Is it finally time to talk about the festive season?
WITH about four weeks to go to Christmas can I mention the subject? Please? You see it's not allowed to be mentioned in this house.
Himself married a Christmas addict but doesn't see why he should be caught up in all the seasonal whirl and spending. I don't understand it because my lovely mother-in-law had wonderful Christmasses for her children – there are family pictures to prove it – yet her oldest thinks it's all a daft waste of money. The idea that he should buy presents for friends at Christmas is just not on his radar. My lectures on the spirit of giving simply fall on deaf ears.
When we have a Christmas party he starts off well enough, making sure guests get the first drink, thereafter he looks after number one and expects everyone else to pour their own.
His rant about the festive season started this week when I informed him that Delia Smith was coming back to the screen with all sorts of skills to help us hard pressed hosts plan and make the perfect Christmas menu. It was beyond his comprehension that women need another woman to tell them how to cook the Christmas turkey. Since mine, like the Christmas cakes is a bit hit-and-miss each year I think I would value an old hand like Delia who's quite down to earth about cooking.
I'm an avid reader of the cookery pages in those special Christmas magazines I buy but wonder in the end do women really have the time to rustle up such things as gin and pomegranate jellies, butternut squash with pecans and blue cheese (no need to guess that this is a Nigella Lawson one) or roast pheasant with chestnut dumplings (assuming you live in the country and the local farmer can bag you a brace). I think if I served Himself Nigella's delight he'd feed it to the cats.
Another opportunity arose at the weekend for him to slate Christmas. He was watching the televised concert stampede at Birmingham City Council's Christmas light switch-on when several people were injured. 'What was all that about,' he declared? 'Why can't they just switch on the lights, say a prayer and go home?'
In fact I almost agreed with him for once. These Christmas tree light switch-ons are getting out of hand and are costing a lot of money which comes from our rates.
Thank goodness health and safety officers turned down diva Mariah Carey's demand to be surrounded by 20 white kittens and 100 white doves when she turns on the Christmas lights at London's huge Westfield shopping complex. What was she thinking about? Image the terror for the little kitties.
In our district council area we have seven tree light switching-on ceremonies in different areas, the biggest in the centre of Ballyclare. Normally a soap star does the honours but this year it's Scooby Doo.
Hopefully the choice was dictated by cost, soap stars don't come cheap even the least known of them. My sympathy always goes to the mayor who has to officiate at all these events. By the time they're all done and dusted he must be sick of the sound of Christmas carols.
And speaking of carols I see a move against carollers coming round the door during the season. In fact in part of Lancashire they've been warned to 'clear off' after a move by police, local council and neighbourhood watch groups who'll be placing 'no carol singers please' cards in the windows of 10,000 homes throughout the area. Not very spirited is it? Even Himself would not be so bad mannered as to not open the door to the carol singers though he'd draw the line at handing over mince pies with a donation. Yes, Scrooge is alive and well under my roof.
People will say that carol singers shouldn't be coming round the door a month before Christmas as they do here and in some English cities. But early carol singing is nothing new in this corner of the world. Irish author JD Sheridan wrote about them in 1956 after the first of them had come round his door three weeks before Christmas. From now on, he wrote: 'There will be no rest for a man with small change in his pocket – unless he is strong minded enough to ignore knocks or patient enough to sit in darkness and so avoid them altogether'.
He wrote further: 'I am not against carol singers but I think that nowadays they come too early and too often. When I was young, carol singers were sudden and seldom – like snow or a piper's band. Nowadays carol singers map out fresh districts like burglars so that you may have to pay hush-money to several contingents on the same night'.
Like burglars? Heavens I hope not. Have a twinge of sympathy for the carol singers, after all they have to sing a great deal louder now to make themselves heard behind all that double-glazing.
Families need to do more for elderly at risk
Pensioners live in fear of their lives as the useless numbskulls of society beat them up for what little money they have. The stories this week have been horrendous. I listened to a local radio programme on which all sorts of measures were suggested to keep pensioners safer. But no one mentioned that families need to take more responsibility for their elderly loved ones. Is it because families think it's not their responsibility anymore to look after the older generation as they struggle in demented New Labour's UK? If they're depending on the police to do the job for them they're on a hiding to nothing. When did anyone last see police patrolling either on foot or by car areas where the elderly are vulnerable? Since I had a lot of travelling to do this week I made a point of observing how many police cars I met. I could count them on one hand and I didn't need all my fingers. What are they doing – saving petrol?
Is health of the baby boomers rubbish?
Apparently my baby boomer generation is suffering more illnesses than any other, caused by bad diet and lack of exercise. We are, it seems, paying the price of all that freedom in the Sixties to enjoy sex on tap, drink by the barrow load and junk food with little or no effort put into exercising it all off. We're the ones, it seems, with creaking knees and hips, diabetes, asthma and strokes. Even climbing 10 steps would prove a challenge to us. The research for this was collected in the United States but British experts say much the same applies here. In fact those coming after us could have problems as well according to Professor of health psychology Cary Cooper of Lancaster University who believes that our ever growing reliance on technology will also harm our health as we spend long hours sitting before computers. So what do they expect us all to do? Go back to the hunter-gatherer days and live in caves?
Minister should learn lesson
This week I was handing out the prizes and addressing the students of my old school Magherafelt High. How strange it is going back to the place where you spent such formative years, seeing the places where you walked, played and studied. I first walked in its doors 52 years ago and half a century of use means the school has to be replaced with a new one. The plans are approved, all it needs is the go ahead from the Department of Education. Sadly the Department appears to be operating a go slow and stop policy these days, except where its civil servants have to send edicts to the schools. These now come in Irish as well as English at a cost I believe of 47,000 a year. Isn't it just grand to know that the politics of the Minister of Education takes precedence over the more essential, such as sending in the builders to create a new school where it's badly needed? I hope the school gets its decision before Christmas though I'll be truly sorry to see the old one bite the dust.
Gordon won't rock the boat
Three hundred thousand families in the UK are raking in more than 20,000 a year in benefits, all tax free of course. Anyone else slogging their guts out to earn that money will have to pay national insurance and tax. The benefit culture is getting out of control as young, single women expand their families knowing the state will provide. Gordon Brown won't touch the sacred cow of benefits with an election looming, few expect him to rein it in either should he regain power in the next election. But the Tories want to make changes which means they may not get elected as the feckless turn out in their millions to vote for the continuance of their lifestyle. Life will be harder from next year for those who do pay their way including hard up pensioners still paying tax on their meagre incomes.
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Tuesday 14 February 2012
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