Tag Archives: Xmas

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

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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!

 

Horror at the Edinburgh Christmas Market

Posted on by

In the dead-zone between Christmas and New Year I took a trip to Edinburgh’s Christmas Market, which proved to be both absolutely great and utterly terrible at the same time. I went with my two kids, 5 and 3, and my friend and his two kids, 6 and 4. We’ll call my friend ‘Iain’, mainly because that’s his name. Our kids have names, too. I promise we haven’t just assigned them numbers.

Regular readers will know that my two are called Jack and Christopher. Iain’s kids are called Girl Child and Boy Child.

The train ride into the city was surprisingly stress-free considering that we were two hapless fathers herding four excitable, potentially unruly children into a claustrophobic environment crammed with disapproving strangers for thirty long minutes. For some reason that bit was fine. It was the arriving that reeked of failure, and that was entirely down to the tardiness of our initial departure.

We’d arrived at our home station with mere seconds to spare, so weren’t able to buy tickets prior to boarding. The six of us had had to sprint towards the train like something out of Home Alone, and then dash through the rapidly closing doors like something out of Indiana Jones. There were no ticket collectors/dispensers on-board the train, so we had to queue to buy them at Edinburgh before we could pass through the barriers.

We were slow to realise why everyone else disembarking the train was moving so quickly up the platform – the queue-savvy sons-of-bitches – and so found ourselves at the very back of the ticket-line.

Iain detests the traditional ticketing system. He prefers to deal with automata, which is why he spent the whole duration of our time in the queue frantically trying to buy digital tickets through an app on his phone. He failed. We reached the front before he mastered it. If it had been the Crystal Maze, he would’ve been left behind in the Train Zone as we went on to collect bits of shiny paper in the Crystal Dome.

I don’t know exactly why Iain hates tickets so much. It’s something to do with feeling beholden; of having to bow down for inspection to a haughty stranger. I think he just doesn’t like talking to people, something to which I can definitely relate.

We ascended into Edinburgh proper, fighting our way through a teeming crowd of thousands.

Edinburgh’s Christmas market stretches across two levels of Princess Street Gardens, with a giant, blindingly-bright Big Wheel dominating the event and the city skyline. This year it was crushingly busy and bustling, a clog of people being pushed up, down and along thin arteries flanked by coffee houses, portable pubs and assorted trinket-hawkers. The air – cold and sharp – smelled of irritation and fried onions; alive to boot with the sounds of a thousand ‘excuse me’s’ intermingling with the same six or seven Christmas songs everyone had been listening to on a loop for a solid month already. I haven’t visited the Xmas market since I was about 23, but I don’t ever remember it being this hectic, this brazenly commercialised, this soulless. The kids didn’t give a shit, though. The city was loud and colourful, there were chocolate-covered churros, and there was a mini-rollercoaster. What more could they want?

Iain was overjoyed to learn that we had to pre-purchase a big wad of tickets before the kids could go on any of the fairground rides. He again tried to enlist me in his one-man war against ticket inspections, but I just couldn’t share his anger. Normally I’m something of an anger connoisseur. I get angry over a great many inconsequential and pointless things, and I felt sad that I couldn’t add this one to the collection.

The big, bespectacled lady at the ticket desk asked Iain if he lived in an EH postcode area (i.e. within Edinburgh or its immediate environs). He said no. Because he doesn’t.

‘That’s a shame,’ she said, ‘You would’ve got a 10 per cent discount if you did.’

Iain didn’t miss a beat. ‘I don’t, but he does,’ he said, pointing a thumb back at me.

This was Iain’s chance to stick it to the man, and he was enlisting my help. His old friend wouldn’t let him down. Whom else could he count on in his hour of need?

‘No I don’t,’ I said.

Iain looked at me with disappoint in his eyes, while the ticket lady, in turn, looked at Iain with disappointment in hers. She looked visibly wounded, like her tenuous grip on hope had been wrested from her hands and cast to the gutter by Iain’s treachery. I just sort of laughed, and unashamedly bought my full-price tickets.

‘What did you do that for?’ asked Iain, unable to conceal how miffed he was. I explained that I had a vision of the future, the immediate future, and it was one in which I looked like a complete twat

The woman’s next question, I explained, undoubtedly would’ve been: ‘Oh, so what’s your post code?’ and I would’ve been forced to stutter out something like, ‘ah, E…H… 1… em, 1… 1…. em, 1?’

And she would’ve said: ‘And what street is that?’

And I would’ve said: ‘Em, I think it’s Street… Avenue?…’

‘Are you sure that’s a real street, sir?’ she would’ve asked.

And I would’ve said: ‘Em…could be Crescent… Place?’

‘Crescent Place? Sounds fake to me, sir.’

‘I LIVE IN A FUCKING BIN, OKAY? BEHIND A TOILET.’

So it’s lucky I avoided that, really.

The kids first went on the mini roller-coaster. I think it always helps when you’re trying to promote an atmosphere of happiness and magic for wide-eyed, excited children to have your fairground rides staffed by dead-eyed teenagers who look like they wouldn’t even blink if the ride suddenly derailed, sending your children catapulting into the night sky at 180mph.

We spent an hour or so at the market, going on some more rides with the kids; treating them to the rickety, rocket-shaped death-trap that was the Helter Skelter; feeding them chocolate; trying to get them to stop running in circles like dogs on a beach. Eventually, time took its toll on their manic dispositions and we realised it was time to head home, via McDonalds, naturally, because we’re bad parents.

We thought about going on the big wheel, but thought better of it when we realised it would cost us about £25 each. That’s a lot of money for the kids to decide they were bored after half a revolution, or for the younger kids to violently shit themselves at 100ft.

We made our way to the McDonalds inside the food court in the busy shopping mall that borders Waverley train station for the last – and the worst – leg of our journey. Horror awaited us. Great streams and chunks of it.

I scouted for a table and chairs in the busy food-court with my two boys and Iain’s Girl Child while he went into McDonalds with his little Boy Child to order the food. We hadn’t been sitting for thirty seconds when little Christopher announced that he needed a pee, elongating the vowels so the word lasted almost as long as an actual peeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

What the hell was I going to do? Iain was lost in a crowd of people inside McDonalds. I had a unisex group of kids in my care, only two of them mine, so it wasn’t practical to take all of them to the male toilet with me at once. The clock was ticking: Christopher wasn’t renowned for his ball-control. The wife from a couple sitting at the table next to us with their two kids overheard my dilemma and offered to keep an eye on two of the kids so I could whisk Chrissy off for a pissy. I thanked her, but politely declined. Tick tock. I had to make a snap decision. Off we went. All of us. Not ideal, but necessary.

I led the kids around the lower level of the mall as we hunted for the toilets, keeping them close to me and tight together like a comet’s tail lest they get swallowed up by the throng of people. We eventually found the toilets, but the queue leading up to the turnstiles that you had to pass through before you even got a shot at relieving yourself was about 18 people strong, and I didn’t have that kind of time.

I hurried and herded the kids back to the table, hoping Iain’s journey into the dark heart of McDonalds would be completed. It wasn’t. What was I going to do now? Chris kept shuffling, jiggling and loudly complaining. I spied the main doors that led out of the mall and joined with the stone steps outside. Ah-HA! All being well – if I could find a place out there for a surreptitious piss – I’d be back at the table in less than a minute.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said to the couple from earlier. ‘Would you be kind enough to watch these two after all?’

‘Stay still, don’t talk, don’t move,’ I said to Jack and Girl Child.

I lifted Christopher up under his arms and rushed him towards the sliding doors like a bomb. Once outside we dashed dead ahead into an alcove where Chris unleashed a long, flowing piss you wouldn’t have credited to a creature of his size; back we dashed and waddled, just in time for a young goth at the table behind us – who’d been sitting with her head on a table receiving worried back rubs from her friends for the past ten minutes – to projectile vomit everywhere. I saw it cascading from her mouth and through her hands like potatoey Vimto, an image that stayed with me for the rest of the day (and haunts me even now). Iain arrived seconds later with our food, and we had to wolf it down with the sharp tang of vomit still lingering in the air.

As we began to eat, Iain’s Girl Child loudly announced that she needed the toilet. Off Iain went, back he came and then, yep, this time Jack needed a poo. Off I went, back I came, and then Iain’s Boy Child had to go. No sooner had they left than Chris announced that he was desperate for yet another peeeeeeeeeee. Why was this happening to me?

Here I had the same dilemma again, and the same split of kids. Emboldened by my earlier success, I bomb-waddled Chris out of the mall’s sliding doors (‘Stay there, kids, and don’t move, okay?’) and back to the same reservoir of piss from before, still wet and plentiful, so he could add more to it. I rushed back, Iain returned and then, guess what?

‘Daddy, I need a pooooooo!’

‘Fuck sake!’ I barked, unable to stop the swear word from leaping out my throat.

Iain grinned. ‘I’ll be honest, the only thing that’s making this more bearable for me is seeing how awful it is for you.’

I laughed. ‘I’m glad to be of service.’

We finally got out of there and boarded our return train, where yet another round of pee-pees sent me up and down the carriage like an angry kangaroo. Iain found this, and my exasperated reactions, a continuing source of amusement. I silently wished for a ticket collector to come along the carriage and re-kindle his rage.

It had been a good day.

…most of it anyway.

But we both agreed that for now, and possibly forever, Christmas could definitely, absolutely, incontrovertibly…

…piss off.

Christmas: A One-Star Review

Posted on by

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…

——————————————————————————————————————–

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 2 of 6)

Posted on by

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’m going to address in bite-sized pieces, day-by-day (well, 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).

What have you got against kids using their imaginations and believing in magic, Jamie? Don’t you realise that without Santa the world would be a grey, dull and empty place?

Of course, you’re right.

It’s only at Christmas-time that we permit our kids to exercise their imaginations in glorious, ambulatory 4D instead of just forcing them to mainline TV through their eyes, absorbing hour after hour of YouTube videos of kids opening plastic egg-cases (for some inexplicable reason, this is considered entertainment).

Our kids spend eleven months of every year shuffling around the house like robot butlers haunted by the souls of civil service middle-managers, daring only to imagine that the next day and the next day and the day after that will be exactly the same as it was today.

Until, that is, the igniting spark of Christmas arrives! Huzzah! ‘Tis yuletime, so come to life, my children. Come to life! It’s time to play, to dare, to dream. Let your thoughts have substance, for ’tis the season of magic (‘Tis also the season that teaches kids that it’s okay for fat old men to break into houses in the dead of night as children sleep).

It’s the time of year where parents everywhere say to their spawn: “Come on, kids, let’s begin your officially-mandated month of very strictly regulated imaginative role-play. I’m going to channel all of my dead-eyed vapidity into regurgitating the same old stock-phrases about Santa that I trot out every year, and pretend that I’m taking you on some unforgettable, mind-bending journey to the very periphery of the knowable universe, when in reality I’m just lazy and deeply unimaginative, and SANTA’S NICE, AND I LIKE NICE THINGS, THINGS THAT MAKE PEOPLE GO AWWWWWW, AND YOU WILL NOT TAKE THAT AWAY FROM ME, YOU LITTLE FUCK-STAIN! Plus, I really like accessorising trees, and making my house look like a John Lewis catalogue, so when I take pictures of my decorations and put them on-line it makes everyone question their sad little lives, and how they’ll never match up to me so they might as well convert to Islam next year.”

Magic is for life, not just for Christmas. Santa is nothing more than a template, a suggestion, a Shutter-stock photo. Kids should be creating their own mental mischief all the time, every day. And you, as a parent or a big person in their lives, should be running around the house with them pretending to be fifty-foot-high hedgehogs on the run from the Intergalactic Council of Sentient Jelly Cakes, or bears with the heads of dolphins, or screaming at each other in made-up languages. Kids need magic. It sustains them. They just don’t need their magic accompanied by a side-order of lies.

Why is it so important to deceive them as we enchant them? Wouldn’t Santa still be a lark if the kids knew he wasn’t really ‘real’? Of course he would. Harry Potter isn’t real, Star Wars isn’t real, and people have become multi-millionaires a million times over on the back of that shit.

Do you want to go ‘all in’? Is that what you want? You want to go all in? Let’s do it then! Let’s tell our kids that EVERY fictional character is real: Ronald McDonald, the Honey Monster, the Gruffalo, Mr Hankey, Death, dragons, Scooby Doo, Muttley, Garfield, Jesus, Danny Dyer. ALL of them. You want magic? HERE’S your fucking magic!! Check out this world: kids who can’t eat their Rice Krispies because they’re frightened that Snap and Crackle are going to burst out of the packet and kick the fuck out of them; kids who think Voldermort is going to pick them up from school and then turn into a giant spider and eat them. Let your mentally-exhausted children live in that world. Let them run THAT gauntlet, you sickos.

Giving Santa the Sack: Your Questions Answered

Posted on by

I’ve already written a mostly serious think-piece about ‘Why the Santa Myth is Bad for Your Children’s Elf’, which you can read by clicking on the highlighted link. I found that the article inspired the same sets of questions, challenges and accusations, which I’ve tried to address here, but this time with a little less of a serious head on. In fact, I’ve gone full-on bonkers in some places. Hope it makes you laugh if we’re sympatico on the subject, and still makes you laugh even if you think I’m the monster (even though it’s clearly you, you monster).

Why are you trying to rubbish Santa? It’s tradition. We’ve always had Santa, elves and reindeer at Christmas time. ALWAYS.

Yes, you’re right, indeed we have. Who can forget the famous cave paintings depicting early man clubbing a bear to death as Donner and Blitzen whizz above his head on a coke-fuelled adventure, pooping down gift-wrapped bones and Christmas cards made from human skin? Or Jesus sitting on Santa’s lap asking for a camel that can go through the eye of a needle, and Santa shaking his head and asking, “Is that on the Pray-station 4?”

The Santa we know today – big red coat, bushy white beard, jelly belly and jolly disposition – has had more origin stories than all of the heroes and villains at Marvel and DC combined. He’s an ever-shifting mish-mash of Christian saints, pagan history and alpine folklore who’s been constantly co-opted and re-packaged by ad-men, marketers and movie moguls the world over, to the point where he’d be almost unrecognisable to those long-ago mountain children who grew up hearing tales of the petty, vengeful old bastard who partnered up with a half-goat, half-demon called Krampus to go around the countryside stuffing kids into a sack. Ho-Ho-Hosef Fritzl.

Shall we bring Krampus back? Shall we? After all, horny old Krampus is far more traditional than the Coca-Cola-coated old coot who shimmies down our chimneys at present. I’m all for it, incidentally. I think Christmas would be improved immeasurably by the introduction of blood-curdling terror (which would also be a perfect complement to Brussels Sprouts).

On second thoughts, let’s not get too hung up on tradition. We used to do a lot of things back in the day: burn witches; stone adulterers; smoke on aeroplanes; vote Liberal Democrat. There’s always room for change. We don’t need to preserve the status quo (and by ‘status quo’ I mean ‘any established or prevailing world-order’ just as much as I do the 1970s rock band, who were fucking terrible).

We already took Jesus out of Christmas.

What’s one more fictional bearded character?

Why can’t you let your kids use their imaginations and believe in magic? Without Santa the world would be a greyer, duller place for kids.

Of course, you’re right. It’s only at Christmas-time that we permit our kids to exercise their imaginations in glorious, ambulatory 4D instead of just making them ingest imaginative content through the TV; making them sit there like old ladies attached to morphine drips, with nary a blink shared between them, as they impassively absorb hour after hour of cartoon dogs or videos of kids on YouTube opening plastic egg-cases (for some inexplicable reason, this is considered entertainment), while we sit there by their sides, occasionally force-feeding them lumps of sugar and chunks of fried pig.

Our kids spend eleven months of every year shuffling around the house like robot-butlers haunted by the souls of civil service middle-managers, daring to imagine only that the next day and the next day and the day after that will be exactly the same as it was today.

Until, that is, the igniting spark of Christmas arrives! Huzzah! ‘Tis yuletime, so come to life, my children. Come to life! It’s time to play, to dare, to dream. Let your thoughts have substance, for ’tis the season of magic. ‘Tis also the season that teaches kids that it’s okay for fat old men to break into houses in the dead of night that have children sleeping in them.

It’s the time of year where parents everywhere will say to their spawn: “Come on, kids, it’s time for your annual, officially-mandated month of very strictly regulated within firmly set parameters imaginative role-play! I know I’ve spent the past year shouting things at you like, ‘Why don’t you live in the real world and stop being silly?’ and ‘No, Kevin, you’re not a magical koala bear on a spaceship with a guitar made of stars, and if you say that one more time I’m going to smash your X-Box into little pieces and feed it to grandma in a sandwich’, and ‘I wish I’d had time to pretend I was a flying postman called Kite Pete AS MY MUM WAS PUNCHING ME IN THE FACE AND TELLING ME SHE WISHED I’D BEEN ABORTED‘, but now – I promise – I’m going to channel all of my dead-eyed vapidity into regurgitating the same old stock-phrases about Santa that I trot out every year, and pretend that I’m taking you on some unforgettable, mind-bending journey to the very periphery of the knowable universe, when in reality I’m just lazy and deeply unimaginative, and SANTA’S NICE, AND I LIKE NICE THINGS, THINGS THAT MAKE PEOPLE GO AWWWWWW, AND YOU WILL NOT TAKE THAT AWAY FROM ME, plus I really like accessorising trees, and making my house look like a John Lewis catalogue.’

Magic is for life, not just for Christmas. Santa is nothing more than a template, a suggestion, a Shutter-stock photo. Kids should be creating their own mental mischief all the time, every day. And you, as a parent or a big person in their lives, should be running around the house with them pretending to be fifty-foot-high hedgehogs on the run from the Intergalactic Council of Sentient Jelly Cakes, or bears with the heads of dolphins, or screaming at each other in made-up languages. Kids need magic. It sustains them. They just don’t need their magic accompanied by a side-order of lies.

Why is it so important to deceive them as we enchant them? Wouldn’t Santa still be a lark if the kids knew he wasn’t really ‘real’? Of course he would. Harry Potter isn’t real, Star Wars isn’t real, and people have become multi-millionaires a million times over on the back of that shit.

Do you want to go ‘all in’? Is that what you want? You want to go all in? Let’s do it then! Let’s tell our kids that EVERY fictional character is real: Ronald McDonald, the Honey Monster, the Gruffalo, Mr Hankey, Death, dragons, Scooby Doo, Muttley, Garfield, Jesus, Danny Dyer. ALL of them. You want magic? HERE’S your fucking magic!! Check out this world: kids who can’t eat their Rice Krispies because they’re frightened that Snap and Crackle are going to burst out of the packet and kick the fuck out of them; kids who think Ned Flanders is their real next door neighbour; kids who think Voldermort is coming to pick them up from school and then turn into a giant spider and eat them. Let your mentally-exhausted children live in that world. Let them run THAT gauntlet, you sickos.

Or… we could just declassify Santa.

Oh, come on, you believed in Santa as a child, and I’ll bet YOU liked it, you big spoil-sport

It’s simple, really. Nothing should be done to inhibit a child’s burgeoning critical faculties, or to corrupt their very sense of the world as an observable, rational and comprehensible place. But don’t get me wrong. You’re right. I myself used to believe wholeheartedly in Santa Claus. I used to get letters from him, in very ornate handwriting. And I thought, this could only be the work of a magical being, he writes like a bloody pro. This guy’s the real deal. I also used to get plenty of Valentine’s cards. I don’t think I can properly express the horror I felt on the day I was old enough to realise that the letters from Santa and the Valentine’s cards were all in the same handwriting. That was a shock to me. “Well, Santa. I see last year’s presents have come with a few strings attached. I’m not that sort of boy. But maybe throw in a few Easter eggs and we’ll talk.”

The truth was even more horrible. I cross-referenced the Santa letters and the valentine’s cards with the handwriting on my birthday cards. Turns out the Santa letters and the VD cards were from my gran.

“Roses are red, I’m your mum’s mummy, and I’m going to stuff you, back up in my tummy.”

I know she was just trying to boost my fragile little-boy ego around Valentine’s Day, but I really bought in to the whole romantic fantasy. And all that time the unrequited love of my young life was a bloated septuagenarian who smelled of cabbage. I was cat-fished by own gran before it was even a thing.

Yee-Haw! It’s Sharkmas!

Imagine if you heard about a culture where the kids were told that every June the 15th a cowboy called Finn Clintson hurtled around the world on a great white flying shark, stopping off to eat air fresheners out of people’s cars, and delivering boxes of rice only to those houses where the kids were managing to play darts at a professional standard.

Families start putting neon sharks in their windows at the end of May. 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 put fresh stacks of air fresheners in their cars, and leave the doors unlocked so Finn Clintson doesn’t have to break through a window. The cries of ONE HUNDRED AND EIIIIIIIGGGHTTTYY can be heard bellowing from every window, down every street, between May and June, as kids everywhere almost break themselves trying to emulate their Sharkmas hero, Les ‘Danger’ Wallace. Listen carefully and you’ll hear: “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. Ten year old kids are walking around literally believing in flying sharks and cowboys dropping rice-boxes in people’s houses at night.

What would you think of that culture?

You’d think they were all cruel and mental, right?

Happy Sharkmas, you cunts.

What’s wrong with the whole Santa thing? Why can’t you let kids have their innocence a little longer, when this world is such a terrible, horrible, disgusting, nightmarish place?

The sort of people who trot this one out are usually the sort of people who spend more on their Christmas decorations than the GDPs of most small countries. While the poor line up on Christmas Eve to get tinned turkey from their local food banks, they’re busy spunking out £50-a-pop on individual strings of ethically-sourced tinsel from John Lewis and £600-a-go on tree baubles designed by John Paul Gaultier that have been pain-stakingly moulded from impressions taken of Paul Hollywood’s balls, all in the name of erecting a festive art installation in their homes that’s as close to the anti-septic perfection of a snap in an upmarket catalogue that a person can get their house to look and feel before it tips over into becoming a modern-day emperor’s mausoleum.

“We need Santa as a bulwark against this horrible world,” they say, as their kids open up a parcel containing a functioning, sentient robot and a watch that can tell the time in other galaxies. “They need to keep their innocence,” they say, as they drive their kids to Jenners’ Boxing Day sale, passing housing schemes along the way where the kids had out-of-date toothpaste for breakfast and dog-food for dinner, and had to take their siblings on in hand-to-hand combat for the privilege.

“Why is this world such a big, cruel, savage toilet?” they ask, as they fill out forms to send their kids to schools with wrought-iron gates and ivy creeping up the balustrades.

Santa doesn’t visit the schemes and estates where the red on the Aquafresh is actually blood. He just flies over them, as high above the ground as possible, tutting and shaking his head. Maybe he ejects the odd teddy bear with an eye missing, or a spoon without a handle, just to feel festive, but he daren’t land. “They’d have the fucking runners off my sleigh in a heartbeat,” he says, with a nervous laugh. “And they’d have the reindeer fighting to the death in an underground betting shop.”

Believing in Santa never did YOU any harm though, did it?

First of all, how do you know? How do any of us know? Millions upon millions of Americans think it’s normal to want school teachers to carry guns, or for poor people to die in agony because they can’t afford hospital treatment. That’s only crazy from the outside looking in.

Am I right, Finn Clintson?

Anyway, I’m not sure that exposure to organised religion at a young age did me any lasting harm (I’m an ardent atheist these days), but that doesn’t mean that I consider organised religion to be harmless. It’s incredibly dangerous, but in the wrong hands, and heads, it’s incalculably so.

My gran smoked for about nine decades and didn’t die directly from smoking-related illnesses, but that doesn’t mean that smoking is safe.

I once lathered my naked body in liquid LSD and then tried to recreate the classic arcade game Frogger by repeatedly running backwards and forwards across the motorway, but I was killed by a truck and came back as a High Priest of the Gnome people, so maybe that’s not such a great example.

In any case, whatever supernatural stories you need to tell yourself to make you feel better about your own actions, or less afraid of your own inevitable death, and whatever all-powerful entities you need to create in order to give those stories life, are all absolutely fine. They are. Really. They’re great. More power to you. Just so long as they don’t bring harm to any other living being – yourself included.

But the second you start seeking out other like-minded ‘souls’ with similar beliefs and supernatural figureheads to yours, with a view to forming a club, one which quickly moves to multiply, standardise, immortalise and spread its rules and beliefs in the form of some irrevocable holy manifesto, the contents of which are destined to be poured down the throats of ‘heathens’ and children everywhere, then that’s not so fine. Then it becomes political. But worse. Because while political leaders and political ideas can change and evolve with time (in theory, at least), religious leaders and ideas – in the main – do not. Otherwise, what’s the point? Either your God has all the power and all the answers, or he’s a pretty shit God, right? Religion is nothing more than politics preached from the cloud and the pulpit, as opposed to the podium and the press conference.

The big difference is, though – again in theory, and specific to this place and time – I’ve got at least some say over whether or not my kids are proselytised into a religion, or indeed a political party. I don’t seem to have any power over whether or not my kids have a belief in Santa inculcated in them.

Even if the Santa myth had no ill effects, and didn’t constitute a massive breach of trust between child and parent/guardian, even then… why are people who don’t want their kids to believe in Santa forced to go along with it? What makes this relatively new and dangerously commercialised myth more important and sacred than a person’s right to raise their children the way they want to?

I’ve tried various things to gently shake my eldest son from his belief (I’m part of a team, remember, so I can’t just scream ‘SANTA IS A HOAX’ in his face fifty times a day, as much as I may want to). Just a few weeks ago I interrogated his belief in Santa. He’s 4. “How do you know it’s Santa and not just me and your mum going downstairs and putting presents out?”

He thought for a moment.

“Because he comes at night. And YOU’LL be asleep too. So it can’t be you.”

Such quick-thinking, such mental gymnastics, but all employed in the service of doing somersaults over ghosts. What damage are these falsehoods doing to his brain? Imagination is fine. Lies are not.

I stroked his hair and looked him dead in the eyes. “I just want you to remember, when you’re older, that there was one man in this world who didn’t lie to you.” And I pointed to myself.

That’ll come in handy if I need him to avenge me in the future…

Can you believe it’ll be Sharkmas again in just six months? Where has this year gone.

The Tail of the Christmas Canine

Posted on by

A very lovely lady at work gave me a her-dog-themed Christmas card, which was sweet and thoughtful. Here it is:

merryxmas

Isn’t it nice? Isn’t the wee dog really cute?

This is how I repaid her:

dog

If any of you out there with too much time on your hands are up for creating pictures that whisk this adorable little quadruped into other places in time and space, then whip them up and drop me an email with the blighters attached. Let’s make Brody the most famous dog in the universe after Lassie, the Littlest Hobo and Hitler’s dog.

I’ll collate the pictures and we’ll give them their own hashtag on Twitter or something, because that’s modern as fuck and I’ve very much got my finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist, whatever that is.

(I already know I won’t receive a single picture of this fucking dog, not even a shit one where he’s at the pyramids, but please let me have my little deluded Yule-fuelled moment. I’m crying now. But my tears are for the dog. He could’ve been somebody. He could’ve been a contender. Goodbye.)

theotherjamie@hotmail.co.uk