On the 12th day of Christmas…

Eighteen stone.

Eighteen bloody stone.

And 12 ounces.

Ungrateful

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I thought it was perfect. New Year’s Day and then another two days off afterwards.

I was wrong. The weekend has been flat and anti-climactic, the festive season deflating painfully across 48 uncertain hours. A vague notion of needing to get ready again.

Better the cold-shower lurch from New Year’s day to working day than this slow dribble back to normality.

Women throw me

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Defining Men-are-from-Mars moment as we open Christmas presents on arrival at the in-laws’ house.

Watching her dad tear clumsily at his gift’s wrapping paper, my wife leans towards her mother and whispers with conspiratorial pride, “It’s a chenille throw…”

Finally, pops gets there, triumphantly holding his present high in front of him to take it all in.

“Oh lovely,” he declares. “A rug.”

Indeed. A true bloke: straight to the point.

As Jim Royle would doubtless have put it: “chenille throw my arse…”

Midnight Mass – you thought the manger was rough…

Given that it wouldn’t be Midnight Mass without at least one societal wild card in the congregation, do you opt for the drunk in the kilt and tam o’shanter who wets himself in the pew (2009) or the bloke who’s waited all year to tell the vicar how Jesus is related to Alfred the Great (2007)?

Just ushered in Christmas by mopping up celtic pee and I kind of miss the ‘Alfred the Great’ guy.

Merry Christmas from the front line…

[pic courtesy of Jim & Claire]

Last day of term

Amid the festive excitement, a brief moment of sad remembrance last Friday.

“And what kind of day do you have ahead of you?” a radio presenter asked a junior school headmaster during a phone-in.

“Not too bad,” was the reply. “It’s the last day of term, so we’ll probably play a few games, show some DVDs…”

And suddenly I was transported back 40 years to the most magical day of the the school calendar. The end of Christmas term.

No DVDs back then, of course, but we brought games in to play while mellow teachers wrapped up their admin, we had Christmas lunch and were ushered into the hall to watch movies on cine film.

Reality was suspended and an eight-year-old kid was probably just one of many struggling to get his young head around the fact that life could be as gloriously, relentlessly happy as this.

If I often reflect on the past it’s usually merely as a yardstick – the realisation of how far away it is and how fast it’s travelling. Now and again, however, the reflection is tinged with hankering: the flickering, futile desire to step twice into the same river.

And this was one of those times. For just a few moments, I ached to go back.

[pic courtesy of hockadilly]

Morning after…

You know a nightclub’s bad when the people kicking off are the bar staff. With each other.

Flashed boobs, but this…?

Anticipation mounts ahead of tonight’s office party, except for one poor soul who’s mortified to learn that his wristband entitles him to just two free drinks at the bar.

“I might flash a bit of bollock at the door to try and wangle another wristband,” he muses out loud: the first time in my life I have heard a male couch bribery in such terms.

The gap between the sexes grows ever narrower.

Christmas play

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At school for younger son’s Christmas offering. A tableau of four performances by four different classes.

At the end of the first, one father gathers his coat and bag together and bustles out of the hall, sending a clear message as he does so.

Seen my kid. The hell with anyone else’s.

“That is so rude,” whispers K alongside me.

Indeed. And were the rest of us half as brazen, we’d be just a step behind him.