All I want for Christmas is…
A damn good hug and a really good game of Scrabble. And some sarcastic laments as to why I’ll receive neither.
A damn good hug and a really good game of Scrabble. And some sarcastic laments as to why I’ll receive neither.
I have no idea where this tale may meander aside from the ridiculous premise and howl into the Matrix that was my twitter post reproduced below. All I know, at this stage, and without writing this article and not knowing where it may yet lead is (1) I shall not be the recipient of that hug (or the hug I really want in addition to the one I shall be receiving) (2) nor will I be challenged to a game of Scrabble during the upcoming festivities and surprisingly unrelated (3) I’m irrationally irritable at the moment. And all of these things have no real connection to the trademarked “Christmas Week” in which we are all dutifully in, whether we wish to be or not.
As you’ll read below, I fucking hate Christmas and so a whole trademarked week of it? Please. But therein lies the rub of this Christmas tale and one which many of you will have switched off from after my profanity laden attack on the holiest of carol singing days, and I’m sorry. We’ve had Christmas “weeks” for as long as I’ve drawn breath and considering supermarkets fill their shelves in late August with tinsel, Christmas crackers and fillers of festive stockings galore, we have a week this year, a seemingly State sanctioned week of merriment and consumption (currently under threat here in the UK from the same “Authorities” clad in an ill fitting suit and resembling being shocked awake by a cattle prod) but it’s “Christmas Week” until told otherwise by that ghoulish wraith in London. Eat! Drink! Consume! Just don’t dance or sing or enjoy yourself, or go to other people’s houses.
Sounds like organised fun to me and you can count me out. Not that I was in anyway, obviously.
But the man with the keys to the kingdom is itching to lock those doors again so I’d grab every damn hug and game of Scrabble you can before he inserts that key into our collective locks.
I ostensibly started writing here as a way of shielding myself from the world being built (back better) around us, and this building work, this incessant hum and drum beat of new worlds being reimagined in the time of the greatest natural disaster to hit the world in living memory scares me. The “picture” of the world painted for us has always had a ring of “forgery” about it and perhaps my lifelong cynicism clouds my judgement, but the world is now stark, staring bonkers. Whenever I dip my toe back into that strange vehicle known as “real life” it seems everything imaginable now is a simple binary choice. There is a war raging, and you’re either with us (accepted) or against us (dispensed with) and what scares me is that we’ve fallen so far and so quickly and not just in my lifetime but in the most recent years of my lifetime too, and if that isn’t a scary enough Christmas tale for you, pretty soon that binary view will become a singular view, the only view, the only acceptable view. And that perturbs me greatly.
I did however promise myself not to veer into these troubled waters in my writing here purely as my presence here is designed to lift my thinking and thoughts away from the world being built back (better?) in a singular system of thinking, and hence a singular view of the world and it’s possibilities. So is this the reason for my irascibility recently and my irritability today? Maybe.
Or maybe I just need a damn good hug and a fucking good game of Scrabble?
As I sit here, drinking tea from a Scrabble mug and talking all things word games you’d be forgiven for thinking I was a scrabble obsessive or one of those weird types who sit at a water damaged dining table next to a beautifully hot radiator and pen words into the darkness of The Matrix hoping for a distress beacon to flare in their direction. I’m none of those things, but I am already missing the cricket (and missing writing about the cricket), recalling times sat beside my Sister and Brother in-Law’s log fire on Christmas Night, itching for the “oldies” to go to bed (and stop bloody enjoying Christmas Day!) and leave me alone with a log fire and the cricket live and direct from a sunny Melbourne. I like those types of Christmases. So I’m looking forward to this Christmas, if only because at midnight I’ll be fresh from a long Christmas Day sleep and only really peering out into the world at Midnight, when the cricket starts, and when Christmas is finally over.
All things being equal in a mad, mad world, I’ll get a huge hug on Christmas morning from the teenager who sets my world ablaze and as is tradition, I’ll get to see his undimmed delight at opening presents on a cold and crisp December morning. And I can’t wait as he never disappoints. There shall be no tense and tightly fought battles of scrabble and nor shall there be that hug of desire I seek from someone who loves me for vastly differing reasons than my beautiful son. There is nothing particularly new here but the absence of my dear old Mum, for the first time at Christmas, is. Then again, she hated Christmas almost as much as I still do! In fact, if you consider the Boxing Day Test Match starts in 4 days this reason alone should push me over the happiness edge, if only for the cricket and yet another England defeat! And it does, to a point. But the Christmas and New Year period for me has for so long signalled the yearly death knell for me, your humble narrator, of being a responsible human being in a responsible and love sharing relationship with another human being, and the recipient of regular hugs from someone who really loves me for being me. Because as the old Klingon proverb confirms:
Hugs are for life, and not just for Christmas.
It’s at this juncture, dear reader, that I am oft to return to when feeling in such frames of a despondent mind, and the words penned by Andrew Walker for his character creation of “Detective Somerset” in his screenplay for the film “Se7en”. Somerset would opine that
“anyone who spends a significant amount of time with me finds me disagreeable”
and I carry that quote with me and have tucked it away as tightly as a kangaroo does her baby joeys, and for many years now too. It is me (and maybe it is you too?) to a golfing tee. Living the way I do neither promotes a promising love life nor does it engender more than my own myopic view, and hopes and fears and maybe ways that others see and view me. Cartoon God to crestfallen hero is usually my “character arc”, in roughly three months too usually, and probably a result of the drip, drip nature of spending “significant amounts” of time with me.
As a confirmed bachelor and non-seeker of cupid’s arrows of love, why am I crying into the electrical wilderness? It’s just that time of the year I guess.
That “Christmas week” if you will.
As much as I enjoy writing, I am sat at a perfect (if water damaged) dining room table and the perfect venue for a damn good game of Scrabble. The pitting of wordy wits, elbows on the table, jokes, japes, biscuits and tea, smiles and claims that you can’t use the dictionary until you’ve spelled out your word aloud first. Human beings around a table, not 3,000 miles apart on an App. A close game. A blow out. A re-rack. The “opening up” of a gap so you can use the triple word score. A loving gaze. A playful stare!
A wink. A smile. A hug.
Christmas is synonymous with many things but it’s certainly so here in the UK with board games such as Scrabble and I can vividly remember so many festive games of Scrabble or the dreaded argument inducing game of Monopoly. Trivial Pursuit became the vogue game of the 1990’s and I have vast memories of these around much missed personalities who have enhanced my life over the years, or lovingly killed time with before the start of the cricket at Midnight on Christmas Day, or my dear old Mum, reticent about playing, refusing to play even and stoutly so, grumbling about the noise we made, scornful of the language and the drinking and the smoking and the beautiful sounds of so much laughter filling the room
and constantly chipping in with the right answers in a tense lull as we considered our answers, despite vehemently not actually playing!
Perhaps the answer to my own question (have I posed a question?) does not need the insight of a Detective, nor do I have to ascertain what’s in the box. Above the razzamatazz and the office parties and the drunken sloops toward a piece of mistletoe with someone you may, or may not, love. Or the high wire act we’re being asked to perform between enjoying the Christmas festivities we want and how we want, you know, like free human beings, and not how we’re directed to dutifully perform is that I’m a misanthropic and belligerent seeker of a game of Scrabble and a hug from someone who’ll see below that silly description or quotation from a film. But that’s incredibly difficult when you consider that I’m only excited for this Christmas as there’s a cricket Test Match starting at Midnight on the holiest of all days.
And it’s difficult to love someone like that.
Even if he does love eating biscuits and drinking tea whilst delving a hand into a Scrabble bag for that much needed letter and a stupendous word with which to take an unassailable lead. But it’s ok, I’ll boil the kettle and grab that lovely smelling Lemon Cheesecake and we’ll have a re-rack, maybe even a sly and cheeky smile and a lovingly barbed comment at one another.
Maybe even a hug.
