Two days of running back and forth between my various family’s houses has, truth be told, left me fairly exhausted. On the other hand, I have a stack of gifts to show for it, and I think if I ate any more food, I would probably spew partially-digested turkey from every orifice, and that’s the important part about Christmas. As far as I remember, anyway.
Nikki and I arrived home following an excellent couple of hours of movies and snacks at Sarah and Craig’s, part of which involved watched the awesome horror-comedy “Santa’s Slay”. It co-stars a wrestler and Her What Was The Pregnant One From Lost (she’s totally hot in it. Gun-toting, hoody-wearing, Transformer-gifting and slightly sexually aggressive. What more could you want from a woman?) and generally has everything you come want from a B-Movie, including many varied methods of Christmas-themed murder, gratuitous nudity, a completely insane plot about Santa being some kind of Antichrist, curling competitions and some fucking genius lines:
Nicholas Yuleson: The clock just struck midnight at the pole. Christmas is officially over for you, Santa!
Santa Claus: You know, most people make the same mistake. The correct time at the pole is completely discretionary, because the poles are where all the time zones actually converge.
Mary “Mac” Mackenzie: He’s scary, yet educational!
This year Nan did go into hospital just before Christmas (again?!) but managed to get released on Christmas Eve, so I went up there for while (dropping Mum and Terry at the Tachbrook club on the way) and helped explain to them what high potassium levels meant and how to avoid it in the future. Meanwhile, Pad ranted about how Nan had been taken off some medication that she’d been on for years because the hospital said the GP should never have put her on it in the first place. Combined with what Nikki’s family have been through recently, I’m forced to conclude that doctors are operating on guesswork over science rather more than they’d like to admit, and that their analysis gets much flakier the older you get.
I wrapped my presents while Mum and Terry were out, picked them up from midnight mass, then we watched TV until about 3am when Mum (perhaps slightly drunkenly) decided we should put the stuffing in the bird so that Terry only had to switch the oven on in the morning. As we were doing it, I kept wondering if stuffing chilled poultry with warm stuffing then leaving it in an inactive oven for 3 hours was something hygiene experts would recommend, but I figured it wasn’t a conversation worth having at 4 in the morning. And hey, it’s 2 days later and I’m still alive and not at all ill, thus proving that experts probably don’t know anything.
Christmas dinner was a far greater success this year, largely because we cooked it all ourselves instead of going the M&S prefab route like last year (a move which ultimately only benefited M&S) - this is, of course, except for the sauteed red cabbage, which was bought in and which no-one liked. We had Cockerel instead of Turkey again, but this year Mum and Terry had to pay for it themselves. It cost an eye-watering £51, and not to say it was bad (I couldn’t get enough and ate until I was nearly sick) but if we had to give an honest assessment, none of us would call it £51 worth of chicken.
Later Rob and I went up to Nan’s, met Dad & Fiona there and unwrapped the rest of our gifts, exchanged ours, then I dropped him off and went over to Nikki’s and did the same there. Then I brought Nikki back home for a couple of hours. By this point, all the driving and eating and general christmassing had left me completely buggered, so I watched a bit of TV, read a few comics and went to sleep about half 1 for a good 9 hours.
On Boxing day, I crawled out of bed at about half 11, and eventually negotiated the horrendous shower of home. Without a word of hyperbole, it is the most insane shower that has ever been conceived by man, and I hate it as much as it is possible for a man to hate a washing aid. It has one dial that reads, clockwise from the top, “Medium, High, Off, Power, High, Low” and a second dial that says “temperature” with a grey arrow pointing left and a red arrow pointing right. Both dials have no markings to orient them. There’s a set of 4 lights labelled “On, Low, Hot and Overheat”, and turning the dials randomly illuminates all of them in various combinations, except the last, which never does anything. You start this shower by pressing an unlabelled button, and turn it off the same way. If you’re lucky, the right combinations of dials and buttons will mean the water comes out and is warm, except it doesn’t matter because when it is switched on, the water pressure here is so rubbish that the only way to make it come out at a sufficient speed to actually rinse shampoo out of your hair is to have it cold anyway.
Eventually I washed my hair. I then went to pick up Nikki, then Rob, and we arrived at Dad’s dead on ten past one as instructed. We had our boxing day dinner with him, then me, Nikki and Rob took Nan and Pad’s dinner up to theirs, and Dad came up after he’d done the washing. While we were at Nan’s, Nikki and I looked through a newly-acquired book about Tachbrook (the village they live in.) Our family has its own “memories of” section, because my granddad and his brother are the two oldest living residents who were born in the village, so I familiarised Nikki with some members of my ancestry who were all conceived, born and educated in Tachbrook and hopefully this hasn’t made her think I’m a completely inbred hick.
I sat with Pad at the table while he ate dinner, and later we all watched “Come Dine With Me” - a rare example of a program that genuinely appealed to all three generations of people in the room, even if for completely different reasons. I think the last time that properly happened was, er, Gladiators? When that finished, we went up to Nikki’s and watched the first Narnia film, which was a rubbish adaptation of a rubbish book. My critical assessment is that CS Lewis had no respect for the notion that his book would one day be a film that needed a Hollywood-style three-act structure, the difficult bastard. The film had a beginning and an end, but no middle. Honestly, I think what it really needed was to be set in modern America and star Dakota Fanning.
After that, I came home and had leftovers for dinner. Cockerel and roast potato sandwiches. Then I spent the rest of the evening reading ALL of Absolute Sandman volume 4, and it was all brilliant. The Kindly Ones was especially amazing, and might well be my favourite arc, but I need to re-read Brief Lives and check. The return of Destruction was very nice to see, and I was particularly excited to see Death go and have a long-awaited chat with Hob Gadling. Marc Hempel’s artwork on The Kindly Ones was particularly excellent, and I proved my nerd credentials to myself by recognising D’Israeli’s inks, even though I didn’t know he was even in the book. For reference, spontaneously recognising inkers in a comic is roughly equivalent to telling who did the production on a song just by listening to it. You have to be a special kind of nerd to manage that.
I am aware that last paragraph might read like gibberish to most of you, but then so did the rest of this entry. Now I’m going to sleep. After, of course, the traditional documentation of this year’s main haul:
Various amounts of cash/vouchers
Watching the Watchmen (a “making of” book)
Absolute Sandman V4
Iron Man DVD
Dead Set DVD
Various clothes (gloves, t-shirts, fleece-jumper, utilitarian socks)
Tyre Inflator
Complete Little Britain Radio series
A couple of “traditional” puzzle toys
Various chocolates, including some giant slab from Hotel Chocolat
The usual succession of imitation brand toiletries off grandparents (including toothpaste)
Chocolate Orange Count: 4
Now, finally, sweet merciful sleep.
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