Author: Moobs

Christmas Eve

We are standing at the edge of the drop off car lane at heathrow. The man who is supposed to have come and collected the car is 25 minutes late. We have twice been told he is on his way only then to be told that they don’t even know what terminal we are at. P is weeping tears of frustration. The gate closes in 15 minutes. I am shouting down the mobile telephone connection at the unhelpful man at the parking company. I inform him that if we miss the plane I intend to come and spend Christmas with him.

We make the plane by the skin of our teeth. I turn to P, sigh, and say “at last the holiday starts”. She lays a clammy palm on my hand and says “I’m going down with a cold”.

We are spending Christmas Eve with P’s sister, K. She is recently separated and her three boys are with their father until Christmas Day. She has been busy organising her first Christmas as a single mum and has had to get her ex to pick up the bicycles she has bought for her boys. It meant him driving the work vehicle round to the bike shop whilst on shift. As his work vehicle is Edinburgh and Lothian Police’s Armed Response car, this leads to some very startled Bike Shop owners. K phones through to pay for the bikes. The owners hesitate to take card details over the phone. K points out that if she intended to defraud them she would be unlikely to send the Police to collect the goods. They see her point.

K and P have a lot of talking to do. I slink into the sitting room and, as stand in man of the house, seize control of a beer and the remote control and allow television to turn my brain to jelly.

Christmas Day

We are in Peebles, a picturesque Borders town. All around the house are fields hard with frost and blurred by fog. The spiders’ webs in the hedgerows look like strings of glass beads. I am crunching down the pavement looking for the Catholic Church. As I am wearing a T Shirt, jumper, body-warmer and wool coat as well as gloves, a scarf and a woolly hat, it is impossible for the locals to tell that I am English (or indeed what sex or race I am) so they are all very friendly. It turns out that K, who has given me directions,  has no idea where the Catholic Church is. She has sent me to the site of the former Evangelical Church; now closed for rebuilding. I apologise to God and set off back to the TV.

P meets me at the door. Despite her gathering illness she is in great form having enjoyed the sort of lung-searing icy tramp across the hills with a dog that the Scots thrive on (what’s wrong with cocktails at an early hour in a basement bar?) She wants to go to see her Gran who is in a retirement home a short drive away. I am a little wary. Gran has Alzheimers and, the previous week, had suffered a stroke that nearly carried her away. I agree to go along, expecting trouble. P is in indomitable spirits. As we drive across country there are birds wheeling; finally persuaded to fly south and Parliaments of crows lining the telephone wires looking bitter.

The retirement home is a model of jollity. The staff wear tinsel in their hair and the guests are participating in the festivities to the extent that they are able. Some sit staring, others mumble and a bespectacled nonagenarian called Agnes shuffles about tidying away anything she finds unattended (including the contents of P’s handbag). The nurse in charge informs me ruefully that however afflicted the guests might appear their ability to put away sherry by the mugful seems to be the last skill to wane. Some of them are being wheeled away for an afternoon with a guilt-ridden family but pause to look wistfully at the shrimp cocktail starter they are missing out on.

I spot Granny B. She is frozen in an apparent attempt to stand up. Her eyes are vacant as a result of sedation and her palms are pressed flat on the seat. Her legs are like sticks in their trousers and she smiles unwaveringly, her dentures perfectly regular and white. She no longer wears her hearing aid. P drops to her knees and grabs her grandmother’s hands. “Hello Granny, how are you?” she asks. Gran’s hands writhe in hers. She repeats the question. Gran pulls her hands free, her smile fixed, her eyes adrift. P’s eyes fill with tears. She looks at me, asks me to sit with her Gran and runs from the room. I sit down and hold Gran’s hand and gesture to a nurse. Between us we establish she wants to change her trousers as they have foodstains on them. She is helped away. P returns having been found and comforted by the staff. She has been administered a dose of hot tea; the British miracle drug.

P’s parents arrive. They are practised at talking to Gran and ask her who is visiting her. Gran says “P” in a whisper and my heart breaks in gratitude. It is a small thing but the consolation it brings P is immediate and immense. I talk to P’s dad and it is plain that for all the love P’s parents have for Gran they would rather she passed away. “She could go on for years like this” he told me in a worried tone. For the record, rather than put me in a home, sneak up behind me and shoot me.

By the time we are home, the boys are back. J is playing with Nintendogs whilst his actual dog, Holly, leaps about in front of him trying to get his attention. The two younger boys, D and W see me, point, shout “It’s the tickley man” and then jump in turn onto my bollocks for the next 4 and a half hours.

The Christmas meal is fantastic. I munch through balls of stuffing, little sausages, parsnips and slices of turkey wondering idly (having read too many US blogs) what a Turducken tastes like. Once the meal is over, I retire to the sitting room where the boys resume their insistent attempts to emasculate me with their booted feet. P’s Mum, meanwhile,  is having her usual Christmas duel with the television. At one end of the misty champs is the huge widescreen which is projecting the sights and sounds of the magical world of Master Harry Potter. I have little idea what the bespectacled wizardling is up to because P’s Mum, as ever, is winning. She is keeping up an endless stream of shouted banality “THOSE CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS ARE NICE. WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT THAT THEY CAME FROM IKEA? THEY ONLY DO THEM IN RED I SUPPOSE. MY TEA IS HOT. WHAT A NICE MUG. DO YOU LIKE YOUR PRESENTS CHILDREN? OH DEAR MY TEA HAS GONE COLD.”

At about 6pm I begin to feel it is all a bit much and sneak upstairs to read. My friend S gloatingly texts me from Whistler to tell me that there has been 45 cms of fresh powder snow and that he has an evening of drinking micro-brewed beer and eating nachos with boarding babes ahead of him. At first I am jealous but then it occurs to me that if I am trapped, I am at least trapped in an embrace: the embrace of a family at Christmas, all trying as best they can,  not just to love one another but to let that love show a little. Painful though the constant stamping on my bollocks may be, the boys plainly like me and, I might as well admit it, I like them; snot-covered faces and blood-spattered boots and all. That is why I have tried this Christmas to pass on a little wisdom. The boys now know what “bollocks” means; that Brussel sprouts make you fart and how to swallow air and make yourself belch. I don’t suppose that’s the spirit of Christmas but frankly who cares?

Looking back down the dry and dusty path of my life I am forced, wincingly, to acknowledge the exceptional number of embarrassments I have experienced. The worst are those where I did not appreciate at the time that anything embarrassing was happening. It is into that barrel of pickled limbs I delve tonight.

It is 1971 and we have gathered at my Nan’s house for a Sunday dinner. Once we have eaten the adults move into the kitchen to clean up and chat and my sister and I are deposited onto the big sheepskin rug in front of my grandparent’s television which buzzes and hums with electricty.

We have been buffed and polished to perfection, our hair combed until it has lost all strength and falls limply over our foreheads. Our cheeks are red from being rubbed at desperately with a hankie onto which my mother has very kindly spat. We have each demonstrated our unfailing good manners and discussed our school work in clear voices and with feigned enthusiasm. We have even choked down the vegetables that my grandmother has reduced to watery pellets of pale goo with her new “pressure cooker”. Our parents are thus reassured that we have met the demanding standards that my grandparent have set and my mother is toasting happily in the glow of the approval of her parents-in-law.

The film my sister and I are watching is a colouful fantasy called “Jack the Giant Killer”. In a scene which grabbed at my young imagination, the beautiful and virtuous princess is imprisoned by an evil wizard named, presciently, Thatcher. Whilst the princess struggles, her arms fastened by shackles above her head (the better to accentuate her chaste bosom), Thatcher approaches her holding a large Swarowski paper weight from which hypnotic lights emanate. The lights bring about a transformation. Her clothes loosen, her hair becomes disarranged, her fingernails grow and her new leer suggests (correctly) that she has become very very wicked. Without quite understanding why, this scene spoke to me. It induced a whole new set of sensations that utterly bemused me.

I trotted off to the kitchen to find my parents. As I reached the doorway, my Nan beamed at me and asked solicitously “What is it little Moobs?”

“I have a question Nanna”

“Do you indeed?” My ancestors exchanged smiles and made little nods to each other. My hair was ruffled affectionately.

“What is your question little man?”

“Why has my willy gone all stiff?”

There was a silence so profound it seemed to suck the light from the room, broken only by the sound of my mother dropping a teacup into the sink.