Andrew Curnow's Ramblings

For several years, while we were at Holsworthy, Dad would spend Christmas Eve sleeping downstairs on the settee.

That’s not me gently building-up to some kind of catharsis where I open up about the blazing rows my parents always had just before Christmas, that would be absurd. (Plus my therapist already has the dispensation on that, in case there’s a book in it for her.)

No, it was because of the fire in the sitting-room. Usually lit on a daily basis, at Christmas it was kept in from Christmas Eve all the way through to Christmas Night so that, not to put too fine a point on it, when Martin and I got up ridiculously early to open our presents, we didn’t spend half an hour moaning about how cold it was.

So, dragging myself back to where I started– Dad, in the role of firewatcher, would sleep downstairs on the settee on Christmas Eve. I’m not sure, actually, whether it was to periodically stoke it up and put more wood on, or simply as a watching brief to make sure it didn’t get out of hand and go all Crossroads on us. Possibly Dad’s reasoning was the former, and Mum’s the latter.

I don’t think it’s unfair to say that Dad’s not what one would really call a morning person so in hindsight it seems particularly cruel to make him sleep alone, on an uncomfortable settee, either to wake up through the night and restock the fire, or alternatively to lie there as an unwitting first line of defence, simply in the cause of us being warm when we got him up much too early the next day.Plus of course, to top it all he always had to work on Christmas Day. No rest for the wicked! 

I’ve never really been ‘into’ music (déjà vu) but even so, it’s slightly shameful to admit that I’d never heard of John Lennon until the news broke that he had been killed.

Just turned forty at the time, he could still legitimately be with us now (like Paul, like Ringo) and it’s hard not to speculate about what he might have gone on to do in the four decades he was denied. It seems a fair bet that The Beatles would eventually have got back together, and it’s likely too that he would have continued the campaigning/protesting that had in many ways already started to define him.

But as I say, in 1980 I’d never heard of him, so when Imagine topped the charts it totally escaped me that this was a deliberate re-issue, and instead I felt how tragic it was, and how ironic, that he should have been killed just before such a huge hit record was released.

It’s a memorable, stonkingly-good song (whenever it was actually recorded) and although it might be a simplistic view, its aspiration for a united and peaceful world, a ‘brotherhood of man’, is laudable.

Stretching a point I know, but John Lennon is not the only (probably bearded) figure taken too young, whose legacy is a simple message of loving each other (and who, on balance, is in fact probably bigger than The Beatles).

Whether Christmas is really a religious festival anymore, or has evolved again into… well, into whatever curious and sometimes uncontrollable beast it now is, is something I’ll leave to your own judgement. But the possibility that even today it might remind us all to be kind to each other, to love one another – well, that would certainly be something wouldn’t it, just think about it.Just… imagine. 

I don’t remember ‘pigs in blankets’ from when I was a child. Nor as a teenager. I don’t think I came across them until well into my twenties in fact, and frankly that was too soon. I mean, just what the heck are they?!

I’ve heard tell of peas being the subject of debate, as to whether they are a sufficiently ‘top-drawer’ vegetable to sit alongside the Christmas roast… But come on! The pea is controversial, yet we’re happy to sling a bit of bacon and a sausage or two on there?! (It’s true that my Auntie always used to have baked beans with her roast, but that wasn’t some outre foodie revolution, she just really liked baked beans.)

Don’t misunderstand me, I like sausages AND I like bacon – but despite Homer Simpson’s legendary instruction to “bacon up that sausage” I’ve never ever had the urge to wrap one around the other. It’s not quite as heinous as putting fruit in jelly, I’d happily have sausages and bacon on the same plate – but, heavens, not fused together into some monstrous mutant gestalt!

They seem to me, these ‘pigs in blankets’ (and since I’m already heaping condemnation on them, let me add that I don’t much like the name either)–  they seem to be an example of an extraordinary amount of effort for a disproportionate amount of result. Wrapping slimy, raw bacon around a tiny, clammy sausage, then cooking them…  And there’s a thing in itself, you don’t want an underdone sausage, but nor do you want an overdone rasher.

Frankly the whole thing is a culinary minefield. And one which, as I say, until the turn of the century I’d never for a minute imagined anybody would be mad enough to want to go sticking their foot into.

I’ve no qualms about rooting around inside our turkey or duck to make sure the giblets have been removed. I don’t mind being put in charge of the cooking. And I’ve definitely no objections to getting involved with the actual eating.

No, where my particular hang up lies is with the bit inbetween the cooking and the eating – in other words, the carving. We don’t of course do it at the table in the way that as far as I can tell nobody except for characters in soap operas and the people on the Iceland ads do, I do it in the kitchen where nobody can see what a mess I’m making.

Whichever way I approach the task it’s very hard not to feel that the phrase ‘hacked at’ is the de facto description; and I certainly feel ashamed and guilty that having already been killed, emptied and cooked (preferably in that order) the poor duck then has to undergo the final, posthumous indignity of undergoing what appears to be an autopsy carried out by an axe murderer.

In an ideal world, I would get somebody else to do it – and in fact the first year we invited Mum and Dad around for Christmas Lunch, I did what I often do on technical matters: I got Dad to do it.

It was on that occasion when, almost as if he was in some way channelling the Golden Age of sitcom, Dad peered into the firmament before producing an intact, and fully cooked, bag of giblets.Which is why of course, to bring me back to where I came in, I now always (and without qualm) have a root around inside first – and it’s also why, though I’m still very bad at it, I always carve it myself. Just in case. 

I’ve never really been ‘into’ music. There doesn’t, in the normal course of events, seem to be much of a buzz around finding out who’s the new number one each week, and although I’m not sure how many official charts there are nowadays even I’ve noticed that Top of the Pops isn’t on anymore.

Yet somehow, the battle for the Christmas number one is still ‘a thing’. In the interests of research I’ve Googled (well, I asked Jeeves to Wiki it for me) the list of every UK number one since 1952 – and what’s most striking is just how few of them are actually about Christmas.

There’s an awful lot of tear jerkers among them though. Tom Jones’ Green, Green Grass of Home was number one in 1966, a song which up to only a very few months ago I thought was uplifting and jolly, until I finally listened all the way through to the last verse. (Spoiler warning, he’s dead.)

In 1971, the year I was born, Benny Hill was number one, and although Ernie (who drove the fastest milk cart in the west…) is a good song, it’s not exactly what you’d call seasonal. (Coincidentally, spoiler warning again, he dies in the end too.) Maybe there just wasn’t much competition that year?

I don’t know the secret of a good Christmas number one, although if you can crack it it’s like creating a pension out of thin air, but it must be time, surely, for one which actually mentions Christmas?! A couple of years back, a friend suggested we should pen one. I don’t know how he’s getting on at his end, but I’m afraid I’ve not had any luck so far.

I mean – what even rhymes with Christmas?!

Santa certainly gets a lot of credit.

I’m sure he deserves it (I hasten to add, in case he hasn’t even checked me once on his list yet) but I think we sometimes overlook the phenomenal job done by his postman and/or woman. I mean, all those letters to Santa must take some delivering!

I definitely remember writing to Santa at least once and that clearly got to him alright (although when we went to the Post Office Mum had forgotten to bring it with her so she had to post it later when I was at school or something).

I can’t recall what I wrote. Nowadays I like to lead into any correspondence with a few neutral opening remarks, a ‘how are you’ or some sort of written equivalent to the conversational ‘weather gambit’. Back then, I fear it was probably a rather perfunctory, ‘Dear Mr Claus’ (I can’t believe I’d have gone ‘Santa’, not in the 1970s) swiftly followed by a list of demands. But, as I say, I genuinely don’t remember, and Father Christmas is too busy now to respond to a Freedom of Information request to release my aged correspondence from his archives. (Apparently.)

Away from the Grotto, back home the Post people do a grand job too (none of my four Christmas cards has ever gone astray as far as I know) and although we always do our Christmas shopping online in mid-December, with the wailing banshee cries of “won’t turn up in time” ringing in our ears (our neighbours are weird) so far we’ve never had a problem.

Obviously I’ve jinxed it now that I’ve said that – so apologies in advance for anybody who ought to get a Christmas present from us but doesn’t. It’ll be in the post.

I don’t want to suggest that all I do over Christmas is watch TV, because it’s absolutely not. (Sometimes I have to find time in my busy schedule for eating Quality Streets, or napping.) Nevertheless, it wouldn’t be UNfair to say that, over the festive period, I do watch an awful lot of it.

There are always, of course, the big-hitters – in my youth, the Christmas Day movie; nowadays more often than not, seasonal editions of popular comedies or dramas or, especially, panel shows.

But just as good, sometimes even better than the specially-prepared delights, is the free rein that Christmas gives to the schedulers, the licence to randomly mix in the bizarre and the unexpected which, because of the ‘captive audience’ nature of the period, acquire a curious fascination and appeal.

Britain’s Strongest Man is not at all the sort of thing I would ever plan to watch in the normal course of events, but I must have spent every Christmas as a child following the career of Geoff Capes.  And the Royal Institute Lectures (like a golden-age Johnny Ball show but turned up to eleven). If you sit down and watch them they’re always fascinating, but they would never tempt me into turning over halfway through Bake Off in October.

There’s also the late evening and early morning schedules, and the BBC Four array, where they’ll excavate stuff you’d never even have thought of. Reruns of the Moon Landing can easily be followed by a 1972 Two Ronnies Christmas Show, after which there might be a documentary on the secret life of Fanny Craddock, or the post-war destruction of London’s phone boxes.

Like Christmas itself, like rooting through all the wrapped-up goodies under the tree, sometimes the biggest thrill is from something you never would have expected.

I love an annual. They used to be a lot bigger when I was a kid (so did Mars bars) but the sight of them in shops at this time of year still gives me a Christmassy tingle.

The first annual I ever saw was my brother’s Beano 1975, and the first one I ever bought myself was the 1978 Monster Fun annual, and all these years later I’m afraid I can only recall the cover art – Dennis the Menace sledging downhill on a rocking horse on the former (which, in hindsight, makes very little sense); and a gorilla disguised as a giant talking banana on the latter (which makes even less). More memorably, I first got the 2000AD annual in 1979, and then proceeded to get it every Christmas for the next decade. In other words, it became (wait for it) an annual tradition. (Sorry.)

Anyway, I love an annual. Maybe it’s the association with Christmas, a time when it seems anything is allowed. There’s certainly, in a ‘get out of jail free card’ kind of way, a licence to give annuals to adults at Christmas – so, for example, my mother-in-law always used to get me the Doctor Who annual even though it’s really aimed at persons forty years younger and thirty centimetres shorter than me.

Similarly, although I’d think it weird to discover my just-turned-fifty brother still buys the Beano every week I wouldn’t see anything wrong with getting him the Beano Annual for Christmas.  (Spoiler alert, we haven’t bought him the Beano Annual for Christmas. (Or have we…? (No, we haven’t.))) 

So, and stop me if you’ve heard this, I love an annual. (And hopefully my brother does too, as we may have got him the Beano one for Christmas (although we may not have)). 

When did calendars become a thing?

Obviously I’ve always been aware of them – like the poor and Corrie, they’re always with us. But at some point during the past couple of decades, they seem to have become much bigger business than they ever used to be.

There’s a Calendar Shop which ‘pops up’ in Barnstaple this time each year selling… well, the clue is probably in the name, but Calendars. Of Pop Stars. Movie Stars. TV Stars. Cute Animals. Cartoons. Film Posters. You name it, there’s a Calendar for it. (For a really popular subject, say Star Wars or Skateboarding Dogs, there’s usually several).

I don’t mind a calendar (I have to say that, pre-emptively, in case anybody’s bought me one for Christmas). In fact I really, really love them (ditto). And I certainly enjoy the ‘New Picture Day’ excitement you get each month, as you turn the page over.

Unless you’re my daughter that is – she looks at all the pictures at the start of the year (totally abandoning the entire calendar principle in my opinion) and then regularly neglects to turn the page until several days into each new month. My cries of, “You’re living in the past” or “I’ll call the Calendar Police” only fall on deaf ears (or at least on ones well-practiced at ignoring me).

This past year we’ve had one of those ‘two months per page’ calendars, meaning of course that we’ve only had six ‘New Picture Days’ rather than the normal twelve…

…But for all that, it still fulfils the minimum calendar requirements of containing all the dates, and in order. So although I’ve been staring at the current page for (checks calendar) exactly one month already, I can tell that it is now December 1^st. So – here we go again!