Christmas mysteries

This Christmas, as always, is a time of mysteries. One of the more mysterious of which being the news that a young grey seal has fetched up in a field in Merseyside, 20 miles from the coast and looking extremely grumpy.

Sammy, or Suárez, or Cilla, or whatever they ultimately decide to call him (or her), appears to have taken a wrong turning during a Christmas shopping expedition to Liverpool from his (or her) home on the River Dee, swum up the brook to Newton-le-Willows, and eventually got stuck against a fence post.

(And we’ve all been on shopping trips like that, haven’t we, readers? Sounds like The Mall at Cribbs Causeway. On a good day.)

Sammy/Suárez/Cilla was eventually persuaded on board a trailer by animal rescuers equipped with brooms and a chunk of mackerel, and hopes were expressed that he (or she) would soon be gambolling once more in the choppy waters of the Irish Sea.

If only Christmas at Dixon Towers could be sorted out as simply as that. We don’t need a broom, though: we need an industrial strength vacuum cleaner to pick up the pine needles that are already falling in drifts to the sitting room floor.

And we cannot live by a slice of mackerel alone. Mrs D’s festive preparations demand smoked salmon, crab meat and several jars of Elsinore lumpfish caviar. Which, if you’re interested, is a bit like real caviar, but smaller, blacker, and significantly cheaper.

Which leads leads us to a second mystery: where can you buy it? Two days before Christmas? In Bath?

OK, it’s the biggest middle-class, first-world non-problem since the lady on Twitter who couldn’t find mini-pannetone. But when it’s your problem, it’s serious.

There is an answer, though, to the missing fishy bits crisis: Keynsham. And such is yours truly’s devotion to family bliss and harmony this festive tide, that he got in the car and drove there to pick some up.

Pausing only to look at the ingredients on the side of the jar and to discover that one of them “may have an adverse effect  on activity and attention in children”. So who needs brandy butter when you’ve got E110?

The third mystery presents itself on the way back from the Bath/Bristol borderlands: what are those two blokes from Wessex Water doing, standing at the bottom of the road, tapping the Tarmac with long metal rods with the general demeanour of people who are about to cut off your supply?

The mystery deepens with the arrival of the massed pipes and drums of the band of the Scots Guards, who proceed to muster at the corner and drill. Assuming they’re not an advance scouting party for David Cameron’s Own Highland Frackers, then the chances of extracting even a drop of water from the taps come Christmas Day look vanishingly slim.

Mystery piles upon mystery. What was it Mrs D asked for when she made up her Christmas list back in October? And can you still buy it at 3.30 on Christmas Eve?

Will the Amazon van get through on time?

And what will we do without Hugh?

This, sadly, was my last published column for The Bath Chronicle. Goodbye, and thanks for reading.

Let there be light. Please...

Christmas, as well as being a time for rejoicing, for celebrating, for  four- and even five-bird roasts, is also a time for remembering.

Especially, in our family’s case, for remembering where you put the Christmas lights last year when you packed them away so neatly and tidily in a labelled box up in the loft.

In the intervening months, through some supernatural force that only inhabits the upper storeys of family homes, that box has somehow got mislabelled. And  your task is to find it, or Christmas  won’t be Christmas chez Dixon.

So, after a neck-twisting, knee-piercing, elbow-scraping scramble through the outer recesses of the attic, you  retrieve three boxes.

The first looks quite promising. It has “Xmas Stuff” scrawled on top in thick red felt pen, but when you  delve inside all you find is a couple of baubles and   the kids’ old soft toys.

The second box is tagged “Miscellaneous”, and is most definitely not the one you’re looking for, containing as it does embarrassing pictures of yourself when you were 20 and didn’t know any better, which must remain hidden from the rest of the family at all costs.

The third box is labelled “Bank Statements 1995-7”, and deep within – Gloria in Excelcis! – are the Dixon festive illuminations.

Ignoring the protests from your maltreated joints, you stagger downstairs and proudly present your spoils. “That’s funny,” says Mrs D. “What’s happened to the ones we hung over the mantelpiece last year?”

After a brief but vain struggle to recall what they even looked like, let alone where they might be, you offer manfully to put up the special weatherproof strand that traditionally garlands  the spindly shrub by the front door.

But the malevolent force that switched round the labels on the boxes has another trick up its sleeve.

Some time last summer it must have got hungry, because it has chewed through one of the wires, with the result that only about half of the lights actually come on, and those that do  work don’t twinkle, pulse, glimmer or throb, but simply flicker despondently.

Two solutions spring to mind. The first involves a soldering iron and a lot of swearing; the second a trip to Homebase and a lot of money.

Not wishing to sully the air with expletives, you pile into the car. Everyone else comes along too. Ostensibly just for the ride, but more likely to make sure  yours truly buys the right sort. And there, amid a festive electronic menagerie of warbling penguins, gurning bears and flatulent  reindeer, you find a replacement.

On the way home, you can’t help but notice the house down the road. Snow-effect illuminations tumble from  every windowsill. Santa’s sleigh has landed on the garage roof  and is strobing fit to bust. The tree in the front garden is wreathed from trunk to crown with a thick rope of incandescent finery that  must have needed a crane to put up, and puts your low-wattage LEDs to utter shame.

Somewhere in your head, a switch goes off.

That was Christmas - now for the recycling

That’s it, then. You’ve opened your presents, you’ve stuffed your face, you’ve marvelled at the new 3D Queen, you’ve been for a walk in your festive jumper and you’ve not got washed away in a flood.

Kiss me quick before it goes into the compost

For you, Tommy, ze Christmas ist over. 

But before you can start to think about getting back to work, or making any New Year resolutions, or paying off all the bills, or planning next year’s holiday, there’s one thing you’ve got to do: sort out all the leftovers.

Just as busy hospitals operate a triage system to decide which incoming patients are worth saving, you’ve got to take a robust, unsentimental approach to the Trimmings that Time Forgot.

Here, then, completely free of charge and printed on the finest recycled paper, are your top five post-festive Reuse It or Lose It Tips.

WRAPPING PAPER: easy one, you’re thinking. If you’d opened all your presents really, really carefully, you could by now be folding up the paper, giving it a quick iron, and putting it away in the loft ready for next year. As if. Most of it is scrumpled beyond redemption after an over-enthusiastic three-year-old ripped into it on Christmas morning. The rest has been used to wrap triangular presents and has a entered a spatial distortion field from which no amount of ironing will ever rescue it. Recycle.

BLUE QUALITY STREET: long after the green and purple ones have gone, and long after the last toffee penny has yanked at your fillings, you’ll find a small pile of blue coconut-flavoured uselessness lurking at the bottom of the tin. Not even hungry magpies are attracted to these, and they won’t burn. Send them for landfill.

BRUSSELS SPROUTS: did you know that they recently discovered the gene that codes for not liking these unlovely offshoots of the brassica family? People who have the gene are what are known in medical parlance as “normal”. People who don’t have it, and like sprouts, are... well, it’s not their fault. Sprouts are dangerous things, though. Just before Christmas there were reports about a man from Ayrshire who overdosed on Brussels sprouts. So if you have a any left over (and you will have), encase them in lead, bury them at least six feet deep, backfill the hole with nuclear-reactor-grade concrete, and set up an exclusion zone dotted with Vitamin K detectors. You can’t be too careful.

SPUDS: donate them to science. Yes, seriously. Another pre-Christmas TV news item reported that top plane-maker Boeing is using bags of potatoes to test wi-fi transmission in the passenger cabins of new aircraft. This raises lots of questions – not least of which is: “What were they on at the BBC Christmas party, and where can we get some?” But there’s always life in an old King Edward. Keep for later.

BATTERIES: you mean you remembered to buy batteries before Christmas Day? So all those toys and electronic do-dahs worked straight out of the box? If you’re that well-organised, you don’t need anyone's help getting rid of the old ones – have a fantastically green New Year.

Dachshunds, donkeys and why it's OK to pick your nose

Sooner or later, if you go to enough pub or charity quiz nights, the question is bound to arise: What is the derivation of the word “dachshund”?

Well, any quiz question is easy enough – as long as you know the answer. If you’re stuck on this one, though, dachshund means “badger hound”, from the German words “Dachs”, meaning badger, and “Hund”, meaning... well, you can probably guess that bit.

Fully-functioning dachshund sorts out a badger. In German

A previously crippled dachshund called Jasper leaped into the  headlines this week after undergoing a remarkable new medical procedure in which cells from his nasal cavity were injected into his spinal cord.

Although “leaped” is probably too strong a word, because Jasper actually trotted into the headlines.

On a treadmill, on which he was videoed, showing off his reacquired mobility for the delight of  TV and internet viewers across the world.

The power of the imagination whisks us to a Gothic laboratory at Cambridge University, where an experiment is getting under way.



“So, Igor,” says Doktor Victor Frankenstein. “Haben sie die olfactory ensheathing cells aus der nozen von dem kleinen Dachsenhunden extracten?”

“Ja, mein Doktor,” gurgles Igor.

“Gut,” says the Doktor. “Also preparen wir den allgemeinen Spinaltapsinjection...”

There’d be something rather ghoulish about all this re-animation if it wasn’t so heart-warming.

Because Jasper is clearly a happy little chap, and very pleased to be back on his feet again.

And parents  everywhere will  have to stop telling off  their children for picking their noses.

Because it IS good for you after all.

Speaking of heartwarming, and kids, and as exclusively revealed on the front of last week’s The Bath Chronicle, it’s Christmas. Yes, really.

And Christmas (pursuing the  tenuous animal connection) means donkeys in Mrs D’s nativity play, and donkeys  mean buying coconuts to make clippety-cloppety noises.

So it’s off to Waitrose, Mrs D’s shopping list in hand. Here it quickly becomes apparent  that self-checkouts and coconuts don’t mix. They won’t scan, and no amount of option-button pushing has any effect.

One assistant says he can put them through at £1 each, which seems a bit pricey. But another, who’s clearly dealt with this sort of situation before, has a coconut barcode stuck into her notebook. The price comes down to 69p for each soon-to-be-pair of donkey hooves, which seems a lot more reasonable. Back at home, though, things get really difficult.

Hammer several holes through entry points at end of coconut. Turn coconut upside down over bowl. Tiny squidge of coconut milk. Shake coconut. Huge spurt of coconut milk all over kitchen floor. Leave nut to drain, find mop. Wonder how Robinson Crusoe contrived to hold out for 28 years on a desert island.

Trawl garage for implement to grip husk tightly enough to saw it but not crush it. Extract flesh from severed halves with dangerous knife. Rinse and repeat. And relax.

So that’s Christmas sorted. Never mind present-buying, card-sending, tree-putting-up, carol-singing: as long as the sound effects are organised, everything else is bound to come right in the end.