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.