Christmas decorations and the Law of Eternal Buggeration

Christmas is all about timing. There should be a law against putting up decorations at any time before the second week of December. Those who jump the gun in November should be thrown in to jail without trial and not released before the New Year, by which time they would already be thinking about Valentine’s Day and looking for Easter eggs, having booked their summer holidays last July.

Sadly only one law applies at this time of year and that is the law of eternal buggeration. The effects of this law are progressive and cumulative. For example, when we called by the local garden centre for our Christmas tree this morning it seemed no more than a minor inconvenience to discover it was closed until May.

Another garden centre close by would do fine, we thought, until we saw the prices. Christmas trees priced at £50 each might seem reasonable if you’re a banker who has just cashed his Christmas bonus or an MP who can claim it on expenses. But for mere mortals it smacks of daylight robbery. No wonder the place was empty apart from the odd pin-striped suit.

We moved on to the outskirts of town to a Christmas tree farm that had a big range of trees from £10 to upwards of £50 with various colour codes denoting the prices. But how to remember the price against the colour? George solved the problem, photographing the list with his mobile phone. Teenagers do have their uses after all.

The place was teeming with people and cars. One chap was holding up a tree in the throng, calling vainly for his wife.

“Nice tree,” I said.

“I know. But we’ll have to look at thirty more before she’s happy,” he said, casting the tree aside and walking off, shoulders hunched, to rejoin the melee.

We didn’t spend too long choosing and found a reasonable specimen for £25. When we got it home we found the trunk was a bit bent at the bottom, giving the tree a pronounced lean in its pot. Mind you, in more than thirty years we have never been able to erect our tree without a pronounced lean, owing to the law of eternal buggeration.

The principles of this law mean that when we go in to the loft and get the Christmas lights out of their box, they don’t provide so much as a flicker when they’re plugged in, even though they worked perfectly when put away the previous year. No amount of familiarity with the law of eternal buggeration is capable of preparing me for the crushing sense of disappointment when I flick the switch and nothing happens. Deep down, I know what’s going to happen. Perhaps this is what creates the churning anxiety that accompanies this ritual. Something in our evolutionary journey instilled in us an innate – but foolish – optimism.

So now I’m left with that other tiresome ritual of fixing the lights. I cast around for spares. I know we have them since two Christmases ago Gill tried to preempt this seasonal problem by getting some extra lights. Have you ever tried to buy spare Christmas lights bulbs? Logic would tell you that the spares would be available at the shop that sells the light packs. But that is a logic that fails to account for the law of eternal buggeration.

No, Gill had to search them out online and that’s what she is doing again just now - delivery date after Christmas. But there is hope. Through a process of trial and error George has managed to get every fourth light blinking, so we have lights of sorts. The decorations are looking a little careworn like their owners by this stage of the day. Now just where did we put those spare lights? Common sense would point to the light box. But, as we know, there’s a law against that.

By late afternoon the Christmas tree is fully tinseled and baubled and the lights (well, some of them) are winking away merrily. I'm trying to tell myself that the tree is filling the hall with fragrant wafts of pine wood. But no-one else thinks that. There's a pungent smell all right, but it doesn't need the family to tell me that if this is pinewood then it bears a remarkable similarity to something less wholesome.

It recalls that traditional German carol, O Tannenbaum:

O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree,
Much pleasure dost thou bring me!
For every year the Christmas tree,
Brings to us all both joy and glee.
O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree,
Why must you smell of cat pee!

Snow event

We never have snow in Woking but we did today, lots of it, more in fact than I can remember falling over a single night when we lived in Yorkshire, apart from in 1963 and in the winter of 1979. It hung around a while those years.

We took Doug the dog for a walk this morning but had to bring him back as so much snow was clinging to his fur, he could hardly walk. He wasn't amused. I must have spoken to more of my neighbours in half an hour than I usually do in six months. Everyone was saying hello to each other. It was like Christmas.

One of my neighbours was on the hill trying to clear a path for cars. He had been there nearly three hours since 7 am when I strolled past. It didn't look great weather for cars but Gill needed to work this afternoon so I ran her in to work and the car cleared the hill just fine, the hill-clearing neighbour having thrown in the towel.

It seemed that everyone with a four-wheeled drive car was out on the road, looking smug, whether or not they had anywhere to go. It's better when the snow fall is so bad that most people leave their cars at home. The worst is when the snow comes just before evening rush hour and everyone is trying to drive home. That can be a nightmare.

A big snowfall like this is fun for about a day and then you realise that you can't hibernate for ever although I don't have a pressing need to go out for a day or two. I suppose that this kind of weather is a good opportunity to test the merits of home-working. I notice that the BBC weather forecasters were calling it a "snow event." It looked to me very much like a snowfall.

I did a bit of snow-clearing, not that I needed to do so, but because it felt good. I noticed other people doing likewise for the same reason. Odd, that.

George, meanwhile, made a snow man in the garden which has lasted a little bit longer than the last one he made(OK, it does sometimes snow a little bit in Woking). His school was closed and he's hoping it will be closed tomorrow. If it is we might venture over to Box Hill, my favourite sledge run.

It's brightened up an otherwise dreary winter. You have to make the most of snow like this. It's an event.

Do you pick up the pennies?

Have you noticed how often you see coins on the ground these days? Most people can't be bothered to pick up the coppers. Should this be a cause for concern?

I'm not sure, but what I do know is that one of the more heated family arguments we had at Christmas was debating the answer to this question: "What's the lowest value coin you would stoop to pick up these days?"

My sister-in-law said she would always pick up any coin she saw on the floor, no matter how low its worth. It was not so much what she said but how she said it that I found aggravating, as if it was criminal even to be debating the point.

She is of the view that to show a disregard for small coins is to show a lack of respect for money. Such lack of respect for money embodies the kind of attitude displayed by people who get things too easily.

I understand this view and have some sympathy for it. But I worry also whether it is right, conversely, to hold money in such high regard that we could appear to be worshipping it.

A few years ago I visited the Royal Mint at Llantrisant in Wales. What struck me most about the visit was that the production of coins is nothing more than a metal bashing exercise. The floor of the factory was strewn with coins.

It made me realise that coins are really tools for making things happen. Small change is just that and no, we shouldn't chuck it around, but I don't think we should be condemned either for leaving it on the floor if that's what we choose to do.

We were playing cards for money, something we often do at Christmas and I had the apparently outlandish idea of playing for silver rather than the usual coppers. We used to play for coppers when I was a kid. A game of New Market would require twopence per hand when we used a ha'penny for the pot, the face card, the odd card and the kitty.

The amount rose with decimalisation but it seems to have stuck at 4p per hand since the 1970s. This year we compromised on 8p per hand but it still did not make up for those 1970s values. In the same time frame a packet of crisps has risen more than 10 fold from less than 5p to 50p. Logic would dictate that, even were we to chip in 20p per hand, it would still be a relatively smaller stake than that made in my childhood.

I think this explains why the game is not as much fun as it was. Of course, it wouldn't do to look as if we were gambling fanatics but gambling - the possibility of winning or losing - is where you draw the thrill. I would argue that there has to be the possibility of some pleasure or pain to make it meaningful but I was overruled I fear and my suggestion dismissed as typical of the lose morals evident in today's society. I feel branded.

Hiding the naked truth

You, like me, have probably been listening to the Pogues' Christmas song, Fairytale of New York, for years without noticing the words very much. But the BBC takes lyrics seriously and, after taking its time about it, decided to bleep out the word "faggot" from on-air transmissions. The censorship was short-lived since listeners complained and the BBC did a sharpish U-turn so that we can all enjoy the f-word once more.

The BBC has form for this kind of thing. I remember when it banned Je T'aime in 1960s, the Sex Pistols' rather disrespectful God Save the Queen in the 1970s, and Relax by Frankie Goes to Hollywood in the 1980s.

But I had not realised until reading about it the other day that George Formby had upset the BBC censors with his Little stick of Blackpool rock. It came as quite a shock.

Given this history of British prudishness I don't suppose we should be so surprised that the National Health Service is canvassing people about its plans to feature some lifelike naked images of men and women in an online diagnostic service. It has two versions, one with all the reproductive organs where they should be, and one where the man looks as if he's wearing some flesh-coloured Calvin Klein's. I had thought this "fig-leaf mentality" had died with the end of the Victorian era. Not so.

Fanning the kipper

The best bit of Christmas is the games and the best game is fan the kipper. To play: Cut some sheets of newspaper into fat fish shapes. These are your kippers. Get two dinner plates and place them adjacent to each other but spaced apart at one end of a room. Clear furniture/people/dogs to the edges of the room. Get some magazines or newspapers; these are your fans.

Now draw up a list of all those there, put their names in to a hat and have someone draw them out to establish the order of play. On a sheet of a paper draw up a tree-style framework like those that are used for a knockout cup competition - finals, semis, quarters etc.

If you have 12 people, say, in your family group put four blank pieces of paper in the hat to signify byes in a draw of 16. In this way the competition will work itself fairly through the rounds. If you get the luck of a draw you have a bye through to the next round.

Choose your kipper and fan. Now you are ready to start. In each match two people "fan off" against each other. The object of the game is to fan your kipper down the room and on to your plate so that no part is touching the floor. The one that achieves this first is the winner.

Our family kipper trophy is a silver rabbit that was given to me many years ago as a corporate gift. As an employee of the Financial Times at that time, the policy was to hand over gifts for a charity raffle among staff. I handed in the rabbit, then won it back. This year I won it again.

I could never bat for England or turn a cricket ball but if fanning the kipper is ever granted international sporting recognition the manager of our national team could be comforted that in one small corner of this great country there is a pretty mean kipper wafter just waiting for the call.