A Recollection for the Approaching Season.

Since we’re only two weeks off Christmas, I thought I’d take my annual look at Annie Lennox’s very pagan version of God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen. For some reason it reminded me of my worst childhood Christmas (I’ve had two far worse ones since, but only after the 21-year watershed.)

I was about ten, and we went down to Oxford to spend Christmas with my brother and his wife. It’s the only time in my life that I slept in a strange bed on Christmas Eve and woke up in a strange bed on Christmas morning (the two things are separately important, you understand, each in its own way.)

Now, when you’re ten you expect to get a bunch of presents on Christmas morning, don’t you? They don’t have to be expensive or anything; a pile of parcels wrapped in Christmas paper and containing things like a Rupert Bear annual and a chocolate selection box will do. What you don’t expect is an old sock containing a few pieces of fruit and some nuts. That’s what was lying at the foot of my strange bed when I awoke full of the accustomed anticipation.

I’d heard about the fruit-and-nuts-in-an-old-sock thing – tales of poverty and wartime rationing, and all that. But I wasn’t born during the war, and my stepfather had a decent job so we weren’t that poor by then. And I didn’t even like fruit and nuts. Chocolate was my thing, and it was Christmas after all.

I decided it was a joke. The real presents would obviously be downstairs.

Kick the ‘s’ off ‘presents.’ There was one.

Can you believe that my parents hadn’t brought my Christmas presents with them? They hadn’t. Unbelievable. Criminal, even. The one present was from my brother and his wife; it was a board game called Careers.

Now, I’d long wanted Monopoly or Cluedo, but I got Careers. I’d never heard of Careers; nobody I subsequently played it with had heard of it; I’ve never seen another copy of it from that day to this; I swear my Christmas present at age ten was the only freggin’ one they ever sold! Which isn’t surprising, because it was boring.

And that, readers, is the story of my life. Whatever everybody else got, I got something different. Sometimes it was inferior, sometimes superior, but it was always different.

Here’s Annie:

The drummer is my man. The grin settles it.