Denial lasts a long, long time. You can recognize people in denial because we stand aghast in department stores and scoff loudly, ‘Hell’s bells, not crackers already!’ (leaving other shoppers to interpret this outburst as they will). Out of every magazine you pick up, there slithers a heavy catalogue of ingenious Christmas gifts, which you stare at uncomprehendingly. What’s this, you say; a pair of slippers with headlights built in? If this is Christmas, you declare, you will have no part of it.
But mixed with this denial is guilt, of course, because one can’t help noticing that other people have ‘started’. It is somehow awful to hear.
‘Have you started yet?’ they say, sort-of casually.
‘No, it’s only November. Ha ha. You?’
‘Mmm. Three weeks ago.’
‘Oh.’
Meanwhile relations start mentioning casually on the phone the lovely present they bought you while on holiday in July, the news of which makes you feel strangely weightless. Presumably there are people in the world on whom this sort of moral blackmail makes no impression, but personally I allow it to flood me with feelings of inadequacy, year after year. And this, I might add, despite my certain knowledge, borne of dismally consistent experience, that the much-vaunted holiday present will turn out on Christmas morning to be a small box of fudge or a red plastic ball-point with my name on it.
Anyway, to return to the theory of stages, this powerful guilt phase finally propels you into an eruption of frantic activity, then a brief spell of euphoria, closely followed by let-down, anger, and finally blank exhaustion. And that’s it. Another consumer Christmas, another absolutely pointless exercise, which you knew you didn’t want to get involved in from the start. This is what I hate about Christmas, that while I object to it very loudly, and can see with painful clarity that it is a form of mass hysteria, I always end up participating anyway, and going the whole hog. We all do. Any form of protest – principled refusal to buy cheese footballs, for example – is feeble and simply makes you look mean.
The idea, therefore, of the princess stating her intentions so clearly and forcibly in regard to the Sandringham three-line whip is really quite inspiring. Based on no evidence whatsoever, I shall assume, too, that when her Aunt Margaret pops her coat on and announces her intention of getting ‘started’, Diana will snap, ‘Well, just don’t get me a box of fudge like last year’ – something I have always wanted to say, Diana, but fear I never shall.
Go on, guess. What’s this? Jing, jing, jing, jing-jing-jingaling, jing-jing-a-jing-aling-jing. Dee dee da, lovely weather for a sleigh ride together la laaah.
Gosh, that’s better. When a girl has spent three solid weekends at home poring over those special goody-crammed Christmas gift catalogues, she fancies she feels the sting of snow on her face, smells the rich vinyl on the Perry Como records, hears sleighbells on the roof, and remembers the exact weight, shape and fragrance of a tub of Lily of the Valley talcum powder unwrapped on Christmas morn. Oh yes.
In short, she is almost clinically depressed. ‘Who wants all this stuff?’ she wails, disconsolately flipping the gaudy, fun-packed pages. She looks back on her life and sees a great endless Jacob Marley charm bracelet made up of all the unwanted Christmas presents she has misguidedly given since the age of six.
‘It still goes on,’ she groans, flapping a catalogue from Boots or Debenhams. ‘Oh yes, they even – and I hardly believe it – still have a section called ‘‘For Him’’.’
It is only at Christmas that I feel genuinely sorry for men. They get a terrible deal, and these catalogues are testimony to life’s dreadful gender unfairness. From being an ordinary individual – albeit a moron, genius, couch potato, whatever – a man at Christmas becomes in his family’s festively fevered mind an entirely notional ‘For Him’ entity who revels implausibly in manicure sets and backgammon boards and special golf-motif alarm clocks.
For men, Christmas morning is a very mystifying time, requiring an almost saintly selfless pretence. ‘Oh look, a jigsaw depicting a huge plate of baked beans. How er, lovely. Ha, ha, that should keep me busy.’ It is a very curious thing. Forbidden to buy socks and hankies, I once bought my father a beautiful leather-and-silver-plate hip flask and fully expected him to be stunned with gratitude, regardless of the significant fact that he never (ever) drank.
But as Susan Carter so rightly whined in a recent episode of The Archers, ‘Men are so difficult to buy for.’ Which is why, as a sort of punishment presumably, they get landed with travel shoe-care kits, novelty calculators, tiddly-cricket and Brut aftershave. ‘Well, you’re just too difficult to buy for’ is the bristling sub-text of each gift, especially when thrust upon a man who:
a) wears trainers, and never goes anywhere;
b) has a calculator already;
c) has never played a parlour game in his life; and
d) has sported a large bushy beard for the past twenty years.
Being currently mateless, I feel I can expand on this topic without hurting anyone’s feelings. So why are ‘men’ so difficult to buy for? Well, let us take Susan Carter’s husband Neil as an example, and apply the usual mental processes by which a thoughtful gift-buyer selects a winner.
What makes Neil happy?
Um, ooh. Well, um. Pigs?
Let’s try another angle. What does Neil aspire to?
Hmm, no, sorry, this is trickier than I thought.
All right, for heaven’s sake, does he already have an alarm clock disguised as a miniature old-fashioned petrol pump, or a jigsaw depicting an enormous plate of baked beans?
I am not saying that all men are Neil Carter. If they were, the world would be full of pig farms, and we shouldn’t be able to move for co-op feed orders. Perhaps I am just trying to justify my strange decision, last year, to buy a dear (male) friend a gaily printed cotton bandanna (the sort cowboys wear over their noses on dusty cattle-drives), accompanied by a dandy booklet entitled Thirty-Five Things to do with a Bandanna. My only excuse is that it just seemed like the ultimate male Christmas gift.
My friend could try it on, read about it, and puzzle very deeply over my reasons for giving it to him. And then afterwards, utterly stumped, he could put it in a drawer and wonder.
Christmas in our house starts on Christmas Eve with the ritual of the food blender. Once a year, I like to trot down to the shed to pull it out from under the lawnmower, blow off the grass and spiders, look at the blade to make sure it’s clean, and then begin – whipping together my special recipe of Paxo stuffing, cherry mincemeat, Bailey’s Irish Cream, chicken fat, Warninck’s Avocaat, cobwebs, After Eight Mints and Bisto (to taste). When blended together in the right proportions, it looks a bit like cat vomit, but it makes a terrific all-purpose Christmas sauce, which can transform even your slimmer’s meal of cottage cheese with prawns into a festive occasion. It also means that you always have something suitable in the fridge for dealing with those unexpected visitors on Boxing Day. (They won’t trouble you again.)
On Christmas Day after lunch, I like the whole family to gather around the fire and play word-games. Which is a shame, because a) I don’t have a fire; and b) everybody except me is a cat. The gratification of being able to beat a cat at Scrabble palled after the first couple of Christmases, and I wasn’t sorry to throw in the towel. In any case, he always wanted to check everything in the dictionary, and it took forever. So now we play more simple party games. They hide the remote control for the TV, and I look for it; or they pretend that they didn’t buy me anything again this year, and I pretend to believe them; or they vomit their Turkey Whiskas with Surprise Christmas Sauce, and I have to guess which bowl holds the uneaten dinner, and which the regurgitated.
We like to watch the TV on Christmas Day. Which is all right, because I’ve got one of those. As in every family, there are the usual fights over which channel it’s going to be. I have already settled with them that we will tune in to Back to the Future on Christmas Day, but I’m a bit worried that they won’t be abl
e to follow it, and that I’ll have to spend so much time explaining bits that have just happened that I will miss the next bits. (Just like the time we all watched It’s a Wonderful Life.)
On Christmas Night I like to reflect on life. What is life like? Life is like hoping for a racing bike for Christmas, and getting a Spirograph. Life is like starting a painting-by-numbers in a great fit of enthusiasm and then realizing that the little pot of blue will never be enough for the great expanse of sky, and that you should have thinned it out when you started. Life is like being given a dart-board, then being told there’s nowhere in the house that you can play darts. Life is like chewing your Christmas pudding really carefully because you are fearful you may be the lucky one with the threepenny bit.
That’s what I like to do at Christmas.
The Arnolds Feign Death Until the Wagners, Sensing Awkwardness, are Compelled to Leave …
A couple of weeks ago, on Radio 4’s In the Psychiatrist’s Chair, the late great Les Dawson confessed to a fault he had never been able to cure. ‘What do you like least about yourself?’ asked Anthony Clare (as he often does). That I can’t say no to people, said Dawson; that I want to please them and, worst of all, that I’m never the person at the pub who just looks at his watch and decides it’s time to go home. Bless you, Les Dawson, I thought. In a generally sympathetic interview, this admission was surely the most endearing moment of all.
As someone who has blithely waved away the last guests at other people’s dinners, gamely collected glasses and turned off lights at other people’s office parties, said ‘Gosh, that’s kind’ to the fifth weary offer of coffee from hosts stapling their eyelids to their foreheads and propping their chins on broom-handles, I felt I knew precisely what he meant. Sometimes I worry that I live inside a Gary Larson cartoon, the one that’s captioned: ‘The Arnolds feign death until the Wagners, sensing awkwardness, are compelled to leave.’
Why does this awkwardness arise? No doubt the non-suffering majority (those decisive watch-glancers, coat-grabbers and leave-takers) think that we dreary obtuse Wagners refuse to collect our hats because we fear that people will talk about us. But it’s nothing so simple. No, in fact we just feel that saying goodbye admits a failure to bond, and we can’t stand it. I remember once interviewing Stephen Fry for a Sunday newspaper, spending two or three pleasant and fruitful hours in a Soho restaurant with him and then – on the pavement outside – finding myself completely unable to say ‘Westward ho!’ and strike off in a different direction, because I felt it would ruin everything.
‘Well, I’m going this way,’ he said, courteously offering his hand and wishing me luck. ‘Oh, that’s lucky, I can go that way!’ I exclaimed nerdishly, utterly deaf to my cue. We walked towards Shaftesbury Avenue, where by chance he spied a 19 bus. ‘I believe this will take me to Islington,’ he said, jumping aboard and waving. ‘Great idea,’ I agreed, and jumped on, too. (It gives me no pleasure to recount this, believe me.) ‘Do you know, I think I’ll go upstairs,’ he said, in a courteous last-ditch attempt to lose me, as we turned left at Cambridge Circus and sped up Charing Cross Road. At which point (outside Foyles) I finally realized it was time to say goodbye.
I disembarked, spent half an hour in a bookshop, and thought no more about it until I re-emerged and saw to my alarm that he was studying the window opposite. Clearly the long-suffering chap had likewise got off the bus immediately I was out of sight.
I often call to mind this excruciating memory when interviewers record their meetings with celebrities entirely in a manner to flatter themselves, registering every ‘um’ and ‘er’ of the responses while somehow forgetting to mention that there is another side to the story: that their own questions were offensive or ill-informed, or that they suddenly suffered a copious nosebleed just at the moment when the tape-recorder unspooled yards of tape which became entangled with the dog. I think with fondness of the actor Brian Cox, who patiently allowed me to interview him twice, because on the first occasion my tape-recorder silently self-combusted on his dressing-room sofa (leaving a hole). But mainly I think of those poor blighters – playwrights, directors, actors – who politely talked for several hours, until it finally (and horribly) dawned on them that ‘enough’s enough’ was an expression which, despite being in English, held no meaning for me whatsoever.
Why isn’t there therapy for this condition? After all, it would be incredibly simple to organize. Just get a group of fellow-sufferers together in a big room and then, well, make us all go home again. Fiddling with one’s travelcard or car-keys while making vague dithery ‘Gosh, is that the time?’ noises would be strictly forbidden unless properly ‘followed through’. After two or three hours, the group leader might helpfully collapse to the floor and feign death (like the Arnolds) to see if it helped. And anyone who staunchly waved farewell and then, ten minutes later, popped a head round the door to ask ‘Was that all right?’ would be sent to Coventry forthwith.
Last week, a Durham cricketer’s wife visiting her parents in Australia received a rather startling telecommunication from her husband – to wit, a fax informing her that the marriage was over. In terms of goodbyes, it certainly had efficiency to commend it. ‘Page 1 of 1’, it presumably announced at the top; ‘FROM: Graeme Fowler, TO: ex-wife’. But was this act of arm’s-length brush-off ‘callous and cold’, merely? After all, the fax was swift and modern in its brutality, it will fade in time (literally), and mercifully it prevented the cliché marital bust-up which invariably degenerates into scuffle and fisticuffs. To peer and strain even further to see a bright side, at least the cricketer did not line her up on a parade ground and bark, ‘All those who are married to me, take one step forward. Where the hell do you think you’re going, Mrs Fowler?’
Faxes for this purpose are quite rare. The more common goodbye disguises itself, for reasons of humdrum cowardliness, as ‘See you later’ and ‘I’ll phone you back’. Last week I moved house – from London to Brighton – but like a genuine spineless dastard I flatly denied its implications on personal relationships to the last. ‘So we’ll not be seeing you,’ London neighbours said. ‘Of course you will,’ I declared heartily. ‘I’ll be back, you won’t know I’ve gone, in any case Brighton’s not far, just find East Croydon and it’s easy.’ Why endure the pain and tears (your own, not theirs) when you can avoid it with denial? Personally I have always admired those famous dying words which, instead of solemnly commending the soul to the maker, express ‘Much better, thanks; in fact, I fancy I could eat one of Mrs Miggins’s meat pies.’ H.G. Wells’s ‘Go away, I’m all right’ is a particular favourite, but it runs close with Lord Palmerston’s grandiloquent, ‘Die, my dear doctor? That’s the last thing I shall do.’ So when I indulge myself unforgivably by mentioning that this Times column will of course continue for ever (and see you next week, and the week after that, phone you later, go away I’m all right), perhaps you will deduce what I’m getting at.
To return to the matter in hand – the Fowler fax – I find that I distrust the temptation to jump to conclusions, to assume it came to Mrs Fowler as a bolt from the sky. It sounds to me more like the act of a desperate person, driven to exasperated lengths. Conceivably, Mr Fowler had been leaving clues for weeks, and had finally exhausted his ingenuity. One remembers the Victoria Wood sketch that went: ‘Jeff’s gone.’ ‘For good?’ ‘Well, he’s taken the toolshed.’ Mrs Fowler may just have been slow on the uptake. One imagines her wandering through the bare, curtainless house, musing ‘Funny, where’s Graeme got to?’, seemingly blind to the words ‘I’m off, then’ and ‘I mean it’ sprayed with paint on the living-room walls.
Personally, the only time I successfully said goodbye – really felt it, surrendered to it, explored it – was when my wise Chinese acupuncturist left London for Los Angeles. (I know how this must sound, but I’ll carry on anyway.) The point was, we had discussed my attitude to separation trauma, so she helped me face a real goodbye (with her), with an emotional result that was positively startlin
g in its depth and scope. The only trouble was, it made me feel like a character from a Woody Allen movie. ‘Why are you sobbing?’ my surprised colleagues asked, back at the office. ‘Why do you think?’ I wailed. ‘Because my acupuncturist has left for the Coast!’
Possibly it was the most pure and truthful emotional moment of my life, but in the end it proved limiting, because when she returned last year I couldn’t face her, too much salt water having passed under that particular bridge. There is a lesson here, I feel. If only she had left me with ‘No, I’ll soon be home, Los Angeles isn’t far, just find the Great Circle and it’s easy,’ I would have been back to see her, like a shot, and would now be cheerfully bristling with acupuncture needles like quills upon the fretful porpentine.
When night falls and she doesn’t come in for her tea, I usually start to worry. So I go outside and call for her (the old story), and then feel helpless when she still doesn’t come. I tell myself that probably she is ‘eating out tonight’ – because I know how easily she insinuates herself into other houses, and then cadges a meal by acting weak and pathetic. At the end of such an evening, she will come home to me in a telltale over-excited state, not really interested in food.
Still, I will say this for her: she always makes sure I’m all right. Out comes the tin-opener, and there’s half a tin of Felix, a handful of Kitty Crunch for my little jaws to work on, even a tub of Sheba if she’s been drinking. But it’s not the food I am worried about. It’s just that I am only properly happy when I know she is safe indoors, curled up asleep on that warm hairy rug of hers, her ears flicking contentedly as she dreams of Jeff Bridges.