Today was the first day of playing James Brown’s Funky Christmas and so now I can officially say I feel festive. Four days into my Captain America advent calendar that in no way attempts to honour the Marvel heroes attributes with its chocolate shapes – no he wasn’t a choir boy, no he doesn’t fight mistletoe. Where the hell is the big chocolate PANG shield*? Or a Santa hat wearing Red Skull? – and I am finally starting to get those desperate needs to eat my own weight in fat food and hide indoors until the Spring. Decoration will soon have to be put shoddily around the house and I will make more than a concerted effort to avoid going into the West End of London unless 100% necessary to avoid the annual gathering of the Globe’s most dawdling fuckwits who seem intent on using up all my seasonal goodwill in not punching their faces until they get out of my way. Its odd how one ‘season’ can provoke so many mixed feelings of warmth and rage all at once.
There’s very little of just ‘meh’ during this time, only extremes of joy or shit. Christmas gigs for example, are one of the circles of Hell that even Dante couldn’t conjure up as tedious office parties turn up to retch and talk their way through your set while only one the party of 30 actually wants to be there and organised it in the first place. If any of those celebs in the jungle wanted a real challenge they should have to do a month of Christmas gigs and see if they can still feel any emotion other than hate by the end. At the opposite end of the scale you have mince pies which are one of the best things ever. You see? Swings of hell and roundabouts of fizzy festive joy. I wonder if this is what Jesus and Santa planned when they aimed to make one big joint birthday party? A medley of high end reactions so that when January comes around you are too exhausted to kill yourself?
This Christmas might be a shit one for a lot of people, what with job losses and another X-Factor single release that somehow appears to be more vacuous and nauseatingly shit than before. I don’t even know what the main one will be but the ‘Wishing On A Star’ single seems to resonate at the frequency that could very well be the much famed and undiscovered ‘brown note’. If you don’t know about that, do look it up. I think it has been discovered by Simon Cowell and Katherine Jenkins and they just won’t give up the secret for fear of losing power over the captive hostage UK audience. I saw a program on Katherine Jenkins this morning and spent a long time just shouting ‘stop fucking smiling’ at the telly until it was over. I kept imagining what it would be like if halfway through her interview with Fern Britton when Fern asked her about being in a helicopter in Iraq when a missile warning was going, that Katherine would reveal she had powers like Banshee from the X-Men. Discussing nonchalantly how the missiles didn’t bother her because she’d just direct a high C at a warhead and it’d explode in mid air, before telling how the army would carry her around war zones letting her warble until the enemies ears bled and brains exploded. The government forever harbouring the strategy to never let her meet Kate Bush for fear they could combine sound waves to destroy entire civilisations.
Yes. So. Hmm. Christmas. That’s what I was saying. Bloody Christmas. Bloody great and yet shitty Christmas. One year, when I’m ruler of everything (I give it till about 2051 for people to elect me as such before I do it forcefully), I will demand all the shit of Xmas be banned. John Lewis will only be allowed to release abstract or bleak black and white adverts featuring no emotion, just fact or subliminal messages. Perhaps a black and white film of a French man shivering in the snow before throwing himself off a building in despair at being so lonely as such a festive family time, his impacted body leaving a perfect ‘John Lewis’ motif in the snow below. Stuff like that. Stacey Soloman will be kept in stasis until Spring, or whenever we work out how to fire people into the sun, and shops will only allowed to play Christmas songs by James Brown, The Pogues, Leisure Society, Surfjan Stevens and a few acceptable others.
Starbucks red cups will feature communist messages from Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book for no real reason other than the colour match, reindeers will be allowed to wildly roam the streets spearing any drunk dickhead who gets in their way with their antlers and Christmas comedy gigs will be banned with all us comic types just getting a pay check to see us through till the end of January. It would, overall, be much better and we’d all eat mince pies and eggnog until we were sick and then start again. Hooray for future Christmas! Unless Jenkins meets Bush and then we’ll all be dead way before then.
Sorry. I’m not sure what’s happened today. This blog is post an ‘amaretto latte’ in Cafe Nero (a weak contender to the Starbucks Red Cups, yet violently more sugary). I won’t do it again.
* PANG is definitely the noise Captain America’s shield makes when it hits someone in the face. Hence, PANG shield.
