‘Here at the age of 39 I began to be old. I felt stiff and weary in the evenings and reluctant to go out of camp; I developed proprietary claims to certain chairs and newspapers; I regularly drank three glasses of gin before dinner, never more or less, and went to bed immediately after the nine o’clock news. I was always awake and fretful an hour before reveille. Here my last love died.’
In Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, Charles Ryder is talking about the army, but he could just as easily be me, grumbling about Christmas. I suppose I should be glad to have made it to 60.
I can’t really disguise it anymore. I feel old and, well, yes: Bah, etc. This is a year-round thing of course, but it is certainly climate-enhanced, and the self-conscious senescence never interposes its grizzled snout more assertively than during the build-up to what is still known, though now with barely concealed bitterness, as the ‘Festive Season’.
I have of course resorted to the usual tricks. Booze, obviously – sometimes more than three glasses, truth be told, and the Rusty Nails are up to the full nine inches now. Chocolate, natch, and stollen. And even the odd rerun of family favourites – Love Actually, The Grinch, Die Hard, and some old home movie my wife likes to watch of her and her friends on the beach in Australia, from the Christmas before we met. Beyond me, but a real weepie, it seems.
But this year, I have to be honest, the blue touch paper of merriment seems damp and not inclined to catch.
Partly, I think, it’s the news. Christmas spirit is hard to distil from the quotidian horrors of the worldwide 24-hour news cycle and this month has been particularly grim. Then again, this complaint is arguably nothing new. I still think of 1966 as one of the years that was high noon in the American Garden of Eden, the last great innocence of the last great hope of mankind. And still Paul Simon was on snake watch.
US economic supremacy in the mid-1960s was so assured that American sitcoms looked like utopian science fiction to British audiences. With Horowitz and Richter at Carnegie Hall, and the Beatles and the Beach Boys in the charts, high and low culture cohabited the zeitgeist with less friction than Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. Yes, there was that one little hiccup in November 1963, but it hadn’t yet begun to replicate. Hell, they hadn’t even had the summer of love yet, and thus still thought that might work.
Yet it was in 1966 when Simon and Garfunkel released ‘7 O’Clock News / Silent Night’, an early sound collage of the famous German carol interplayed with various news reports of a dispiriting nature, from serial murder to the watered-down plans for civil-rights legislation to Nixon warning that a disgruntled home front was a greater threat to the war effort than the Viet Cong. ‘Stille? Nicht!’
Which reminds me, as does ‘Stille Nacht’, of Christmas Day 1914. It is a curious aspect of human nature that when things are middling, we moan, but when prospects for a Merry Christmas are really bleak, such as in the trenches of Ypres, men will spontaneously down tools and enjoy a game of football with the enemy. An occasion celebrated in my joint favourite Christmas commercial of all time, from Sainsbury’s in 2014, one I’ve yet to watch through without uttering appropriately Germanic choking noises as I suppress a manly sob.
Even so, as I can hear myself talking myself out of it, I think an objective case can be made that the past few weeks have been unusually bleak for December, if not for the standards of the front line, then at least compared with when that advert first aired.
Uppermost in my mind is the outrage at Australia’s Bondi Beach, I suppose, and not just because of that wretched home movie. This horrific attack, as always nowadays, provided us with more amateur footage than we quite knew what to do with, and a news media and political class desperate not to name the Islamist evil in our midst.
There was an extra poignancy I felt for Australia, which I still think of as ever so slightly childlike when it comes to international relations and the ways of the world. Much as I suppose Elon Musk was suggesting he feels about migrant crime in the Home Counties of England, which he sees as Tolkien’s Shire. Now Mordor’s shadow has fallen further still.
So yes, Bondi for one. But also seeing places like Birmingham actively celebrating the new, improved diversity bollards in the city centre, to eliminate the threat of ‘hostile vehicles’ to Christmas markets. Grim, grim, grim.
On reflection, I think what I need to do is look into my own heart and soul, to dig a little deeper, to revive and nurture the flame, the underlying spirit that drives goodwill to man – good, old-fashioned generosity. I have, I realise, lost the knack. And for this, I also blame the British government.
I really do believe that the Two Big Gs, Gratitude and Generosity, are the secret to living a tolerably happy existence (the third is keeping your dreams realistic). But living under a government intent on wringing every last hard-earned penny from every single joule of even remotely economic activity, to then lavish it upon the most feckless, work-shy and undeserving? This has made me regard my fellow man or even family member with narrow-eyed suspicion. Mine! Mine! Mine!
That way misery lies. And so I do realise I need to re-read my A Christmas Carol, and to reflect with Scrooge that you really cannot take it with you – even if ‘it’ is looking likely to be insurmountable debt. To steadily, gently, but resolutely, learn to unclench.
It was another Charles – Charles Lamb – who coined my favourite epigram on the subject. ‘There is no greater pleasure in life, than to commit an act of generosity by stealth, and have it discovered by accident.’ (Churchill thought that the greatest pleasure was to be shot at without result, and it is a close call as to which is more easily attainable in Britain this Christmas. But I am sticking with Lamb.)
So, I shall tomorrow go out and commit half a dozen acts of random, anonymous kindness – and then accidentally upload the footage on to Insta. If nothing else, it should cheer people up a bit and maybe set an example. I could be the new MrBeast.
But first, a short and very Rusty Nail, I think. And maybe just one more slice of stollen. Merry Christmas!
Simon Evans is a spiked columnist and stand-up comedian. Tickets for his tour, Have We Met?, are on sale here.
