Nightmare before Christmas

It wasn't so long ago that if you wanted to get into a fight with a total stranger, there was really only one to go about it: head down to the pub on a Saturday night, neck seven or eight pints of Old Goatstrangler and start casting aspersions about some other bloke's parentage.

Cue a bloody nose, a swift ride in an ambulance and an awkward chat with two sturdy representatives of Her Majesty's constabulary.

These days we have Black Friday. To enjoy the same experience, without the debilitating after-effects of the Goatstrangler, just visit your nearest retail mega-centre and try to buy a 40-inch curved-screen LED TV. The sort that normally sells for £1,599.99 but – today only! – is a mind-bendingly cheap £1,299.99.

Cue a violent entanglement with a similarly-minded bargain-hunter, a long wait in A&E and an embarrassed telling-off by a PCSO who is clearly five years younger than yourself.

Then there's Cyber Monday, when you sit yourself down in front of your computer (nursing a sore leg, and wondering what to do with a boxful of loose LEDs), and try to order all your Christmas presents. Online, in one go.

Only to discover that everyone else on the planet has had the same idea.

The internet has slowed to the pace of a reluctant tin of treacle. The electronic whoozits that your kids have set their hearts on sold out three weeks ago. And all there is left to buy on Amazon is pre-owned CDs of Now That's What I Call Music! Part Six.

Sadly, that's the way the modern festive season crumbles, and there's no point in moaning about it. Instead, you should prepare yourself for the days that lie ahead. Days like:

Sylvan Saturday. You book your family on a sound and light woodland walk experience at a nearby national arboretum. Printing the confirmation and e-tickets consumes seven sheets of paper. You wonder idly how many more trees they'll have to plant to offset that little lot.

Blue Sunday. You settle back, after a splendiferous festive repast, and reflect that a Quality Street would round it off nicely.

You reach for the sweetie bowl, only to find that there's nothing left but the horrible blue ones, and that persons unknown have decorated the floor with discarded wrappers from your favourite purple, green and red varieties.

Damp Tuesday. This is the day you booked off back in September, in a wholly uncharacteristic fit of forward planning, so that you could support small local businesses by doing your Christmas shopping in town.

It rains. And it rains. And it rains.

Sleepy Wednesday. Work. Zzzzzzzzzz...

Nightmare Thursday. You managed to order at least some of your presents on Cyber Monday, and since then you've been feeling just a little smug. But this is the day the truth finally dawns: the goodies won't be delivered until January the 8th, and you most definitely do not have Christmas all wrapped up.

So where's Santa when you need him?

Your ultimate Christmas Checklist

Do you know the last posting day for airmail packages to Vanuatu? Can you tell the difference between a chestnut roaster and a turkey baster? And can you tie one of those curly ribbons without which no present is truly presentable?

If your answer to one or more of those questions is “No”, then you need help, and you need it now.

Christmas is just around the corner (if you hadn’t quite realised yet) and there’s still lots more to be done.

So here it is – your Ultimate Festive Cut-Out-And-Keep-And-Stick-To-The-Kitchen-Wall-And-Forget-About-It-Until-It’s-Far-Too-Late Christmas Checklist.

• CARDS: What do you mean, you’ve posted them already? You can’t have – not all of them. OK, you’ve been through your address book and decided who to send them to. But you’ve left off that family from down the road who moved to Canada two years ago. Sure as baubles is baubles, you’ll find a card from them popping through the letterbox on December 22, when it’s far too late to do anything about it. And nothing will assuage your guilt.

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• DECORATIONS:  Based on 20 years of painstaking scientific research, Dixon’s Second String Theory postulates that any string of fairy lights that worked perfectly well last year will fail within five minutes of unpacking them and plugging them in again this year. It further states that no DIY shop within a radius of 10 miles will have the right fuses. And it finally predicts that the best way to get them working again is to chuck them out and buy a whole new set. All of which explains why fairy light makers are rich, and you are not.

• FOOD: There was a time not long ago when your choices were limited to a monstrously large turkey or a monstrously expensive goose. These days, of course, variety is the key to spicing up your Christmas dinner table. So if you don’t like the idea of one of those four-bird roasts they’re always advertising on telly, why not try a five-bird roast? Or a six-bird roast? Or a grotesque amalgam of herb cheese, smoked salmon, chilli jam and filou pastry? The only limit is your own imagination. But don’t go overboard on the quail’s eggs and pomegranate sorbet. It has a nasty habit of repeating on you.

• CHRISTMAS CRAFTS: You can crochet your own Nativity scene, you can create tree hangings from old paperclips, and you can even fashion decoupage tea-trays to give to your nearest and dearest. Let’s face it, though, life’s too short, and there’s only one Kirstie Allsopp. And by no stretch of the imagination is it you. 

• OFFICE PARTIES: It’s OK to enjoy yourself, and have a few drinks, and strut your funky stuff on the dance floor. But never, ever, ever succumb to the karaoke. There are few festive experiences less pleasant than waking up on a Saturday morning with a rasping sore throat and the strains of Beyoncé’s Single Ladies still ringing in your ears. And you can take that from a man who’s tried it.

• TREE: Don't worry, there’s still plenty of time to get a tree. Yes, really.

• PRESENTS: At this late stage it doesn’t really matter what you buy. Just keep the receipts, and remember that Amazon don’t deliver on Christmas morning.

• DRINK: Oh all right then.

The ultimate last-minute Christmas survival guide

Ultimate. A much-misused word. A word that doesn’t mean “best”, or “finest”, or “taste the difference”, or any of those other tempting phrases the supermarkets use to package fancy-looking ham or overpriced chicken gizzards.

No, “ultimate” means “last”. It means “final”. It means “done”. And it means “dusted”.

So, if you’re one of those people who idly leafed through the so-called Last-Minute Gift Guides that fell out of the posher daily papers a couple of weeks ago...

And if you’re one of those people who laughed slyly, used the supplement to line the hamster cage and said to yourself “Ha! There’s tons of time left till Christmas...”

And if you’re one of those people who really does wake up on Christmas Eve and realise you haven’t bought a turkey – then this one’s for you: the Ultimate, Final, Left-It-Too-Late Guide To Those Last-Minute Christmas Conundrums.

Q: When I look in the window of a jewellers’ shop, why are all the price tags always face-down so I can’t read them?

A: Because if you have to ask, you can’t afford it. There are, even here in Bath, some lesser jewellers who do show the prices of the trinkets in their displays. But you probably can’t afford them either.

Q: What is the point of Brussels sprouts? Be honest, I can take it.

A: The Brussels sprout is a symbol of seasonal regeneration, a green shoot amid the murk and mire of darkest December, a token of Dame Nature’s infinite bounty...

Q: You’re making this up as you go along, aren’t you?

A: No. Oh all right, yes. Ask me an easier one.

Q: Why do they make blue Quality Streets when no one eats them?

A: To fill in the spaces between the purple ones.

Q: All, right, I’ll come clean. It’s Christmas Eve, I haven’t bought a turkey, and the whole family, including rich Auntie Agnes, is descending en masse for lunch tomorrow. What’s my next move?

A: Run for your life. Alternatively, invest in one of those four-bird roast things that are all the rage this year. As an added bonus, you’ll have enough unidentified avian leftovers for at least three weeks’ worth of sandwiches.

Q: Right, I need to get back to the shops. Most of them have double doors, don’t they? So why do the people who are trying to get in always use the same door as the people going out?

A: What’s that got to do with Christmas?

Q: Not a lot really, just idle curiosity. And how come you’ve started asking the questions and I’ve started answering them?

A: Good point. Ask me another one before anybody notices.

Q: What should I buy for the man who has everything?

A: Nothing. But he won’t thank you for it.

So there you are. The gold mines may be empty, the frankincense trees may be wilting and the myrrh bushes may be down with the blight, but for you, Christmas is ultimately sorted. Have a good one!

Christmas mysteries

Here we go again. It's December. For a brief moment the sky clears, the temperature drops and the frost does whatever frost does. Frosts, probably.

Give it a day or two and we'll be back to torrential unquenchable rain, but in the meantime we are, at last, officially allowed to start talking about Christmas.

Christmas, of course, is a time of mystery and wonderment. And the mysteries start right now.

Mystery number one: how can the unique and fragile Christmas decorations Mrs D has brought back from Poland have made it safely through baggage handling at Heathrow but still look too vulnerable to hang on the tree?

Mystery number two: by what hitherto undiscovered osmotic process have the boxes containing last year's decorations, fairy lights, festive CDs and other assorted baubles managed to migrate to the far end of the loft behind a whole load of other boxes that you know for a fact haven't been touched since October 2007?

Have the mice been on a Charles Atlas course or something?

Getting the boxes out of the loft is a bit like one of those puzzles where you have to slide blocks around a grid in the hope of releasing a single block. The sort of puzzle you get given as a Christmas present, fiddle with once and then chuck at the cat in sheer frustration.

If you're having trouble picturing it, just imagine Sainsbury's car park on a Saturday afternoon. Plus you're scrabbling around on your knees, in half darkness, with a musclebound mouse polishing its fangs somewhere close. Welcome to your winter wonderland.

Mystery number three: how many Advent calendars does a normal family need? At the last count, our place can boast six in all: three common-or-garden ones with kitschy pictures behind cardboard flaps; two of the chocolate variety to be consumed after breakfast BEFORE YOU BRUSH YOUR TEETH; and one allegedly traditional candle marked off with a 25-day countdown.

If you ever need reminding about how few days you have left to panic about how unprepared you are for Christmas, then Dixon Towers is the place to be.

Mystery number five: how many times will you be able to stand playing through Now That's What I Call Christmas before it goes back in the loft? Even if you're allowed to skip A Spaceman Came Travelling and Kylie Minogue's toe-curling remake of Santa Baby?

Mystery number six: the same goes double for such festive delights as Carols from King's, The Messiah on Ice and Miriam Margolyes Tells The Story Of The Snowman.




(Incidentally, some of these are not real CDs. And anyone still nursing lingering fantasies about the Cadbury's Caramel bunny should be aware that she was voiced by the aforementioned Ms Margolyes, who was also the puritan in Blackadder II. Just thought you'd like to know.)

Mystery number seven: what's Miriam Margolyes got to do with Christmas? And what happened to mystery number four?

Mystery number eight (which for some reason ended up as a second mystery number seven in The Bath Chronicle): who comes to your staff Christmas lunch when you're a department of one?

Anyway, that's quite enough mysteries for one Christmas, and the wonderment will have to wait for a different week. Preferably some time in April, after the dust has settled.

A hard man is good to find

The usual pre-Christmas letters are starting to arrive in the office from ladies desperate to find something fresh for their hubbies or boyfriends this festive season.
“Dear Mr D,” they invariably ask. “What can I buy for the man who has everything?”
Well, ladies, this year the solution to your present-buying problems lies in just one name: Bear Grylls.
Bear Grylls is today’s top TV hero, and he’s well hard. So hard he makes Chuck Norris look like John Sergeant, and Lemmy out of Motörhead like Little Jimmy Osmond. He makes The Professionals look like The Amateurs, and Ray Mears (of whom more later) like Bill Oddie.
Bear Grylls came into the world with two great disadvantages: (a) his first name; and (b) his second. His natural survival instincts soon kicked in, though, and after an early life struggling against adversity he became the youngest Briton to climb Mount Everest. A TV series followed and it, like he, is Born Survivor.
Without wishing to spoil the plot (although you could probably guess it), each programme sees Bear travelling to the world’s least hospitable regions, accompanied only by a director, a camera operator, a sound technician, a lighting gaffer, a key grip and quite probably a focus puller too.
On arrival in darkest Outer Whatsitland he sets out on foot with one aim in mind: eating the indigenous wildlife. Raw.
Such activities have earned him a place in the pantheon of TV heroes, especially among those viewers whose ideal evening’s entertainment doesn’t involve ballroom dancers with two left feet and aspiring Beyoncés with adenoids the size of Glasgow.
Success follows success, and Bear Grylls has even started his own online store selling outdoor gear – fleeces, waterproof jackets, thermal undies and the like, all emblazoned with his distinctive signature.
And now, in an exclusive deal with Mr Grylls, the Opinion desk can offer the presently perplexed woman-about-town a new range of Yuletide goodies for the hard man in her life: The Bear Grylls Festive Collection! Choose from:
Bear Grylls Tropical Socks
Look just like ordinary socks, but have special pockets filled with a thick slimy fluid which gradually oozes out into your shoes, giving you that authentic wading-through-mangrove-swamp experience as you stroll down to the shops.
Bear Grylls Matching Tie and Handkerchief
The tie unfolds into a 40ft abseiling line. The hanky is made of sandpaper. Available in practical, stain-concealing desert beige.
Bear Grylls Arctic Swim Set
An empty box, to commemorate Bear’s notorious naked televised dip in glacial meltwater.
Bear Grylls Aftershave
A classic fragrance inspired by the lifestyle of the man who drinks his own wee on telly.
Bear Grylls Scalextric
Two Land Rovers in zebra-stripe camouflage, one with a miniature plastic Bear in the driving seat, the other piloted by survival rival Ray Mears. Ray is kitted out in his trademark multi-pocketed combat jacket, Bear is stripped to the waist (as usual). This weight advantage can be evened up by putting Bear on the longer outside track. But he still wins. Every time.
Bear Grylls Electric Toothbrush
Powered by two car batteries, it comes with its own special abrasive paste to give your mouth that just-hiked-30-miles-through-the-Desert tingling freshness.
Bear Grylls Cookbook
Packed with recipes you wouldn’t really want to try at home, even if you had the ingredients. Raw snake, raw lemming, raw scorpion and raw gudgeon are among Bear’s signature dishes, and make this one of those cookery books that are good to read but tougher to digest.
And that’s it, ladies! Your present problems solved, thanks to TV’s Mister Survival.
More gift ideas next week: the Alistair Darling Investment Opportunity and the Gordon Ramsay English Dictionary. Watch this space.

This article first appeared in The Bath Chronicle on November 27 2008.