Christmas update

My faith in humanity has been restored. Obviously, this is partly due to the season of good will to all men. But mostly because a box of delivered chocolates has sat outside the front door of my sodden flat for at least two weeks, and nobody has pinched it. It was under plain cover, I suppose, but even so I am impressed. Exactly twelve months ago, the locals were looting my living room.

The most regular chocolate thieves are both away at the moment anyway. Hope is with her dad, and Sarah is still incarcerated in Chelsea. And there is enough chocolate in a children’s ward at Christmas to ensure a localised obesity epidemic. In fact, on Christmas Day, there was apparently something of a surfeit of Santas too. Not three hours after a Santa with a slight limp and suspiciously high-pitched Ho Ho Ho was strong-armed into doing the rounds, than he was superseded by a member of the London Fire Brigade in a similarly unconvincing costume. I am informed by an entirely unbiased source that the earlier incarnation was far superior. Though not, I suspect, as far as some of the young mums were concerned. Photos will doubtless follow.

William was delighted with Father Christmas, especially when he finally remembered to deliver the ‘Gordon book’. And that was the favourite present. According to the back, a bargain at £2.50 in elf currency. I’m hoping that his tastes will maintain such affordable levels. No doubt Father Christmas was pretty chuffed too. William was also in sparkling form for Christmas day, which was an enormous relief. He had been pretty uncomfortable for a couple of days before, and his doctors had even threatened to remove his line on Christmas Eve, which would have meant sticking in temporary peripheral lines for at least a week. Not very festive. But now Thursday seems to be D-day, when he will have the op that will hopefully relieve the pressure in his tummy and settle things down enough to start planning for coming home. William has already started planning his return, as he is demanding that his favourite cuddly toys – his ‘friends’ – are sent home in his stead. They are seen here sharing the bed with William in his 'boys are smelly' pyjamas. For the meantime, all is on hold. William is on his drip more-or-less 24 hours a day, is windy and often sore, but is otherwise as entertaining as ever. This currently means that we are all part of an enormous Thomas role-play. William is generally Gordon, the express engine. So when he is not joining the rest of us in the great festive television slob, he hurtles around the ward at high speed, with me following and doing my very best to ensure that he doesn’t yank out his central line. I am Harvey the crane – performing the necessary role of rescuer when he falls ‘off the lines’. Everybody has a part to play. The ward sister is Trevor the tractor. William is doing his best to ensure an early release.

Incommunicado

I managed to lose my mobile phone on the late night train back to Croydon the other day. I confess that its loss was entirely due to my altered mental state. On its own, the experience of catching a late train back to Croydon is enough to alter anyone’s mental state. The doors at Victoria are kept locked until 10 minutes before the train leaves, presumably to keep Croydon’s denizens from making themselves at home – using the facilities to cook chicken nuggets, pushing dirty faced children around in decrepit buggies, putting knitted ballerinas on the toilet rolls in the Ladies. That sort of thing. So you wait in the crystallising frost, and join a steaming, stamping mass of ex-revellers, all nursing impending hangovers, and too cold to speak. The cold and nausea seem to drag you down like a sinking anchor. Finally the gates are opened by a chain-smoking porter – all non-smoking rules are suspended when the end of a Marlboro is the only source of warmth – and you shuffle to the platform, gradually trying to coax your limbs into forward movement. And it was whilst I was nestling in the corner of a carriage, quietly trying to remind myself that I was human, that I presume my phone dropped out of my pocket.

It’s quite liberating, really. Unless I turn on my computer and surf through mountains of spam and Facebook generated invitations to stick crappy applications to my profile, I am un-contactable. Glorious. Except that I was waiting for a call back about my flooding problems. I thought that I might finally have persuaded Thames Water that my flat has flooded four times in the last four years, and that they might look into doing something about it. Despite the fact that they still don’t have it ‘on their database’. In frustration, I had even tried suggesting that I wouldn’t put the phone down until I heard the clicking of keys as the data was being entered. ‘I can’t enter the data,’ responded the customer services drone. I asked who could. ‘I don’t know.’ I may have spotted the flaw in their data system. A shame that they haven’t. So I phoned Ofwat. Who will doubtless have the same conversation, but had promised to phone back. Possible progress after four years of repeated homelessness. And then I lost my phone. People become letterbombers because of this sort of thing. A pointless act of revenge. Thames Water’s internal post system would doubtless lose the bomb anyway.

Christmas is going to be spent at William’s Chelsea pad. It is kind of the NHS to provide us with such a fashionable festive address. In fact, we have managed to swing a ‘hotel room’ for Christmas evening. For ‘hotel room’, understand a room on the fourth floor with white walls, a single bed, strip lighting and chewing gum encrusted carpet tiles. I suppose it doesn’t do to encourage people to feel too comfortable. In contrast, Sarah has decorated William’s ‘bay’ so thoroughly that it has begun to resemble Santa’s grotto. And William has been wound up to such a level of festive over-excitement that I arrived the other day to find him bouncing up and down in his cot shouting ‘We wish you a merry, Christmas, we wish you a merry Christmas’ at the top of his voice. Santa has been once already - William gamely tried to hide his disappointment that he hadn’t arrived with any of the presents he asked for - and there is a stubbornly tenacious coating of stray glitter on every flat surface. It is in no way ideal that William will be in hospital over Crimbles, but he will certainly enjoy himself nonetheless. His impending operation – laparotomy, ileostomy and assorted biopsies – is now due in early Jan. Christmas at home has been delayed to his potential return in mid-February. I can get the girls their presents in the January sales.

Humbug

Christmas is coming, and it is time to practise the ‘Bah Humbugs’. I am perfectly qualified for this. I have read Dickens in a professional capacity. I have the sort of trained diaphragm that can produce a really resonant ‘Bah’. And I have a sweet tooth. So I like humbugs. Plus William and Sarah are facing a Christmas in Stalag Chelsea and Westminster, and I am currently either working, sleeping on Sarah’s floor, or trundling up the A23 between Croydon and Chelsea. So Crimbles is seeming a little unattractive at the moment. And my poor junior school classes are feeling the brunt, as the froth of their youthful festivity beaches on my dry cynicism. But that’s a metaphor. And they need to learn to recognise those. So they’re stuck with me banging on for another week.

It was the boys’ Christmas dinner this week, so that was at least one nod to the festive season. Sparky put on his pinny, invited everyone to his place in rural Kent, and produced goose fat-roasted potatoes. It was enormously impressive. Then we threw ourselves at the mercy of the commuter belt – singing carols to his neighbours. And they were unimpressed. The mood was perhaps best captured by the resident of one of the mansionettes that we serenaded.

“What are you doing?”

“We’re wassailing.”

“I don’t know what that means, but here’s some money.”

Presumably hush money. It is difficult, in these circumstances, to put a name to the enemy. Ten good singers – ex-members of the National Youth Choir – must sound at least reasonably impressive when they sing carols on your doorstep. Years doing just that in London have been very successful. But the mansionette dwellers of Kent remained impassive. They presented a blank, red-brick face. “New money,” complained one wassailer. But this is a difficult insult to throw when the corollary is that old money is better, which is equally alien to a jaded socialist such as me. So I have worked on a new coinage. Cash And No Taste. CANT for short. It should be delivered with a London accent, as it sounds appropriately offensive then. And will therefore be appreciated by my current colleagues, who are both gloriously cultured, and wonderfully foul mouthed. I will miss them when I give up teaching again, and get back to singing.

Tonight was the department dinner – a moment to realise what I’ll be saying goodbye to, as we had dinner in the Athenaeum. My post-modern confusion at being found in such a setting was no better encapsulated that when I took my phone out to show a colleague that I had the number of somebody I knew only as Aphrodite on my phone, but was told off for the nature of my classical reference, as I shouldn’t have had my phone on. That Aphrodite is a composer of crossover music was information that could only cloud the issue, and is further evidence of the terribly difficult times we live in. Time, I think, to sign the Glyndebourne chorus contract and submit myself to a comforting few months of putting on fancy dress and pretending to be somebody else.