Better days

22 December, 2014 (19:36) | All articles | By: Stuart Fraser

This is the blog for December 15th 2014, re-posted today owing to the original’s tragic loss while my website was being improved. Brother Fiddle’s comment has also gone the way of all flesh. It is my dearest wish that further improvements will not take place.

Of course things were better in our day. They always are. Or were. Things have been better in our day since our day. Things have been better in our day since the first day.

So I won’t say Christmas was better in our day.

What I will say is this: time and innovation have brought many improvements in our longer lives, but not everything has been improved.

I see nothing to replace the family thrill I remember from poring over the special double-issue Christmas Radio Times when it first hit the streets. I see a trillion twinkling bulbs in every street, but none of them twinkles so much as the little string of fairy lights my parents fetched down from the attic year after year, nor as much as the little string of fairy lights that I fetch down from the attic every year.

From my house, if BT is having a good day, I can surf the world this Christmas – TV, radio, films, games, e-mails. I can access pornography in full glorious technicolour across five continents if I want. None of that is for me, though, late on a pre-Christmas day. I like, as I’ve always liked, to turn off all the lights and sit by my tree, smelling pine resin and listening to music and thinking.

My poor children. They’re slumped on the sofa now, exhausted. The world is selling them things, all the time, and the adults are making them do things, and their friends and they are saucer-eyed with excitement at all the possibility: games, computers, playstations. How I long for the Christmases when they were saucer-eyed with excitement at sprinkling glitter on the frosty lawn so Santa’s reindeer could see to land.

It must be my fault, but how can I keep the world from them? What have my music and poems, my twinkles and contemplations got to offer them compared to their peers’ bleeps and flashes, plants and zombies, Dr Who and Harry Potter? In their media age, framed by the rectangle of a computer screen, what room is there now for magic in their lives?

Well, I must hope, and hold the line, that’s what I must do, facing off the Minecraft zombies and ender-dragons and Angry Birds and Darth Sidious and the rest of the dark side. Bastards. Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough.

Because the world tried and still tries to get its clutches on me at Christmas: but I’ll tell you something for sure: choppers or iPads, game of Charades or Game of Thrones, the world’s not getting me. Oh no.

I still believe in magic. Not your John Lewis virgin penguin magic or your Sainsbury’s supermarket dancing on the graves of the fallen of 1914 black magic, no. The magic of thought and feeling, words and music, meaning and contemplation, silence and reflection, talk and laughter. Organic magic. Don’t need gadgets for any of that.

And if I’ve come to value these things more and more as time goes by, then it is possible that one day my children may also stop, think a moment, turn around, take a look at the world reaching out to them, its arms proffering  Sky TV and replica soccer strips and designer label trainers and X Factor and Ant and Dec, take a look at that world and say to it what I’ve been saying to it for 40 years:

Fuck off. Fuck right off.

 

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