Andrew Curnow's Ramblings

For those of you watching Box of Delights, today it’s episode five. 

For everybody else: The Box of Delights was a nineteen-eighties BBC children’s serial, based on a book nobody had ever heard of. It has a Christmas vibe, which becomes very clear very quickly – even if you don’t pick up on the theme tune being ‘The First Nowell’ the story starts with boy hero Kay Harker coming home for the Christmas hols… and thereafter it’s snow, cathedrals and kidnapped clergy all the way.

For some it’s become a tradition to rewatch the serial on the same dates that it originally went out, so that they finish, as the story does, on Christmas Eve. I’ve not seen it since the repeat in 1986 and, curiously for a man regularly driven by little more than nostalgia and potatoes, I’ve no great wish to. Part one is fine, but my recollection from the time is of feeling increasingly short-changed, that each week the episodes got cheaper and the story got ramblier.

I can forgive the odd bit of OTT child acting; but the unconvincing cartoon animation used for the animals is much more difficult to accept – and by episode six, when Kay’s journey back to Ancient Greece appears to have been filmed in an over-lit sandpit in a tiny corner of TC3, it all starts to feel very amateur hour.

But then, we all have our own little Christmas traditions – to the outsider they may seem ridiculous and pointless and even a bit silly, but to us they’re warm and comforting and an absolutely vital part of the Christmas period.

So for those sticking with it, through dodgy effect, cartoon phoenix, and purple pim, today is episode FIVE. Enjoy.

After the peeling, the cooking, the eating and the napping, comes the washing up.

In the past, whenever Mum and Dad came up to ours at Christmas, Mum would offer to do the washing up; whereupon we of course would say there was no need, we’d do it later, and make some token gesture at stopping her before then letting her carry right on and do it.  (It’s very different when we go down to Mum and Dad’s of course – there WE offer to do the washing up. (And then let Dad do it.))

Not anymore though because, at least at our place, the whole ‘offering/token gesture/rings off & marigolds on’ business has been done away with. That is to say, we have a dishwasher.

For many years after we were married my wife said we should get one; and I would always insist that there was no way a machine could achieve the same effect simply by sloshing a bit of water around and making ‘judder judder’ noises, as I could by wielding a brillo pad like Thor’s hammer and making ‘sweary sweary’ noises.

It remained a slight bone of contention for some time (although not too much because, frankly, I always did the dishes anyway) and even when she told me she’d got my favourite sort of dishwasher (that is, a free one) I wasn’t convinced.

But I must admit I’ve been converted. I wouldn’t go quite as far as one of my wife’s customers, who said she’d like the sound of the dishwasher played at her funeral, but it IS a tremendously comforting sound. And now, of course, we no longer have any disagreements at Christmas over who gets to do the washing up.

Arguments about who’s going to load the dishwasher, on the other hand…

Sunday wouldn’t be the same without a bit of Bully, and Christmas wouldn’t be the same without a bit of turkey.  Even though Sir Bernard of Matthews has gifted it to us all year round, still the turkey in its full, roasted, ‘all the trimmings’ form only appears as a special treat at Christmas.  All in all, it’s not bad going for a bird whose best possible review seems to be “not too dry.”

I like turkey, but there are those that don’t – and since two of them live at Curnow Towers that puts me in the minority so we usually have Duck instead.  The first year, we ordered the bird from a local farmer, and Christmas Eve there came a knock on the door.  “I’ve two ducks in the back of the car,” he said, “do you want to come and choose one?” 

In what seemed a very long 30 seconds as I walked from our house to his car all I could think was: are they still alive?  (And if so, what are we going to have for dinner tomorrow and how am I going to tell my Mum we’ve now got a pet duck?)

Fortunately for all concerned (well, except perhaps the ducks) their quacking days were already over by the time I saw them.  And, at the risk of being disrespectful to the dear departed, our duck tasted bootiful.

There used to be a show called Press Gang (written by some bloke called Steven Moffat, I wonder whatever happened to him?) and in one episode, token nice guy Kenny observed, “I get socks for Christmas – and I like it.” Well… Me too!

I wouldn’t describe myself as fashionable  (no, no, settle down, it’s true) but secretly, I rather enjoy waking up on Boxing Day with a selection of new garments to choose from. Including socks. At Christmas, there’s often an abundance of slightly-novelty socks available. Not full-on novelty, not bright red with Santa and a button that you press for a quick kazoo-interpretation of Silent Night – although I’ve had my share of those too (thanks Mum).

No, by slightly-novelty I mean an otherwise normal, plain black sock (or at a reckless push, navy) but with some motif tastefully embroidered on. Days of the week is a common one, or moods (happy, playful, etc), or animals, or perhaps stylised heads of the various Doctor Whos.

My fondness for these isn’t simply a version of the old ‘novelty tie’ syndrome which late-90s executives mistakenly thought would fool people into believing they had a personality; as chief launder(er?) at Curnow Towers, there’s a great practical advantage when pairing up clean socks, if they aren’t just one huge phalanx of plain black. 

My daughter often throws a spanner in the works, by intentionally wearing mismatched socks – not completely odd, but not an actual pair either, they’re usually a themed coupling (two different shades of blue, say, or a Jon Pertwee and a Jodie Whittaker) which makes it difficult to determine if it’s two odd socks, or just one odd pair.

Useful, stylish, and tapping straight into my love of laundry – it’s no wonder that, when I get socks for Christmas, I like it. 

Every year, around the middle of December, I get fed up with Christmas.

The weight of it presses down, the things to be done, the co-ordination, the organisation, the budgeting, the planning, and the sense of a deadline looming closer and closer. It drains the colour from it all just for a little while, and I know that with it I get irritable and grumpy (well, -er and -er).

Maybe everybody feels the same – and yet, this year especially, people around and about seem to be, for example, flinging their outside lights up with an enthusiasm and energy that escapes me, so maybe they don’t. I enjoy seeing all the lights as I drive home from work in the evening, but still my initial thought is of that gloomy damp January weekend to come, when they’ve all got to be taken down again.

I get the sense, quite inaccurately I’m sure, that everyone else seems to have got a handle on their Christmas, and that with it all in hand they are able to kick back and enjoy the ride. In comparison, here it always feels like a desperate sprint for the finishing line, with too little time to appreciate the scenery as it blurs by.

It doesn’t last. Sooner or later the tree goes up, or I’ll catch a bit of My Fair Lady, or I’ll overhear some old bloke enthusiastically lying about Santa to an excited youngster. Like a festive Mr Micawber, something always turns up, the mood lifts, and off we go. From somewhere, ‘a little bit of Christmas’ gets things going again.

That may of course just be simple self-delusion but whatever it is, that ‘little bit of Christmas’ stuff goes a long way. If only I could find some way to bottle it!

I can definitely see the appeal of a joint present. Where there are two young siblings say or, I don’t know, just off the top of my head, two awkward-to-buy-for parents for example – sometimes a communal present (a board game maybe, or a really big tin of biscuits) can be the way to go.

When we were very wee, I seem to recall a run of not so much joint, as jointly-themed presents. So one year, my brother got a Lego Space Station and I got a Lego Fire Station. Another year, we both got pirate dolls. I mean action figures, we both got pirate action figures.

Bruv’s was the bald one with the scar and the hook for a hand, and mine was the swarthy one with the eyepatch and a peg leg. (I think they were part of the ‘Woolworths Pirate Cliché’ range, but sadly we never managed to get ‘the one with the parrot’ to complete the set.)

Following that (and I realise that Lego and Pirates take some following) one year while we were up North some kindly relative(s) bought us portable phones. Not mobile phones, that would have been extraordinarily generous (plus nobody had got around to inventing them yet). No, these were two gorgeous red & white-liveried phones, along with what seemed like about twenty miles of cable. Connected up, they allowed instant communication between opposite ends of the house. They also instantly consigned the tin cans and the piece of string to both history and the dustbin.

I like to think that, after we’d gone to bed that particular Christmas Night, Dad and Mum spent a few minutes entertaining themselves by doing “Perrin here, on red” gags but I haven’t actually checked on that.

Perhaps I’ll give them a call.

Having put the boot into pigs in blankets, and at the risk of coming across as some kind of foodie fascist, I don’t like mince pies either.

From the name down, they’re just all sorts of wrong: It’s called mince. Oh, like the meat? No, no, not like that, that’s minced meat. This is mince meat. Oh, so it is meat? No. And so on.

As far as I’ve ever been able to determine, the mince pie is a pastry case containing some unidentifiable, probably unanalysable, substance, a miscellaneous assortment of goo and sweepings along with the occasional bit of that other well-known unwelcome food intruder, the lemon curd (which is still to this day gaily chucked into bags of mixed fruit against all reason).

I don’t know how many mince pies people tend to make during the other eleven months of the year but, channelling the spirit if not the unexpected patience of my A-Level Maths tutor, I’d suggest it is a figure tending towards zero – so it seems to me that, among other criticisms, selling ‘mince meat’ in the same sort of quantities as ordinary, perennial, all-year-round jam, must mean that about 70% of it is thrown away unused. Unless, that is, its bizarrely inexplicable chemical composition allows it to last for more than twelve months. (And to be fair, it does have the air about it of something that might well have a half-life rather than a use-by date.)Even the fact that people often have them with cream or custard or brandy butter suggests, to my jaundiced mind, that perhaps the mince pie itself isn’t all that popular. Take my advice, people, just have the custard and skip the pie, you’ll feel better for it

A dog, as they say, isn’t just for Christmas.

We’ve never actually got a dog for Christmas – frankly, I struggle wrapping up a simple box, heaven alone knows how I’d set about wrapping a puppy. But the presence of two of our dogs is entirely due to moments of weakness on my part, brought on by Christmas-induced lapses of grumpiness in late December, and meaning that far too early in 2008, and then again in 2013 (having learnt nothing from history and being therefore doomed to repeat it) we headed off along frozen roads and across the moors, out into the middle of nowhere to collect a puppy.

The very first dog we got wasn’t anything to do with Christmas at all, although for all the warning I got about him he might just as well have been delivered down the chimney by a jovial, benevolent stranger in a big red suit. Mitch was already en route to Devon before I knew anything about him, so he was very much a fait accompli. (Or a Labrador. One of those two.) That was mid-June 2005, although even my wife’s bare-faced cheek stopped shy of trying to pass him off as an early birthday present for me – and to be fair, by December I had got used to him.

That first Christmas with us Mitch took to tearing up discarded wrapping paper with great enthusiasm, and somewhere we have a photo of him lying spread-eagled in the middle of the sitting-room floor, spark out from an overload of sheer pleasure, the carpet all around him strewn with the chewed, tattered and generally thoroughly-dogged remnants of wrapping.

No question, if asked to vote in favour or against, that dog was definitely FOR Christmas.