The Spirit of Christmas

It is ten forty-five p.m, 24 December 2013. In the Chemist household, this points in one direction. Not, as the end of the previous sentence suggests, to an evening of shite, shallow pop, but to the yearly family visit eglise-wards.  We’re off to church.

It has been a family tradition, since before I became aware, that we drag ourselves away from the world of secular pleasures and go and pay our dues to the Baby J, the donkeys and all the pretty little blonde angels.  

I’m from a Catholic household, and was an unblinking believer for the first sixteen years of my life. This meant that Christmas meant something of actual importance. It was a reminder and celebration of the wond’rous joy of the dawning of a new world. Unlike Easter, which, while being the bigger miracle, was an unending guilt trip of biblical proportions.  Easter is shit.

Even though I had God removed from my life by sustained thought, and, ironically, an epiphany, the remnants of this period are deeply ingrained into the deepest trenches of my psyche.  Christmas is more than an excuse to get wasted without being judged, to stay in bed until early evening, to have port and stilton for breakfast. These are, indeed, parts of the wonder of the Yuletide period, but the whole is greater than the parts.

I first got into the family Midnight Mass at the age of eight, when I discovered that I would be allowed to open my presents on return from the slowest hour-and-a-half of my life, rather than having to wait until the morning.  When you’re waiting for a lightsaber and laser-rifle, those hours matter.  It’s the difference between a life of freedom or a life of alien-overlorded servitude.

And, as I imagine most children find, it was chore.  A big, fat steaming Christmas chore, to which I was bonded. As the years passed, the ways to pass time changed. For a few years, I’d translate the Latin verses into English for the duration.  Hitting my early twenties, I’d spend the dripping minutes of boredom checking out the talent from a fog of festive spirits. A phase which lasted pretty much the rest of the decade, with various degrees of disorientation, and talent.

I never pulled at church. I clearly wasn't working the room well enough.

I must’ve seemed somewhat responsible in my late twenties, because the Priest’s little helper, lighting his way with a red nose to put Sid James to shame, and with a face of thread-veins like a map of the Nile, asked me to take charge of the collection plate.  Feeling grown-up, I agreed. Feeling shitfaced, I dropped it. I have not been asked again.

Two years ago, Mario Balotelli was at the same church as me. I asked him to make sure we won our game on Boxing Day. We lost. Mario, you owe me a Christmas present.

The last few years I've been on driving duty, so Christmas Eve’s excuse for getting ripped off my tits has gone the way of the dodo. Or Dodi, for those with a royalist streak.

Now, I sit still, sing, and think about the beauty of the occasion, and consider the communal  coming together in midwinter which has been a feature of European life for millennia. In the calm sobriety, in my concrete belief in no unearthly being* , I remember that we are all here, now, at this point in time and space. That we have all sprung from one chance mutation somewhere in Africa eons ago. I remember that many have come before, and many will come after. Hundreds of thousands of years have seen billions of lives, loves, losses.  We have shared stories, we have risen and fallen, grown and shrivelled.

And I remember that, today, globally, more than ever, we share histories, cultures, ye traditional hopes and fears.

And for that, even if the rest of the year you’re an absolute fucking nonce, remember - we all are human. We share that. We are none of us islands. At best, be loving, caring, considerate. At worst, don’t be a dickhead.  It’ll be the 27^th soon, the peace and goodwill will all be over, and people will expect to get shafted. For the next two days, no one wants to be fucked over.

Make Christmas mean something. Make it mean people.

Happy Christmas to you all.**

* Not including Roger from American Dad

** Apart, of course, from David Cameron, Gideon Osbourne, Michael Gove and all the other devils of spiteful hate. Even I don’t feel that festive. 

Giant Douche or Shit Sandwich?

Russell Brand has been making headlines recently for things other than bullying Spanish waiters and marrying plastic popstars. The would-be pirate took up his mantle of the people's poet from its previous holder, Rick from The Young Ones. On Newsnight he informed Paxman why he'd never voted, and why apathy is the only sensible choice - because politics is a two-horse race, and the two horses are being ridden by very similar jockeys who shout at each other whilst riding for the same stables. Or something along those lines.

I've never liked Brand. Not for any good reason, but because I think he'd make a shit pirate, and he made a shit Arthur.  The cinematic equivalent of pissing on a sleeping Dudley Moore's face.  An unforgivable crime against art, humanity, the environment and alcoholics.

But he struck a raw nerve with this pontification. Paxman gave him a mild grilling, like the shit final flames of a  4a.m. kebab shop heater on the last flaccid slices of purple donner, only to come out in semi-support a few days later.  Many people have liked the clip on Facebook, some have declared him a political genius, and I've even found myself agreeing with him, as his latest crusade to be a pantomime Jesus coincided with my own falling out with my party.

It will come as little surprise that I am, and always have, been a Labour voter.  They're noticeably a little more centre than myself, but even in a two horse race you need to bet on something if you want to get anything out of it. However, the appointment of Tristam Hunt to Shadow Education, and Rachel Reeves to Work and Pensions was a Bridge over the River Kwai too Far, or somesuch.  One Step Beyond. The straw that ...you get the picture. I don't like them. 

Hunt is a TV historian whose education credentials are the same as everyone else's - he once went to school.  His first pronouncement was to offer support for Free Schools while insisting he didn't support Free Schools.

Reeves' moment of glory was facing up to Ian Duncan Smith, flexing her right-of-centre muscles, while laughing at his attempts to dismantle the Social Security system, and promising that when she got into power she'd fuck up anyone who even thought the words ' Jobseeker's Allowance' .  If he thought he was hard, she'd come over there, shove his namby-pamby policies up his lily-white arse, and then go and personally kill anyone with a hint of disability. With her bare hands, while whistling the Dead Kennedy's ' Kill the Poor'.

At least, that's how I remember it.

I resigned my membership shortly after this, and decided I couldn't vote for a party which had these two fucksticks on their front bench. If it was my party, I'd take them to a forest, break their ankles and leave them for bears.

This resolve has lasted about three weeks. Disgusted as I am with these two wanktards, the opposite is unbearable.  In the last week alone Cameron has let his fat mates know that austerity is here to stay.  Dressed in white tie, at a five-course meal with the Lord Mayor of London,  sat atop a throne of gold carried on the back of a tortoise made of fifty-pound notes*, he set out his plans to keep the rest of the country on the bones of its arse.

At the same time, Gove has written to the teaching unions, stating that he is prepared to enter talks. Talks about how his plans are going to go ahead without any negotiation, and that the talks must include not only the two unions which represent 95% of teachers, but some other pissy little associations for teachers who are too well-paid, or too right wing, to be part of a union, but daren't leave themselves vulnerable to being fucked over in one of the myriad ways a teacher can be fucked over.

There are six of these cop-out groups, representing under 5% of teaching staff. They can have their own meeting with Gove. They don't strike, they don't stand for anything . They just enjoy the benefits the other two unions have won for them over the last century. Parasites.

Meanwhile, Ian Duncan Smith continues his crusades to eradicate poverty by eradicating the poor. Fringe Tories propose killing disabled children to save money**.  Nick Clegg continues to live.

So, even though the two options are similar, they're not the same. In the middle, it may be a bit Animal Farm - you look at one, you look at the other, and you can't tell the difference. But move away from the centre fence, and the differences show.

So I'm voting. Because the people who are likely to have enough of a conscience to abstain on principle are also the people who would be more likely to vote Labour. The natural principles of a Tory don't stretch that far. And the thought of another four years of this gaggle of amateur-night ideologues is too much to consider.

We're never going to revolt, it's not in our cultural  DNA. We'll grumble, abstain, maybe even actually go to the polls to write 'none of these dickheads'. But we won't be out in the streets, shaking pitchforks, stringing the Bullingdon Boys up from a Downing Street lamppost.  So until the day comes that the people of Britain have their own Odessa Steps moments, I'm going to use the only weapon I can use legally.

I'm voting Labour.

Hopefully Reeves and Hunt will choked on their stupidity by then . If you haven't got hope, you haven't got anything.

* I made that bit up. But for a second, you believed it, didn't you.  Because you can see him doing it, can't you.

** I didn't make that up, shockingly. 

Sunday Evening, the Halloween of the Week.

I had a good holiday this summer.  It ticked many boxes: it was long, there was tasty food, and it was almost as geographically as far away from my place of work as it is possible to get, at least for the first three weeks.

I needed this break, not so much because I was in the midst  of an end-of-school-year burn out as because I was in the midst of a very-real-danger-of-punching-someone-I work-with crisis. It would not have been a good move, professionally. Personally, I can't really judge. Violence is never the answer, but sometimes you don't want answers,  you just want to smash things up.

I've been back home for over a week, and the greater part of the bile has subsided. And I've been back at work for a week, with very little incidence of any all-consuming rage. The break done me good, and no doubt about that.

But tonight, I'm feeling resentful. Not for any specific reason, but because I had become used to waking up, musing the world over for a couple of minutes, and going back to sleep. I'd become used to my biggest decision being what's for lunch, what's for dinner, and occasionally, what's for second dinner.  In essence, I'd become very much used to doing what the fuck I want, when I want.  

Fortunately, I usually quite enjoy my job, and it is something I want to do.  Tonight, it's not actually work that's irritating my psyche with the itching powder of life. It's what work means for my Sundays.

I recall fondly the days when Sunday was still a day of the weekend, when Sunday was another pub day. Admittedly, a slightly quieter, more pipe-and-slippers pub day than a let's-blow-up-the-world pub day, but a day for setting up shop in a boozy establishment, and wringing the last few hours of life out of the dying embers  of the weekend's fire.  Things would happen on Sundays.  Quiet things, slow studied, slightly unsteady things, but things nonetheless.

But being a teacher, that's not an option I have. Monday's are never a slow slide into the working week, but an early morning slap in the face with a spiked glove of awakening. Monday requires alertness, preparation, pep and zest. It does not forgive the groggy hangover, nor make allowances for the fuzzy head. Monday fucks you up.

Sunday evenings are now a bit of a graveyard of a time.  It often feels like the gateway between this world and the next has thinned,  and not just because of the living dead who often inhabit it - Last of the Summer Wine, Downton Abbey , Antiques Roadshow and their ilk. I'd bet, statistically, more aged folk slip their mortal chains on a Sunday night, home, alone, weighed down by the decades of Sunday night wistful misery. All just to avoid seeing in another Monday.  I'd imagine Sunday night is suicide night, for those with suicidal tendencies.  Conversely, I can't image it being music night, for those with Suicidal Tendencies.

It is a morose evening. I've accepted this, and developed a range of strategies to impede its grey grip on life. Hot Chocolate with a nip of whisky. Long baths, Radio 3 and a good book. Shooting people in the head for gleeful pleasure on Call of Duty. They pass the time, they keep the ghosts at bay.

But the ghosts of the holiday are powerful, and there remains  a yearning for a couple of Sunday night pints,  maybe a cheeky whisky or three, and a handful of fags. The summer is dying, and it should mourned in the appropriate manner.  However, being the responsible adult I never asked to be, I shall resist. 

Resist the pub anyway.

Q.I. is on TV. There are a few beers in the fridge. I'll keep those ghosts alive, drink to the dying season, to the fading traces of the holiday, to the memories of a lie-in.

After all, Monday is another day.  

Turn! Turn! Turn!

It’s approaching mid-July, and all over the country children are staring wistfully from classroom windows* at the azure celestial canopy, and the blazing trail of Helios as he makes his way through the heavens**.  And they wait. For within the week they will be set free from their shackles and be ejected into six weeks of give-not-a-fuck-about-anythingness. The summer holidays are almost upon us.

I’ll lay my deck of cards of bias out on the table of truth before I start this –I’m a teacher and have a vested interest in the long holidays we get. I love them, and they are the sole perk of the job***.

Elsewhere, in education land, Pob is at it again. Not content with fucking up every other aspect of the Education system, he’s now proposing that school term dates be set by headteachers.  To bastardise a popular, very irritating phrase – it’s decentralisation gone mad. Properly mad. Not Blackadder’s pencil-up-the-nose, underpants on head mad. Not even the madness of Charles VI of France – helpfully known as Charles the Mad - who thought he was made of glass. No – this is more of the calibre of Everyone’s Favourite Roman Emperor: Caligula. A man so mad he would have people tied upside down and chew at their testicles as punishment.  An Emperor so insane he tried to make his horse consul****. A proper nutter, you might say. A picnic short of a picnic.

The major problem with this idea – other than the mere fact it is Gove’s, and so arrives from his mouth already tainted by his brain, is that it seems to be working on the principle that schools are factories, students are products, and teacher are cunts. It is the brainchild of man who values neither brain nor child. And it designed to shorten the summer holidays, on the grounds that students aren't learning in every possible waking moment and if we allow this to continue China and Korea will invade and we'll be condemned to a future reliant on the Chinese economy and cheap imported goods from the far east. Or something equally ill-conceived. It is the unbaked idea of someone who thinks England's heyday was under Queen Victoria, and therefore we should return to said era for inspiration. 

Dickens lampooned the Victorian School System in the novels Hard Times and Nicholas Nickleby, creating the monstrous establishments of Gradgrind and Dotheyboys respectively.  Coincidentally, Pob is in favour of all students reading a Dickens novel, despite the fact that it is beyond most adults.  In fact, most adults seem to think they’ve read a Dickens novel, but on close questioning it is usually ascertained that they have, in fact, seen Oliver! when they were at school, and remember watching Scrooge McDuck in Duck Tales.  

It seems clear from his two pronouncements that Pob is indeed familiar with the oeuvre of Mr. Dickens, but has made a seismic error- he thinks they are the ideas of his policy wonks, not social satire. With this realisation I now fully expect he shall look to Oliver Twist for ideas – instead of Work Related Learning, students not fluent in Latin by thirteen will be sent to the workhouse. He shall glean inspiration from Great Expectations, with students lacking social ambition sent to mad old spinsters to be bullied, mocked and forced to play arcane card games, like, Hello Mr Punch, Go-Johnny-Go-Go-Go and Bamalafizzfazz. And, in a masterstroke of imbecility, those children who fail to grasp the fundamentals of Christian Tradition will be visited by three strange men while they sleep, with threats of death and a shit Christmas.

In fact, Pob’s mission in life seems to be straightforward – to take all joy out of childhood; to squeeze the little blighters through the grinder of education; and to dehumanise both teachers and children alike. Life is not about being fitter, stronger, faster, better all the time. Sometimes it’s about just being. Being free to do nothing, to achieve nothing.  To rest while the cerebral fruits of academic labours take a root. To grow up, to explore, to be more than we were.  

Some of us may be stuck, sitting in classrooms, but we’re looking to the skies. School’s almost out for summer.  For teachers, it’s a chance to be people. For students, it’s a chance to become people. Take that away, and we condemn both to life of unquestioning servitude and burnout.

Sometimes, you’ve got to have time to sit on the dock on the bay, watching the tides. So, Pob, leave those kids alone.  They’re neither bricks in the wall, candles in the wind nor pawns in your game. In the words of a great sage, to everything there is a time.

It’s time to kick back, crack open a can of Stella, and give-not-a-fuck. For six glorious, lazy weeks. 

* Or climbing out of them, depending on the nature of the school and child

** Or the sun in the sky, for the more prosaically-minded

*** Not the sole reason, of course. We do it for the kids, innit.

****. an appointment whose ludicrous factor is only matched by CallMeDave’s appointment of an ill-informed ideologue a Secretary for State for Education.  

Little Britainers

We're spinning in space at 1070 miles an hour, and moving round the sun at 67, 000 miles an hour. We are the Third Rock from the Sun, as his very Reverend James Marshall Hendrix pointed out, and a blahhh of an American  sitcom flogged to a merciless death*.

The planet is a mind-blowing 4.54 billion years old**. Older than my jokes. Older than your gran's stories about getting tipsy on a charabanc to Morecambe. Older even than God.

Because God was invented by humans, and we're only about 200,000 years old.

Earth exists in the Goldilocks Zone - so called because conditions are just-right-for-life, not because we are a bunch of porridge-stealing, bear-baiting harridans. And, given the enormity of the Universe, which is itself 13.82 billion years old, the chances of life forming here are bogglingly small.

Our own existence as a species is so utterly improbable as to be almost miraculous. Not actually miraculous, mind, because that would imply the existence of some kind of godhead, and, like I said, that's one we made earlier, not the other way round.

Your own existence, and mine, and everyone who ever lived, is down to an even finer sliver of chance. The odds against any single one of us being is slimmer than a River Island model. Take a moment to absorb that. You shouldn't really be here, reading this. I shouldn't really be here, banging this out on a shitty Mac I've borrowed, which is making me wish Steve Jobs had actually really never been here. How do I right click this silver piece of technological evil? Why do Mac user swear by them? They're surely more deluded than Young Earthers.

Given that slightness of probability, I have a question for those who are posting the forthcoming nonesense on Facebook. Those of you who are Proud To Be British - what the fuck exactly are you proud of? You didn't choose to be British. You're here by an accident, a fluke, an unplanned and unpredictable explosion and scattering of dust the best part of 14 Billion years ago.

You might not be ashamed to British - although given that we are responsible for giving the universe Jeffrey Archer, Michael McIntyre, The Segway and the Mau Mau massacre I'd question that - but proud? Really? If your greatest achievement is to survive birth, you really ought to stretch yourself a bit.  Try consecutive thoughts perhaps? A completed sentence?

This may seem a minor point, but this jiggled thinking is the thin end of wedge which has resulted today in someone firebombing a mosque in Muswell Hill. Because what it really means, like a St. George's flag in a pub window, or a Swastika tattoo on your forehead - is simple. Proud To Be British is shorthand for - and I shall be polite about this - I'm a fucktardic xenophobic halfwit who'd rather identify myself as disliking and distrusting foreigners than celebrate the fact that I have one life, at one time, and, against all odds***, I am on this planet, spinning through space, with the rest of humanity, my fellow travellers in time and space.

And, instead of rejoicing in our common bonds, our shared histories and experiences, our many and varied cultures, and stories, and heroes and villains, and foods, I'm going to define myself by the fact that parents happened to be in this little corner of our little planet nine months after they shagged.

I'm picking on Britain, because  that's what I've seen on Facebook since the death of Lee Rigby. But the same ranty point is applicable to all.  We should mourn the death of one our own - a human - as is fitting. But remember - like the Borg - we are essentially the same the world over. We don't choose how we come in to the world, or where we come in. Your birth is your parents' achievement, not yours.

We are here together. Let's be here, together.


* It occurred to me that this programme is no longer on our screens, and I wondered what had happened to it. But I realised I don't care. I really do not care. Even less than I care whether Darma and/or Greg survived that car crash at the end of series two which was soooo clearly a desperate attempt to get given a third series. Which I hope they didn't. Because it was insult to the living. And the dead. And the yet-to-be-born.

* For those of a religious persuasion who think the earth is 6, 500 years old. You are utterly fucking insane. Ironically, I bet you also disbelieve evolution, while being closer to ours and apes' closest ancestors in intellect than most other member of homo sapiens sapiens. 

***Which reminds me, we also gave the world Phil Collins. We should hang our heads in heavy shame.

Vive la France

I’ve been a Francophile for as long as I remember, putting me at odds with the majority of my fellow Englanders. Where my compatriots see a nation of simians prone to laying down weapons with an unhealthy enthusiasm, and afflicted with an innate weakness for cheese and shit wine, I have tended to see a nation of philosophers and poets, artists and beautiful people. The country of Monet, Rimbaud and Zola. And Plastic Bertrand.

I think I can trace this love of the French to my early years, sitting in Hulme Library reading Tintin*, immersing myself in a world of espionage, adventure, fluffy dogs, exotic countries and drunken sailors.  My early impressions of France was that it was a country of excitement, where round heads and tiny quiffs were the uniform of the super-cool, where the streets were narrow and everyone seemed to carry a gun.  It was my kind of place.

My experiences were drawn a little more into reality with my first French lesson at St Thomas Aquinas High School**, when we were introduced to the French family who inhabited the pages of Tricolre, the text book of choice in 1980s French classes.  This was a (stereo)typical French family, with a mere, a pere, a young son and a teenage daughter called Marie-France. It is to Marie-France I apportion the inspiration for my real attraction to France, because Marie-France would have been about two years older than me, and was stylish, studious and pretty fit. As line-drawings go, anyway. Not a Francine Smith or Lois Griffin, but enough for a pubescent adolescent to get distracted by. If French girls were like that, I wanted in.

So, to my initial belief that France was a country riddled with spies and pirates , the carefree, stylish young-girl-about-town was added***.  And so, until my twenties, this informed my vision.  France: a country of two-dimensional adventure and penciled objects of desire.

I’ve recently returned from a trip to France, and every time I go, my original simplistic love is diluted with real France, as it occurs in the actual country. It’d be going a bit far to call it a disappointment, because I still love it. But it would be fair to say that I’ve met few philosophers, artists or pirates.

Most annoyingly for me, however, is that France has long had a reputation for being tres chic, the home of style, the fortress of couture.  When I first met real live French people, twenty-odd years ago, I was struck by the lack of correlation between this idea, and that ever-pesky annoyance, reality.  Then, in my very early twenties, all the Frenchies I knew looked like they were dressing like their parents, or had been dressed by their parents.

Nothing has changed.  The cheese is great, the wine is risky, the clothes are shite.  At some point in the fifties, French fashion was probably lightyears away from the staid, drabness of the rest of Europe.  In fact, for people over fifty, the clothes would still be classed as very stylish. But the fashion for the under forties is, with a few exceptions, best described as Meeting-the In-Laws-Friendly. Not so much cutting edge as Alderley Edge.

So, while I am always sad to leave, and for a fortnight afterwards dine on French produce purchased to draw out the holiday buzz, and read some Baudelaire and Tintin with wistful pangs of regret for the life Marie-France and I never made together,  the pain of leaving is easily lessened by purchasing some actual fashion on my return to Blighty.

So tomorrow I’m getting a tiger-stripe onesie.  I bet Tintin never had one of them.

*I know he’s Belgian, but at the age of seven I assumed he was French. I don’t think I really became aware of Belgium’s  existence until the 1982 World Cup.  An awakening that has not improved my life in any measurable amount.

** Which no longer exists.  Twenty-seven teachers won a lottery syndicate a few years after I left. The school hit a rapid decline following twenty-seven resignations shortly after.

***Like a younger Genevieve from The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Or Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, if vous preferez. 

The Sun'll Come Out...

Macbeth, the character, in Macbeth, one of Shakespeare's funniest comedies, upon hearing of the death of his wife, starts prattling on about 

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day.

Essentially he's doing the uber-goth thing of reflecting on the pointlessness of life, because tomorrow - or at least some tomorrow in the future - everyone is going to die. Unfortunately for him he was born after Gone with the Wind, otherwise he’d know that Tomorrow is Another Day, and so there is no point getting stressed and all miserably nihilistic about it. 

Macbeth’s main problem is that he knows he’s fucked – he’s probably going to die soon – and so, naturally, his disposition is not so shiny as it might be. His other problem is that he hasn’t learned the joys of procrastination. He may be going to die tomorrow, but it’s not tomorrow yet, it’s today. He should stop getting in a tither, crack open a can of Stella (Or a Bottle of Buckfast, given that he’s Scottish) and enjoy the good life while he can.

Because the fine art of procrastination is one that requires little skill other than the realisation that there’s always going to be something that you ‘should’ be doing. As I type I know that the kitchen is in need some of desperate attention – dishes are piling up, lunch is not being prepared, and the art of bread-making is being sadly neglected.

In front of me, a pile of books is accusing me of being an incompetent teacher, a half-written novel is goading me with jibes about having no staying power (a goad I am used to, from many sources, for many reasons).

But to get all of these things done would wipe out my entire Sunday, and that would leave no time for the real pleasures of Achieving Fuck All on the Sofa – an activity at which I am a master.  There is mindless Nazi history to be watched, and Arsenal/Spurs game to come, and many and varied Facebook statuses (stati?*) to be liked. These things don’t take care of themselves.

Recently, I bought my niece a Riverside Shakespeare for her Eighteenth Birthday, because that’s the kind of fun-lovin’ uncle I am, and wrote in it ‘ Everything you want to know about life is in here somehwere’. *** Taking that sweeping statement as my cue, I’m learning from Macbeth. He frets, and strides, and furies and clangs. But tomorrow does eventually come, and he does eventually die. Painfully and humiliatingly. And his head gets put on spike, and people probably piss in his eye sockets. Although Willie doesn’t explicitly mention that in his script. Probably censored.

So not only does Macbeth lose his life, but he spends his last day getting worked up about it. You can’t avoid the inevitable, But you can pretend it’s not there. If he’d known this, he’d at least have enjoyed his last few hours of life.

Eventually I will have to plan my lessons for tomorrow – including, not coincidentally, Macbeth with Year Nine. I will have to do the dishes. I will have to eat. But if I wait, I’ll get them done with the minimum effort required. Right now, there is televisual learning to be done, and reclining to be practised.

I’m learning from Macbeth. Procrastinate, procrastinate and procrastinate.

I’m learning from Macbeth. You may die tomorrow, so enjoy today.

I’m learning from Macbeth. Now how do I turn this into a lesson for thirty fourteen-year-olds?

I’ll tell you tomorrow.

* It’s fourth declension - of course  – so statuses (Anglicised usage) or status. Not stati.** D’oh! I’m such a dumbass pleb at times. How could I have forgotten that?

**And I also bet Toby ‘kill me with a battered copy of Lewis and Short’ Young doesn’t know that either. Because he’s a twat.

*** Unless, of course, you want to know about Angry Birds or the Harlem Shuffle.

1966 and All That

Mrs Chemist, a native of Kiwiland, is in the process of applying for the right to remain resident on this emerald isle, this other Eden, this idyll home of Nectar Points and railway enthusiasts.  Being the caring partner that I am I have decided to help in this endeavour by being actively and enthusiastically involved in the process. Especially the citizenship test.  To this end, I dug deep into my pockets and bought a study guide off Ebay for the bank-breaking price of Ten New Pence.

This was last week. The test tests whether would-be immigrants know such useful details as who is entitled to free dental care and how many Nectar points are two bottles of Bishop’s Finger worth? Essentially, a dry document of dry details  - presumably to make Britain seem like a place of dull facts and, by extension, an equally dull existence.

Bizzarely, the very day the fruits of my largesse arrived in the post, the present ‘government’ announced that the test was about to change. No longer would those wishing, and willing, to become a weave in the fabric of the history of this Land of the Free* have to learn such grey statistics as the number of practising Methodists in the district of Merthyr Tydfil, or how many stripes there are on a standard zebra crossing. No siree!  Out with such nonsenses! Because now, following the general re-writing of reality that the shambles who are  running the country are attempting to impose across the entire spectrum of society, the test is now about Great British History, as judged by a couple of people who are really good at pub quizzes, but probably shit at rational thought and human interaction.

You may have seen sample questions on various news websites.  You can try the test here : http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/21229722.  It seems fairly innocuous during your first perusal.  There is, however, one essential flaw. It’s completely fucking useless.

Unless you live in Trafalgar Square, there is no need, or value, to know that the tiny figure you can’t see at the top of Nelson’s Phallus is Admiral Nelson, one-armed, half-blind adulterous attention seeker.  Similarly, knowing that Stonehenge is an ancient Neolithic monument not only has little intrinsic worth, it also makes  visiting the site itself redundant, as you’ll already know all there is to learn about our fascination with rocks arranged in circles by bored/pissed Ancient Britons.

I’m sure there are also questions about cigar-smoking midget Isambard Kingdom Brunel, but all it would really tell anyone becoming acquainted with the famous folk of British yesteryear is that there was a propensity towards Very Stupid  Names**. And very stupid hats.

I think, in actuality, this test has been written by Michael ‘Death can’t Come Soon Enough’  Gove, because it is exactly what I imagine he wants a GCSE in History to look like – 200 questions like this, getting increasingly obscurer as the exam progresses.  It starts with an easy Stonehenge, and ends with a question on the legal name in 1302 for a falconer who had had their licence suspended for improper human-avine relations.

The citizenship test should be reduced to one question: Would you vote for the Conservative Party. A ‘No’ gets you entry.  A ’Yes’ gets you shot in the face.  Piece of piss.

* If you’re rich and white

** See also: Horatio Nelson,  Ethelred the Unready, Cogidudnus and anyone called Wayne.yne.

Take yer Eastenders aand shove it ...

It's half one in the morning, and I'm reclined on the sofa at my mum's, finally wrestling off the vestiges of my New Year's Day hangover with the aid of a hot chocolate and Fake Bailey's. The festive season is crawling off, wounded, into the gossamer field of memories, and the bleak, soulless January spreads before us - a bitter necessary evil to be borne,to be faced with determination and, hopefully, to be survived. It wants to defeat you. You must resist.

However, there are remnants of Christmas still with us, and they make the slide from Yule Joy into New Year Horror the more bearable.  There are still some Roses left, and not just the shitty caramels and poisonous orange creams. I've got more Stilton than I can hope to eat in this lifetime, and the novelty of my Christmas toys hasn't worn off yet. And there is still a smattering of interesting and unusual TV to watch, a festive selection pack of viewability.

Not a whole lot though. It's not been a vintage year for Christmas telly.  Readers of a certain vintage will remember the pre-Christmas excitement when the bumper double issues of Radio Times and TV Times were released on the approach road to the holidays. Gaggles of small children would pour over the pages like pirates drooling over new treasure maps, carefully planning the fortnights viewing, accompanied by intermittent 'oohs' and 'ahs' as another televisual wonderment was unearthed*.

I remember TV at Christmas as being packed with nuggets of distraction, fizzing with spectacle, transmitting unending fantabulousisms. Among the ever-present Bonds, Poppinses and Wizards of Ozzess were mornings of wacky cartoon treats, obscure gems like Anne of Green Gables and strange films from the Australian Children's Film Workshop. There were big film premières  middle-class seasonal uplifters like Truly Madly Deeply, and costume dramas so superior to Dumbtown Abbey they could kill it with one hand while munching a mince pie and sipping a brandy.

Even the nostalgia was better then,.

During the Yule weeks, one of the great things over the years has been lazing around, hungover, watching good honest programming.  Unfortunately, these last two weeks it seems to have mostly been Diagnosis Murder and Bones repeats, with the occasional scrap of quality meat thrown at our feet to remind us how shit everything else is. Even Christmas Day's Dr Who was a bit of a limper.  Sadly, the best TV has been the four episodes of Match of the Day**.

But tonight, I've found some nuggets. A programme about nasty insects. Two BBC Four docs  - on Roman Art and Art Nouveau. And a QI I haven't yet seen.  And I'm watching them. Because I must. Christmas is a time for traditions, and I refuse to let those traditions die.  Even if I am dog-tired, and there is the siren call of bed awaiting.  If I give up on this, I let January win.

Never let January win.

* I may be slightly over-romanticising this.
**Apart from the one where Sunderland beat City which was both implausible and overly-tragic. Like Mike Leigh's Naked in sporting form.