stomach or death. Here in the modern, secular west, I can profess belief or its lack in whatsoever I choose and be almost certain of a tolerant reception.

But try to tell people that I don’t want to play along with the Santa myth? Well, let’s just say that most culturally dominant orthodoxies seem benign until you try to opt out of them. I think a steak-knife to the stomach would be easier to take. Take it from me: being a Santa-truther gets you treated like a scar-faced leper with a vest of grenades and a public masturbation problem.

The sprawling Santa conspiracy, global in its reach, in which we entangle our children raises a multitude of uncomfortable questions, and comes at a terrible price: not least of which is the spirit of shattered trust in which it’s perpetuated.

It seems that all other western cultural norms are fluid, except for this one. Never this one. The only things powerful enough to grant you a Santa exemption are deeply-held fundamentalist Christian beliefs or adherence to a non-Christian faith, and even then there’s a chance you’ll still be regarded as a destroyer of children’s dreams.

I baulk at the presumptuousness, the unthinkingness of it all. Really, would a Christian parent ever in a month of Sundays approach a Muslim family and knowingly ask them if they’re looking forward to the birthday of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ? A religious person might very well try to preach to or proselytise my children, but I’d be well within my rights to do everything possible to counter their supernaturally-motivated manoeuvrings, from taking expert advice to punching them in the teeth, and I’d enjoy broad moral – if not exactly legal – support. Santa’s cult of commercialism, however, has carte blanche, and few would ever support me in a bid to tear it down.

It’s clear that there’s something about this little red-and-white lie that’s seen as integral to and inextricable from a hearty and wholesome childhood. There’s a concomitant notion that somehow the act of debunking Santa holds the potential to obliterate a child’s capacity for innocence and imagination, and quite possibly leave them with the dull, jaded outlook of a middle-aged chartered accountant on the eve of his second divorce. Or else turn them into a fleet of joyless androids each wearing the scowling face of Richard Dawkins.

This pre-supposes that in the pre-Santa days of Shakespeare and Dumas the kids of the world were witless dullards, and every visionary, artist and poet worth their salt only emerged post-Pole.

Santa began as a folk-tale that many believe morphed out of the legends of a Saint. He was a rather different, certainly less sanguine, figure in his early days, one that children were more inclined to fear than keenly anticipate. The Santa we know and love today – the darling of TV adverts, movies and billboards – has only existed in his current form – big-bearded, red-jacketed and jolly – for a comparatively short time (the same is true for his retinue: Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer only arrived in 1939); but yet we are encouraged to believe that something as malleable and arbitrary as the historical idea of Santa should be considered unchallengeable, unchangeable and eternal.

Santa is but one fictional character in a cast of thousands. Why does he get special dispensation when it comes to the laws of reality? I regularly read my sons stories about alien encounters, magical beanstalks, sentient robots and talking horses, without ever feeling the need to hoodwink them into accepting that all of these things can be found in reality. No-one would consider it heresy for me to explain to my son that horses can’t really talk; knowing this fact doesn’t in any way limit his imagination or detract from his very real enjoyment of the story. Penguins don’t have jobs, dogs can’t moonlight as policemen, aliens can’t travel through time in a physics-defying police box, there’s no such thing as ghosts, and people can’t turn green and smash buildings when they’re angry. My eldest certainly knows that, or at least these things have been explained to him. He doesn’t care. He still mimics these characters and scenarios, and riffs on them in his own unique, imaginative way when he’s running about the house lost in make-believe or play-acting with his toys.

Strange old ladies don’t stop him in the street to ask if he’s excited about a visit from the talking horse. He doesn’t see a million adverts on TV featuring a talking horse trying to convince him to buy things. He isn’t taken to The Talking Horse’s Grotto every year. In no other sphere of life is there such a zealous attempt to systematically cement children’s fantastical notions into fact.

Perhaps in the past the Santa fantasy was more innocent and fleeting in nature: a little tale or poem wheeled out every Christmas Eve; a single evening of merry make-believe. These days Santa is everywhere. Literally everywhere: he’s like a God who’s tired of subtlety and enigma. You can write to him, email him, watch him, read him, visit him, Skype him, tag him in your friends’ Facebook posts. He appears every year at the stroke of November, and doesn’t stop assailing kids with his maniacal mirth-making until the very last slice of turkey’s been fed to the dog.

Your motivations may be pure. You may only wish to indulge in a little heart-warming festive fantasy. But you don’t have the luxury of raising your children unplugged from the Matrix. Santa is perpetuated by businesses, not by you.

Money. It’s all about money.

Just like everything else in life, I suppose.

The power of Santa compels him… to do very little

Here’s a question for you: why does Santa deliver unequal amounts of toys to the children of the world? Why does he deliver more toys to affluent families than he does to poor families? Because he does. SO clearly, then, on the great sliding scale of political ideology, the red-jacketed sleigh-racer is more tightly aligned to conservative notions of capitalism than he is to communism, or socialism. If your kid goes back to school after the winter break with a new pair of cheap shoes and a toy laser gun, and has to listen to another kid bragging about his £1000 home entertainment system and surprise trip to Disneyland, what is he to infer about his worth in Santa’s eyes? Should he castigate himself for being too naughty, placing the blame for his poor festive haul upon his own tiny shoulders? Or should he just conclude that Santa doesn’t really like him all that much?

Remove Santa from this equation, and you’ve still got a problem with unequal distribution of wealth and resources in society, married to an unslakable thirst for goods and gadgets that’s only heightened and reinforced by our media, but that’s an argument for another time (besides, there are more learned, original and eloquent thinkers out there with better and more important things to say on the topic than little old me).

Consider also this point: Santa is an omniscient being who has mastered time itself, can travel around the globe and back in one evening, and can apparently conjure an endless supply of toys from thin air. Santa uses these powers not to alleviate suffering, lift people out of hunger and poverty, cure the sick and the lame or to usher in a new era of world peace, but to drop toy robots down chimneys. What a role model. He’s no better than Sooty. Or Jesus.

You can emphasise the magical, imagination-stretching benefits of a child’s belief in Santa as a rationale for deceiving your children, but when I hear Santa’s name mentioned by parents, more often than not his name is employed as a correctional tool rather than as an instrument of wonder. Be nice, behave, go to bed, tidy your room, eat your dinner or Santa will cross you off his list, and you won’t get any toys. By weaponising Santa in this way, parents have created a bearded boogeyman to scare or bribe their children into behaving the way they want them to. This may be an instantly effective, no-nonsense behavioural control technique, but then so is smashing them in the face with a cricket bat.

The sad truth is that parents are conditioning their children to be good not for goodness’ sake – as the old snowman song goes – but to be good so they can get a new TV or pony. They’re being encouraged to equate virtue with financial reward. Part of being a happy, successful and fully-socialised human being necessitates a degree of sacrifice, negotiation, humility and deference. These are qualities – and modes of conflict resolution – that shouldn’t need a chuckling demigod, or the dangled carrot of a PlayStation 4, to be fully realised.

Sometimes people will say: “You believed in Santa, and YOU weren’t traumatised.”

You could put forward exactly the same argument for religion. Come on, you sang songs, you listened to some nice little stories, you went on coach trips. What’s your problem? I’ll tell you what my problem is: consent.

Even if the whole Santa myth is benign and beautiful, why do I have to participate in it if I don’t want to, when I can opt out of almost every other cultural or religious convention without raising an eyebrow? Why should I allow fat old strangers to peer down at my children every November and fill their heads with bullshit, when if they were peddling any other lie I’d be well within my rights to tell them to fuck off?

Whose interest does Santa really serve?

I’m conscious that I’m probably coming across as even more of a misery guts and world-class humbug than Scrooge himself. Believe me, I’ve analysed my opposition to Santa endlessly. Was I lied to as a child? Did I have promises broken? Is this what’s driving my dissection: are my trust issues bleeding on to the hem of Santa’s coat? I’m pretty sure that isn’t the case. I just like asking questions, and don’t like lying.

And, this may shock you, but I love Christmas. I love the ceremony and expectation of it all. I love the tree, the twinkling lights, the cosy mugs of cocoa on the cold and windy nights. I’m probably more excited about my kids opening their presents than they are. My partner and I – as I’m sure you do, too – always choose presents perfectly suited to their personalities, presents that will help them play and learn and laugh and grow.

Maybe I just don’t want Santa to muscle in on that. But, more than that, I find it almost impossible to lie to my kids. Santa is a secret I’ve had no say in, that I have no need for. You don’t need Santa to make Christmas magical, but you do require his absence to maintain an honest and healthy stance on both society and the universe itself. My silence is being demanded not to preserve the mystery and magic of the festive season, but to stop me from blowing the whistle on the millions of other families who have chosen to deceive their children. Families who want to keep using Santa as a four-month-long carrot-and-stick combo. This only makes me want to blow the whistle all the more; to send my sons into their schools with information bombs strapped to their brains, ready to blast your children in their faces with the bright light of truth.

But I won’t.

Well, I would give them the information, but I would counsel them not to share it with other kids, and I certainly wouldn’t take the liberty of telling anyone else’s children the truth about Santa. While some people may see it as their inalienable right to warp the world-view of my children, I don’t see it as my right to do the same to theirs. And what my kids do with any information they may or may not get from me is on YOU, not ME. If you want to lie to your kids, don’t fucking rope me into it.

That being said, I’m as much a sheep as the rest of you. I took them to Santa’s Grotto last year. Me. Wilfully. Well, accidentally (I didn’t know the garden centre I was taking them to had a grotto), but certainly of my own volition. I stood like a statue as pseudo-Santa spewed out his nonsense into my kids’ brains, which makes me a Christmas quisling. A hypocrite. A man who fears the zeal of his festive partner. A man who has more and more respect for apostates and cult-breakers (if I can’t even wriggle my kids free of Santa’s soft grip, what hope would I have had as a doubting Scientologist?).

Besides, in many ways the web of lies has already been shot too far and spun too tightly for me to take corrective action. We were at a barbecue this summer past, and my eldest boy, Jack (then 3 on the cusp of 4), and I were sitting at the top of the garden, looking down on the house. It had a sloped, peaked roof.

Jack asked thoughtfully, “How does Santa land on that roof?”

I took this as my chance to gently guide him towards the truth of Santa’s non-existence, asking him to state if people like Doctor Who or Captain Underpants were real people, or characters.

“Characters.”

“And what about Santa?”

“Real.”

“What if I told you he wasn’t real, and that big people just made him up?”

He laughed and shook his head. The more I protested, the harder he laughed. I even just flat out resorted to saying: ‘”There is no Santa. He’s not real.”

How did that go? you may ask.

He wouldn’t accept it. Furthermore, he now thinks I’m a fucking mental case.

THANKS, society.

I guess you win.

Jamie’s Digest (3): Cool Bits From Books – FESTIVE EDITION

Whenever I’m reading I always like to highlight phrases and passages that strike a chord with me, either because they’re emotionally or intellectually resonant, or because they’re exceptionally relevant to something that’s happening in the world today. I’d like to continue to share some of the these excerpts with you.

Santa Claus: A Biography

What a well-researched, interesting, funny and insightful book, charting Santa’s evolution from the swamps of myth into the ubiquitous character we know and love today. He’s terrified little children the world over, helped to advertise everything from soap to guns, and if he hadn’t ‘existed’ we would never have been able to read absolutely tremendous news stories like this. I had a great time reading this book, and I’d like to share a few bits and pieces from it.

“The ideal Santa for department-store grottoes or work-shops is described as middle-aged, plump, red-faced, and possessing his own beard with an ability to charm children and pass a police background check. Such candidates are scarce and becoming more so, according to those responsible for recruiting them. Modern healthy lifestyles have apparently reduced the number of suitably obese men, and head-hunting firms are paid handsomely, and advertise far afield, to produce the proper candidates.”

Isn’t that great? A dearth of Santas owing to an overall reduction in obesity levels and generally improved health: have you any idea how hard I, as a Scotsman, laughed at that paragraph. Honestly, we should just change the name of our country to The North Pole and be done with it. It’s the jolly part we’d struggle with.

I like that, though. Scotland becoming a Jurassic Park for Santas. Anyway, elsewhere in that same chapter we learn a little more about why there appear to be so few new Santas:

“Why should there be a shortage of imitation Santas for malls and department stores? Many veteran Santas complain of a new miasma of suspicion surrounding anyone dealing professionally with small children. Shopping centres fearful of litigation have imposed new rules or, in some cases, even forbidden Santas to hold children on their laps, preferring that they merely extend a handshake to the children who are brought to stand by them. Other stores have discouraged a jolly attitude, lest it be interpreted in an inappropriate fashion, and have insisted their Saint Nicks be more business-like in their approach to kids. Santas are told to keep both hands visible at all times, wear white gloves to heighten that visibility , and have to undergo criminal background checks, and in some cases even drug testing. In the United States, they have become targets of bomb threats and irate parents and have asked for police protection; in tropical countries they have had to go on strike to protest the suits they are forced to wear.”

A few things spring to mind after reading this paragraph:

  1. Yes, it’s a shame that we live in a world where we have to doubt the intentions of those who wish to spend time with our children, but, equally, these past fifty years have taught us that an overwhelmingly large number of clowns, teachers, Santas and kids TV presenters have tried to fuck our kids.
  2. I now know why this year’s Santa at our grotto was quite thin, and came across more like a headteacher desperately trying to tamp down his stress as he stares into the precipice of another violent emotional breakdown than an avuncular chuckle-head with a sackful of hohoho. Or maybe the Santa that was originally hired went down with a heart attack, and this miserable son of a bitch had to fill in last minute.
  3. White gloves for visibility? Man, Michael Jackson’s stylist was definitely trying to signal us from the inside, like Dwight shooting arrows for Daryl. I’m also going to be keeping a very close eye on snooker referees from now on.

Amazon link: Santa Claus – A Biography by Gerry Bowler

Insidious as Fuck

I was reading a chapter of The Christmasaurus to my 3-year-old son, when my eyes skimmed a sentence or so ahead and sent back a message to my mouth to shut down mid-sentence. I’d seen some dangerous, insidious shit; a passage that seemed to come straight from a book of religious short stories. Through these same pernicious paragraphs the book also – perhaps paradoxically – threw a wink to those who would support our burgeoning mono-culture, and tipped its hat to the ‘But it’s NICE’ crowd. Sorry to go full Dawkins on y’all, but I’d rather my son was encouraged to follow the dictates of reason than bid to glug from the shit-filled chalice of superstition.

The titular magic dinosaur was fine, of course, as was Santa himself. I don’t have a problem with them. It’s a work of fantasy, after all. Also, I admire the way the author treats the main character’s disability, and was happy to have my son absorb the sentiments… but… the section below where William’s Dad tries to reignite his son’s belief in Santa  (even though, in the context of this book, Santa is supposed to be real, anyway)? Fuck, no.

“‘I believe this story is true. Therefore it is true,’ he [William’s Dad] said.

‘But… how does that work?’ questioned William, desperate to know more. ‘If I’ve never seen something, how do I know it’s real?’

‘Ah, William! You’ve got it the wrong way round!’ said Mr Trundle, smiling. ‘Believing has to come first. People who don’t believe in things will never see those things. Believing is seeing.’

But William still looked uncertain.

‘But, Dad, some kids at school don’t believe in Santa. What if I believe he’s real and someone else doesn’t? If we both believe different things, then we can’t both be right, can we?’ asked William.”

[Mr Trundle then introduces William to the ‘Glass half-full/glass half-empty’ dichotomy, and uses this as a hammer to bash the sense of reason out of him.]

“William looked at the half-empty mug of milk in front of him for a moment before realising that his dad might actually be right too. Even though he and his dad believed different things, they were both right.

‘You see, William, we both believe completely opposite things, but it doesn’t mean that either of us is wrong. This mug is both half empty AND half full at the same time,’ said Mr Trundle, as William sat there with the expression of a young boy whose mind is in the process of being completely blown. ‘People believe all sorts of wild, wacky, weird and wonderful things, but it doesn’t mean that anyone is wrong or that anyone is right. What is important isn’t what is wrong, right, real, fake, true or false. What matters is that whatever you believe makes you a happier, better person.'”

I’m beginning to think that Trundle’s a Scientologist, the disingenuous c***.

Amazon link: The Christmasaurus by Tom Fletcher

WHATEVER YOU DO: READ. AND READ LOTS. IT’S GOOD FOR YOU.

Christmas Canine 2: The Wag-a Continues

Imagine my astonishment when I logged into this site’s email account to find that some plucky little reader out there had come up with a Brody-related image that’s as insane as it is festive. Well done, mysterious artist, whoever you are.

card (1)

There’s still time to submit your own to theotherjamie@hotmail.co.uk

Here’s a link to the original picture and mission statement:

http://www.jamieandrew-withhands.com/2014/12/23/the-tail-of-the-christmas-canine/

Merrg Brodymas!