At this time of year, I am usually reminded of The Damned’s Captain Sensible’s 1983 hit single Glad It’s All Over. I think I may even have bought it, which may have more to do with the grim nature of 1980’s pop music than the good Captain’s musical genius, but when Christmas and the New Year is over, then I’m glad it’s all over.
Whether you celebrate the birth of the Baby Jesus or you see the festive season as a golden opportunity to spend quality time with the ones you love, or maybe even both, surely by now you’ve had enough? I’m definitely in the quality time with loved ones department so to that end my Christmas was glorious. I’d be happier if we were to move the festive season to perhaps 25th June each year and enjoy the kind of weather our Antipodean friends are fortunate enough to be granted. For those of us who don’t do God, could we just try it for one year and see how it works out? In any event, no one knows the date the supposed Baby Jesus of Nazareth was born anyway. Maybe the devout will get even more folk enjoying their festive services if the sun is out?
Having been wishing each other a happy new year for a few days now, I am sure it is beginning to dawn on us that actually Happy New Year is just another way of saying “Hello!” Of course, we wish people good health and happiness, but we do that already, don’t we? Either way, it’s rather obvious that this New Year is basically the same as the old one.
To me, it’s a part of the “let’s start a new life” after something grim happens in our life. “Let’s start again,” we say, but we know in our hearts that actually we simply pick up the pieces of the old life and get on with it. I don’t have a problem with that way of looking at things because I don’t want to set aside the lives of those we lost last year. Starting a new life would tend to imply that we want to leave everything behind, good and bad. I hope this makes sense. Saying Happy New Year is wishing someone well. That is certainly what I mean when I say it.
I say I am glad it’s all over because, if you allow it to, Christmas can feel like forever. Our ludicrous faux German market in Bristol was being erected back in October and it existed purely for the benefit of the stallholders to make shedloads of money. It’s set up as and called a Christmas market but once you’ve had one high fat offal tube, haven’t you had them all? How many festive garlic presses do you really need? Do you really purchase dog food at a fucking Christmas market? The best bit for me was when I was walking by the entrance to the fake German pub at the centre of the shopping area, a security guard asked me if I was going in. “That’s strange,” I said to him. “You guys are usually there to keep people out, not drag them in.” The look on his face suggested he was not amused, so it’s just as well I didn’t follow-up with, “You’d have to pay me to go in to that shit hole and drink beer so bad Germans wouldn’t touch with a bargepole.”
Christmas TV was terrible, as it always has been, even back in the old days when Morecambe and Wise was a mere oasis in a dessert of TV dross. I went in less pubs than I do during the rest of the year, I didn’t have a single Christmas meal, apart from the one on Christmas Day, I did no physical shopping at all; I was so much happier than I would otherwise have been. And best of all, I managed to go a whole winter without hearing Slade’s infernal Merry Christmas Everybody, except on one occasion when she who must be obeyed decided to play some Christmas music. Don’t worry, though: we’re still talking.
For doddery old pensioners like me, the return to normality is relatively minor and just means less cheese and Scotch whisky. I like the routine of daily life and, just over a distant horizon, there is the promise of spring, with its warmer, longer days.
And tomorrow, the festivities are officially over, the roads will be insanely busy and the pubs will be empty, as people engage in the annual tradition of trying to bankrupt their local pub, or Dry January as some people call it.
It was great while it lasted, but I’m glad it’s all over.
