FraserWords

Many people say the thing they like most about winter is lighting the fire, pulling the curtains, shutting out the cold and wind and huddling round your own warmth. A time of retreat, of drawing inward.

It seems sensible. Who would be out in this world? Here I am by the window, fingers flying over the keyboard, William Byrd’s centuries-old spectral choral beauty filling the air, looking out (oh yes!) at the birds thronging the feeder, the bare trees on the skyline.

Out there be dragons. Gosh, so many. For example, The Apprentice: dozens of the most vile human beings imaginable made up to the nines, dressed in expensive props and scripted beyond an inch of their lives, licking the sagging wrinkled arse of the appalling Alan Sugar, grovelling their ‘Lord Sugars’ to him as the BBC deifies the business of selling tat for vast pots of money. I’d love to be on The Apprentice so that in my first boardroom meeting I could yell ‘You’re not Lord Sugar, you’re a twat’, rip up the production team’s crappy script, shove it up Sugar’s Amstrad and then beat my fellow ‘contestants’ to a pulp with Nick bloody Hewer.

Sorry about that.

Yes, in here is cosiness and out there be dragons. Football, for instance. I didn’t think it possible to find soccer any more obscenely venal until I read this weekend that some Premiership clubs, the clubs that pay dullards more than £100,000 a week to lump leather round a field while billions starve, are charging for little children to be mascots on match days. You know, mascots in the endearing scene where the players walk out hand in hand with adoring little fans. Well, the families of the adoring little fans are being robbed of up to £600 for the privilege by clubs that pay the likes of Wayne fucking Rooney millions of pounds.

Sorry about that.

In here, apart, I can read, thank the Coconut Eating Crab. So long as it’s not the newspapers. I see the Daily Mail, which has now passed so far beyond parody it’s uninsultable, is offering readers a knitting pattern so they can make a copy of gorgeous Prince George’s Royal tank-top. If I find somebody doing so, I shall set fire to them. Without exception.

Sorry about that.

Here, I can choose my music and not be serenaded by the abject drivel pumped out hour after endless hour by shops where slack-jawed assistants stare with thinly-veiled contempt at the grasping hordes snuffling for a few quid off a TV here, a cheap mobile phone there, a new shoot-em-up zombie game…

Sorry about that.

Where was I? Yes, drawing inward. Actually, do so and strange things happen. Talking of music, I’ve not listened to Fairytale of New York for years, since it was kidnapped by the Christmas Police and played on rotation every December 20 times a day. Ubiquity, I thought, had destroyed a fine song. Well, this year my son Tom had to sing a clean verse at his school concert, and, surprised, I dug out my Pogues CDs and put it on to play him the rude bits, for a laugh. Bellowing out the words at the top of my voice with my laughing Tom, do you know, the strangest thing happened? Thrown back on ourselves, away from the baubles, listening to the words, singing the song, it became great again. Christ, I filled up. Throat tight, eyes pricking. ‘I put them with my own’. Try to stop listening to it for a very long time, then put it on very loud. What a great song it is. And then listen to Rainy Night in Soho or Misty Morning Albert Bridge. Has there ever been a better writer of fly-blown romanticism than Shane MacGowan? I don’t think so.

Sorry about that.

But in here, I can be a heretic and say the unsayable, as in the above. For another example: ‘Christmas is for children’, they say, adding ‘ahhhhh’. I say: ‘Why? Why is it for children? Bastards. There they sit, faces lit by the blue glow of their varied screens, plied with food and drink and cooed at by fatuous twits saying ‘Christmas is for children… ahhhh’ and what do they bloody well do about it, eh? A few grudging verses of a Christmas carol and a mutinous trudge around the shops and a startling lack of willingness to watch The Railway Children and sat there waiting for it all to be brought to them while exhausted parents descend into a frenzy of cooking and buying and giving… Bugger that. Christmas may very well be for children, but the sods had better learn quick that it’s for everybody else too and it’s not for taking without the giving bit. Bastards.

Sorry about that.

Look, I think perhaps it’s time to stop thinking about Christmas present, and turn to Christmas past and Christmas we hope may come again. It’s time for our own Christmas tradition in this place, and I see Thomas Hardy’s The Oxen , our Christmas anthem these past few years, was yesterday named by The Observer as one of the ‘ten best Christmasses in literature’. Well, we knew that, brothers and sisters, didn’t we? And we love the way it stands for a better, more innocent world, even if that world of possibility only exists in stories. What else do we have but stories?

Merry Christmas to you all.

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.

“Now they are all on their knees,”

An elder said as we sat in a flock

by the embers in hearthside ease.

 

We pictured the meek mild creatures where

they dwelt in their strawy pen,

Nor did it occur to one of us there

To doubt they were kneeling then.

 

So fair a fancy few would weave

In these years. Yet, I feel,

if someone said on Christmas Eve

“Come; see the oxen kneel

 

In the lonely barton by yonder coomb

Our childhood used to know”,

I should go with him in the gloom

Hoping it might be so.