Month: December 2022

Advent The Last

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Christmas

In the words of Professor Noderick Holder (himself building on the earlier “So This Is” thesis by Dr Lennon) IT’S CHRISTMAS!!!!

Well, almost. Christmas Eve (often a day with a sense of “Why am I always the bridesmaid?” about it) is nearly over. Ours has been spent cleaning, pleasingly put on hold mid-afternoon by a quick visit from bruv and nephew. All being well we will be seeing them again on the other side (or “Tuesday” as it’s more commonly known). There was also a moment of realisation that having nagged her mercilessly to do a present list, we haven’t actually bought our daughter ANYTHING off her list. Oops!

The Advent part of the month is over too – and having worried I might run out of things to comment on (and by ‘comment on’ I mean ‘moan about’) ultimately there hasn’t been time to mention the Yorkshire Pudding controversy, the mystery of Freda & Laurie, or my several very specific issues with The Twelve Days of Christmas. Count yourselves lucky is all I can say!

Various kind people have sent us cards/letters/tree decorations, so this is probably a good moment to say thanks/it’s good to know the art of letter-writing hasn’t died out/it’s on the tree looking lovely (and smelling fantastic).

In a very specific sense I hope my work colleague managed to get his van sorted and that it was indeed Option A The fuel pump, rather than Option B Oh no not the bloody engine! In a far more general sense, I hope you all have a fun and relaxing Christmas Day, whoever you are spending it with and whatever you are doing.

With which, it’s nearly time for bed. Because, as Dr Presley’s essays on the matter put it, Santa Claus comes tonight, tonight.

Merry Christmas.

X  

Advent #23

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Childhood, Christmas, Family, Pets

We have a “Baby’s First Christmas” tree decoration which goes up every year. Naturally, the baby in question can’t remember that year, any more than I can remember MY first Christmas when “Ernie (The Fastest Milkman In The West)” was number one.

Not just my first one either. My grandparents used to have a photocube atop their telly one of the images in which was the whole ‘tribe’ together one Christmas. I’m in it, probably about three or four. Bruv’s there too and various of our cousins (one is so young, it was probably ‘s first Christmas). But I don’t remember the occasion, only seeing the photo years later.

There’s something both good and bad for the ego, to know that people were perfectly capable of enjoying Christmas, and indeed happily went about doing so, without me. Just as we’ve ‘inherited’ Christmas from generations before, similar in many ways, changed in others, I expect that in fifty years time our descendants will have kept the bits they liked, dumped the bits they don’t, and added their own traditions into the mix.

Because although Christmas often feels like returning again to the same familiar things, it’s never quite the same twice. Long after that first Christmas, our baby has moved out, but only recently so she’ll be with us as usual this year; meanwhile our old dog is fifteen but probably doesn’t have sixteen in him… So I’m aware that with baby steps this year, but larger strides next, our Christmasses are already changing.

The time may even come when people will have to go back to enjoying Christmas, and indeed happily go about doing so, without me! I wish them as good a batch of Christmasses as I’ve been fortunate to see!

Although not for some time yet I hope!

Advent #22

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Childhood, Christmas

“Some nuts and a tangerine in the toe of your stocking” has become a cliché but it presumably accounts for why we have them still at Christmas. Certainly when I was young, although they were never presented singly in any kind of hosiery delivery system, tangerines would always be a Christmas thing. Nuts too.

Oddly I’ve not continued either tradition – and when I say that it’s only within the last five years that I’ve stopped buying the traditional Christmas Radio Times, even though I never ever referred to it because we have an onscreen TV Guide instead, you can see what I mean by ‘oddly’. I have nothing against tangerines, but because we get them all year round I think the association with Christmas is lost. Well… What I actually mean is we get ‘small orange fruits’ all year round. If I’m honest I’m still slightly reeling from my daughter’s recent revelation that tangerines, clementines and satsumas are three different things rather than three names for the same thing. (I sometimes feel that nobody ever tells me ANYTHING.)

As for nuts, I’ve never been a nut person. I don’t mind the occasional peanut, but even with a walnut whip I usually leave the nut and just eat the, um, whip. Nevertheless, probably the sound I associate most with my earliest Christmasses, knocking ‘the crunch of snow’ and ‘sleighbells’ off the top spot, is the cracking of nuts.

We had two nut crackers at home – your standard hinged version, and a carved wooden thumb-screw type affair – and many an evening over the Christmas period we’d watch TV to the background accompaniment of shells being cracked.

All of which nonsense probably indicates that my sanity is up for debate and I’m probably a bit, well, crackers.

Advent #21

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Christmas, TV

There is a fine line between singing the descant and just randomly singing something that isn’t the tune – or, to put it another way, when I sing along I may be singing the right notes but not necessarily in the right order. With a link as seamless as that (so seamless, in fact, that you can’t see the join) it is of course time for Morecambe & Wise.

From 1969 to 1977 on the Beeb (with 1974 off), and from 1978 to 1983 on ITV, their Christmas Specials have become the stuff of legend – and even though Eric and Ernie are no longer with us, showings and reshowings have allowed them to remain a part of our Christmas ever since.

1971’s legendary Andre Previn sketch is the bit of telly that I have seen more than any other; and it still makes me laugh every time. It may well be the funniest routine they ever did, although my absolute favourite, and from the same year, is the Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers routine with Glenda Jackson. (Or rather, the Fred Astaire & Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers routine).

Arguably it only contains one gag, and it probably wasn’t a ‘new’ joke even then, but the business with Eric’s cane getting larger and larger, the brilliance of the way that it gradually dawns on him, and the various ways that the routine uses the canes as props, is just wonderful.

Maybe the age of the traditional double act has gone, but at least we’re lucky enough to still be able to watch the greatest of them all. I for one am very happy for them to keep bringing me sunshine every Christmas.

Advent #20

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in 1970s, Childhood, Christmas

When I was a child, there were certain places that seemed like Mecca. I’m not talking Hollywood or Disneyland – far more thrilling than either of those was BBC TV Centre, Wood Lane, W12 8QT (the phone number for which is engraved in the memory of anybody my age). Another was the Doctor Who Exhibition at Longleat. And another was the Palitoy factory at Coalville, Leicester.

It was from that humble-sounding location, neatly printed on the back of their cards and on their boxes, that the headline acts of many a birthday and Christmas came. The Millenium Falcon, the cardboard Death Star – not to mention the figures which were always my favourites even over the big playsets and vehicles. I have a feeling that by the time of the last great plastic-moulded Christmas present, 1982’s AT-AT walker, the branding had switched to USA company Kenner, and a little bit of the magic went with it.

Years later, four or five years ago, BBC2 had a Christmas documentary about the Star Wars toy range, going into detail about the Palitoy story. To be able to see it in its heyday was thrilling – but even more so, as if they’d secured a candid chat with Father Christmas himself, were the interviews with some of the people who worked there. It was unexpectedly moving to see the actual people whose output thrilled me and so many of my schoolfriends back in the day.

What struck me most was that, although their small involvement in the Star Wars phenomenon has given them a tiny bit of immortality, they were just ordinary people. They didn’t make a big thing of what they did. They just did a good job and they made it look easy.

Child’s play, in fact.

Advent #19

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Christmas, Moaning

Maybe I’ve just led a very sheltered life, but when did Cranberry sauce become ‘a thing’ (THE thing!) for turkey. I don’t recall seeing it before at least the turn of the century. The otherwise-excellent illicit turkey dinner I had last week came, of course, with a bowl of the stuff and it was, of course, the only thing left on the plate when it returned to the kitchen from whence it came.

Then there’s the nutcracker. It didn’t figure in any of my school-day Christmasses, but now not only do we have nutcracker decorations on the tree, the huge stone pillars lining Exeter’s Guildhall are this year decorated like the nutcracker characters –thirty foot tall soldiers looming over them MAY be nice for kids, but might also be the sort of thing to give them nightmares. However, making the case for it being me who’s wrong (normally a role reserved for my wife, but to save her a job) I accept that Tchaikovsky died in 1893 so perhaps it has been around longer than I think…?

But what about kissing under the mistletoe? That seems much too informal to be any kind of English tradition (if it was a comradely handshake under the picture rail, that I could believe). No doubt if I were to bother Google-ing it I’d find it dates back to Pagan Times, or the ancient Greeks or something; but setting that aside, not only do I not remember it being ‘a thing’ when I was young I’ve still yet to come across it anywhere!

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been kissed under things in my time. I was once almost-kissed in the doorway of Lloyds bank (insert joke about interest rates rising) but- Mistletoe? and Christmas? I don’t think so.

Merry Kiss-mas!

Advent #18

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Christmas, Doctor Who, Weather, Work

Having survived the past week of sub-zero temperatures, when the mercury dropped and the red light on the electric meter was flashing like the strobe at an illegal rave; today, with the weather a good deal milder, I’ve come down with something. As a result I’ve had to pace myself – which mainly means I stopped halfway through the ironing for a snack and a nap. After all, the last thing I want to do is be ill over Christmas.

I can only remember being ill at Christmas once, in 2010, when I woke on Christmas Day feeling achey and cold and not keen on going anywhere without a duvet. Luckily I rallied mid-morning enough to cook lunch and, more importantly, eat it. But as the afternoon wore on I relapsed, ending up shivering on the settee distinctly lacking in Christmas cheer.

By the evening the crowd had thinned, to the point where by the time Doctor Who was on there was just the two of us – me huddled on the settee wishing I could regenerate; and bruv, who I presume had spent the afternoon identifying the optimum seating position where he could be as near the TV but as far away from me as possible.

When I woke on Boxing Day, as is often the case after a good night’s sleep I felt much better – certainly much more lucid. My recollection of the night before was of frozen ladies, flying sharks, and marrying Marilyn Monroe. In the days of Morecambe & Wise or Only Fools I would have known at once those were solely the invention of a fever – with Doctor Who, more of a 50/50 chance. What else could a boy do? I watched the Christmas special for a second time over breakfast.

Just to be sure.

Advent #17

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in 1980s, Christmas

I really love a mug. (And I’m not just mentioning it for the benefit of anybody who has reached the “What can we buy that awkward bugger this year?” stage of proceedings.) I don’t collect them, it’s not like the joke about the guy who likes sausages; but unlike its more boring relation, the cup, the mug has a jolly, devil-may-care individuality.

When I was a kid I remember getting mugs with Easter Eggs in (a sort-of eggcup for a sort-of egg); nowadays of course the mug is often given gift-set status by being paired with socks. As it happens I love both mugs AND socks (of course I do) so it’s a win-win situation.

I seem to recall a strange phase in the late 80s where everybody had a mug tree containing the same set of mugs, cream-coloured with a pastel pink/orange flower painted on (I glimpsed a set just recently, in Sheila Ramsay’s house in Take The High Road circa 1989) – but apart from that, the expectation is that anybody with a cupboard of mugs will have lots of mugs all with different designs on.

Which is indeed the case here – where, to go back to my earlier claim that “I don’t collect them”, I don’t… BUT it is true to say we have got A LOT of mugs. We have long-since reached the point where my wife has had to move some out of primary cupboard one, and into one of the spare cupboards instead (and when I say ‘spare’ I mean we can’t use it, because it’s full of mugs).

I also have a strong suspicion their numbers are gradually being thinned out – I suspect she’s slowly giving them away, and she probably thinks I haven’t noticed.

But I have of course. I’m no mug. 

Advent #16

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Childhood, Christmas

It’s been very hard this week to hear the awful, awful story of the boys in the lake. Just the thought of them laughing and playing, enjoying the novelty and thrill of the snow and ice; for it to all change so horribly in a moment, is almost unbearable – and in as far as it could ever be worse, somehow it happening so close to Christmas makes it worse. Their families will have presents wrapped up and hidden away, there’ll be half-opened Advent calendars… Heartbreaking.

When I was in Primary School one of the boys in my class, and a friend of his, were swept away in the river. (I think, although it’s a long time ago, one of the storm drains overflowed.) He survived but his friend did not, and I have to admit that at school the next week we didn’t really believe him until our teacher confirmed it. It would be a lie to say I often think about it, but occasionally I do. I’ve certainly thought about it, and him, this week. This was 40 years ago so I’m not sure what if any sort of ‘counselling’ he would have got to deal with any potential trauma. I’m not sure we even thought in those terms back then.

I always feel, and how absolutely wrong I am, that once we get to ten days or so before Christmas, there’s some kind of exclusion zone, as if nothing can stop or interfere with it now. That’s not the case, clearly, because things can always change in an instant.

So if nothing else, I guess this week has reminded me to appreciate what I have.

Advent #15

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Christmas, Doctor Who, TV

Like my Uncle and his calendar, the BBC has also snuck a new Christmas tradition on us, and as the nights pull in and the advent windows open so the BBC Blu-Ray department has unleashed yet another Doctor Who boxset on the world.

This time round it’s 1964/65’s season two. Even with a couple of episodes having been carelessly chucked away in the intervening fifty-seven years, that’s still thirty-seven whole episodes to enjoy, starring William Hartnell as the very first Doctor. When I was a kid, the first Doctor was a bit of a rarity – all these years later, he’s been Hurndall-ed and Bradley-ed, but for my money the original is still the best.

Doctor Who’s early years often have huge ambition but tiny resources, but undaunted the production team in season two give us the Daleks invading the whole Earth (well, London and the Home Counties) and then an entirely studio-bound alien world inhabited by giant talking butterflies and huge lumbering ants.

To the modern eye it’s obvious that the two oversized middle legs on the ants are the actors’ own, sticking out of what looks and sounds like a very plastic-y costume; and there’s probably no Doctor Who story before or since that requires more suspension of disbelief to enjoy. Through it all, not always sticking to the script but always sticking to the character, Hartnell bestrides the universe as THE Doctor, untroubled by even the remotest possibility that he could ever conceivably be replaced. To be fair, squaring up to Daleks, giant ants and, in the season finale, Carry On legend Peter Butterworth as an evil time traveller, he feels pretty irreplaceable.

Although the following year (spoiler warning for those who’ve not caught up yet) he bumps into the Cybermen at the North Pole and—