Can we fast-forward exactly twelve months please?
Well, thank God that’s over – and I don’t even believe in Him!
You can call me Scrooge, or worse, if you like but I always find the second half of December going into the New Year as an ordeal and this one’s been no different to any other.
It’s one of the most challenging periods of the year for yours truly when various people around absolutely adore getting into the festive spirit, bringing out the Christmas decorations and wallowing in the all the trimmings – the Christmas television schedule, cards, shopping, going for walks. For someone like me who is unemployed, retired and/or old Christmas doesn’t mean as much when each day (week-day or weekend) is a brand new one to do with as exactly you like.
I don’t ‘do’ the normal human things like ‘thank you’ letters and gave up sending Christmas cards about twenty years ago.
As a result the festive cards I receive are few and tend to come from the hardy annuals who send them out as part of their annual December ritual come what may and – as in my case – haven’t had replies from some of their correspondents in decades.
Apart from the fact I’m lazy and cannot see the point of them, in this day and age of Instagram, Twitter, Facebook to name but a few (none of which I belong to) for me Christmas cards are a relic of the past when the modern more immediate ways of keeping in touch did not exist.
Worst of all are the card that come with typed inserts of ‘Here’s our family news for the past year’. I suppose some regard them as a way of bringing their long-lost pals up to date with their doings and then expressing a hearty “Let’s get together when we can at some point next year!” (irrespective of whether there’s any positive intent on either side of doing this).
On this subject, one article that genuinely made me laugh out loud over the Christmas period was Michael Hogan’s in The Daily Telegraph on deciphering the content (or should that be ‘separating what is said from the reality’) of such missives. See here – DAILY TELEGRAPH
As far as I was concerned, the 2016 Christmas TV schedule was one of the worst in living memory.
Most middle to late mornings were filled with seamless wall-to-wall ‘modern’ and noisy Disney or Pixar-type animated cartoons chock-ful of wise-cracking animals speaking in hip ‘street patois’ presumably voiced by the cohort of usual suspects from the Hollywood fraternity picking up money for old rope.
All the normal features of a weekly schedule were systematically dumped in favour of endless ‘entertainment’ programming, none of which this viewer had any interest in. Even the specially-made ‘blockbuster’ Christmas peak-time shows were a shadow of the greats of the past in terms of quality.
Come New Year’s Eve at the weekend and, as per usual on a 31st December, I went to bed at my standard 8.00pm and them awoke and got up at about 11.20pm in order to ‘see in the New Year’.
The BBC had been advertising Robbie Williams doing a live concert up to midnight, whilst BBC2 were putting out another of Jools Holland’s traditional Hootenanny extravaganzas.
At the establishment where I was billeted for the New Year we opted to switch back and forth between the two as the minutes ticked away to Big Ben.
Robbie Williams, of whom I’m no particular fan anyway, was performing in some vast big church hall (or similar) and naturally began by singing several ditties from his latest album (The Heavy Entertainment show) all of which were bland and unremarkable, clearly an unabashed product of the “It’s a couple of years since your last album, Robbie and Brand Williams needs a new product, let’s put something out and – with a bit of effort on its promotion – we can probably pull a couple of millions pounds of profit in to keep your career bumbling along’ syndrome.
Williams clearly cannot sing these days (which statement presumes that there was a time when he once could). What I personally found disappointing during this bore-fest was the auditorium being packed with Robbie Williams worshippers who plainly knew every word of every song and duly belted them out as if attending the climax of some kind of happy-clappy religious festival.
All I can say is that, if I had been a pubescent teenager, the sight of the charisma-by-passed 42 year old Williams slogging away on my television, trying to look and present himself as a still-at-the-‘peak-of-his-form’ pop idol, would have seemed farcical and irrelevant.
Seeking respite from that concert, we occasionally switched over to watch a slice of the Jools Holland’s shindig. Holland is a musician and band leader I respect. Unfortunately the guests he introduced as the show began were equally disappointing in both the anticipation and the execution. Sadly – I say that because there have been some great televised Holland ‘New Year’ parties in previous years – this one was also a distinct damp squib.
At a couple of minutes to midnight the coverage switched to the scene in central London close to Big Ben and the London Eye. A countdown and a firework display unfolded either side of the Big Ben clock strikes … and fifteen minutes later it was all over.
My reaction afterwards was simple relief that I was but a staircase and ten metres from my bed … and not standing cold and underwhelmed on the Thames Embankment facing a two-hour trip home by public transport, that is if London’s public transport was not on strike and still working normally.
Roll on a full-cooked breakfast on the morning of 1st January 2018, I say!
