Surviving Christmas

I know that everyone's experience of Christmas is very different so it is impossible to give universal advice.  I have known people who set off for a Spanish or Tunisian hotel each December so are far away from the, poor weather, crowds and traffic chaos of the UK and I know people who go 'on tour' from relative to relative around the UK having a series of traditional Christmas meals to the extent that they must be sick of the sight of even the images of this food.  I know Pagans who get it all out of the way on the Solstice four days before Christmas Day so feel none of the pressures that the media seems to jack up.  I know one many who celebrates Saturnalia on the 25th complaining that the Christians stole his holiday.  He has no servants that he can serve on that day but child minds for Christians going to church.

I come from a small family so never had a huge number of relatives to visit.  However, I did live through the 1970s which these days seem to be perceived as the 'golden age' of Christmas.  There is regular reference to the fact that half the entire population of the UK watched 'The Morecambe and Wise Show' helped by the fact at the time there were only three channels.  In addition, Christmas tunes by Slade and Wizzard, hits in the 1970s are more common on our radios than many carols.  These days with television recording devices, the chance to 'see again' on multiple channels and your computer, plus computer and console games has taken away a lot of the tedious intensity of Christmas especially for the young.  It always seemed particularly cruel to given children toys they had waited for all year and then deny them the chance to play them and instead sit in Granny's overheated house listening to relatives arguing about which year in the 1920s someone joined a tennis club or when the zip had not simply been invented but introduced into common usage and sit through dull movies only to spend the time when all the good stuff was home being driven home in the dark.  Living in southern England as I do now, there was not even the consolation of snow, which generally fell more often at Easter than Christmas.  Coming from a Pagan family, once school broke up, I did not have to attend any more religious events and have no experience of standing in cold churches listening to people droning out the 'classics'.

This posting, then, is a random collection of thoughts on how to survive Christmas without feeling that you never want to see it again.  Please feel free to send me any other things you want to include that I may never have encountered or thought of. The umbrella warning I would give is:  Avoid Excess. Christmas is about excess in so many ways.  People have the heating on far too much which makes everyone dehydrated, feel fractious and thirsty; turn the heating down a notch for every person who enters your house.  Do not try and jam too many people into your house, it is a recipe for arguments.  Think about it, many UK families replicate the circumstances of the television series 'Lost', i.e. a strange assortment of people, many of whom do not want to be there, with people they might not particularly like and certainly have little in common with, in an overheated, cramped space not even as attractive as a desert island.  Excess continues with food.  At Christmas generally there is food from the moment you wake to when you are back in bed again.  There are sweets and nuts, cakes and biscuits then most people put on a meal many times larger than what they would eat on a normal day, except that, of course, you are not burning up a fraction of the energy you would be doing on a normal day and you have been eating lots of high energy food already.  The people who need the food at Christmas and the energy it provides are those that are outside like the homeless or working hard like emergency services, often actually get less rather more than usual.

Do not try and enforce jolity.  At Christmas people are often reflective, it is grey and they may feel down.  However, thrusting brash, noisy activity in their face is not going to make them feel magically happy, it simply throws what they are feeling into sharper relief.  Combined with over heated houses and excessive food and alcohol it can be far harder to cope with than something more low key.  Have decorations, yes, but not some huge installation that makes the place glitter in every corner.  True happiness comes from seeing what is important and being thankful for it.  You have a house when many people do not; you have food when many people do not; you have gifts when many people do not.  Do not put everyone on a guilt trip, but do see that actually you can be happy from having people you love around you and having a good (but not madly large meal).  If everything is too big and too brash then any real feeling is gone from it.  Never enforce jolity on people; do not compel participation.  Think about, after a large meal, lions lie around and doze they do not charge across the savannah, think the same with people.  If someone is not a gamesplayer all year round then do not guilt trip them into being one at Christmas, it will simply be twice as unpleasant for them.  Also avoid activities that provoke embarrassment; on this basis do not treat teenagers as if they were still eight years old, let them find their own level of interaction.  Keep it simple.  As a child I used to watch my parents and grandparents play serious card games at Christmas.  My Granny (my father's mother) seemed transformed into a different woman.  However, the card games were nothing flashy and nothing new, but it was clear that the players were enjoying the game because it was something they rarely had a chance for.  The same went for my Grandpa's (my mother's father) eclectic mix of piano tunes, generally more informed by Socialism than Christianity, but it was the only time he was tolerable.  These things work better than new elaborate games, especially if no-one is compelled to participate.

These days a lot of the problems of competiton to see various programmes has been eliminated and it has reduced a lot of tension in houses.  It does not really matter if you miss a programme or a movie, you can have preset your recording device before leaving home and the programme will no doubt be available on some channel or online or on DVD in the near future.  This contrasts with the past when large chunks of the assembled group would have to sit through something they found tedious knowing what they wanted to see was ticking away on another channel.

I do recommend a degree of exercise, if simply to counteract the stuffy-headedness of being inside for much of the day.  It also allows a reduction in the tension of having people piled up on top of each other, especially in the UK where houses are really too small for the number of people we jam into them.  The Royal Family has the right idea, though naturally their houses are huge.  They all go off to church and obviously for Christians this is one way to get some fresh air and exercise.  Of course, really Catholics time it badly.  Midnight Mass may have a magic to it, but if you want the family to survive Christmas, Midday Mass would be far more suitable.  For the more secular among us, walk the dog, go to some park, even look around the shops.  I favour going to some open space as even in these days of far longer opening hours, there is nothing more dreary than walking passed closed shops.  I can guarantee that a lot of the pressure of being around people at Christmas is reduced if a large portion of them get out.  We cannot entirely counteract the fact that we can only stomach our family for comparative short periods of time; often husbands and wives find it far more challenging to be together for an extended period than when each has the escape of work.  This is why there are so many divorces initiated in late December and early January.

The one thing that people neglect to give at Christmas is space.  Too many families organise every moment of everyone's day.  You rise early and you stay up late, prolonging the day, but rarely do you get time to take a break and sit back.  Let the teenager listen to their ipod, let adults not participate in games, let people watch something different up in the bedroom, let the elderly or the younger people sleep if they want to.  There is ample opportunity for coming together and you are going to get a lot more of it compared to usual over the period, so let people opt out for some of the time; do not try to have everyone involved all of the time, it wears down the reserves of patience and goodwill very quickly.  My one recommendation is to have a good non-fiction book on standby.  Do not have fiction because it can be frustrating leaving the story to go and eat or participate in an activity.  I always used to have the non-fiction samurai books by Stephen Turnbull for such use.  I think it explains why celebrity biographies are ideal at this time of year.  You want something that is interesting enough but that you can dip into and out of as need requires.  Let children have free rein on computer/console games, remember, for them Christmas, after the initial couple of minutes of delight, can be hours of protracted tedium, particularly for teenagers who would would rather be around their friends' houses than pressed together with little known relatives.

Overall, I know that people feel that Christmas is not Christmas unless everything is done to the maximum. My suggestion is that if you want to retain your sanity and good relations with your family, especially your spouse, is to step everything down a notch or two.  Do not provide excessive food; keep the house temperature down a bit; let people opt out of activities and you should be able to get through Christmas without dreading the same time next year.

Memories of Warwick Avenue

There are a number of songs which not only remind me of my past because when I hear them they fire off reminiscences of that time, but because they specifically refer to somewhere that I have had a connection with. Having lived in Woking a great deal it is not surprising that work by 'The Jam' and particularly by Paul Weller himself falls into this category. 'A Town Called Malice' (1982) is supposedly about Woking where 'The Jam' grew up. 'Stanley Road' (1995), Paul Weller's third album is named after a road in Woking which I walked down many times and a video for one of the singles from the album featured the railway station. Ironically Weller as a member of The Style Council also recorded 'Come to Milton Keynes' (1985) which I did in the 2000s. However, the most recent song which has covered a location I knew is 'Warwick Avenue' by Duffy released this year, from her highly successful album 'Rockferry'. As I have commented before Duffy's music owes a lot to 1960s female singers such as Dusty Springfield, Sandie Shaw, even Petula Clark, though with a bit more blues, soul, US influence at times. Her songs are clearly rooted in UK culture and 'Warwick Avenue' refers to 'the Tube' which is the colloquial name for the underground railway in London.

The Warwick Avenue in the song is not the one in West London that I knew because it did not have an underground station and it was a residential road which led to shops and cafes but had nowhere in it that you could meet someone unless going into a private house. The one Duffy is referring to is between Marylebone, Kilburn and Notting Hill in western Central London, which does have an underground station. The Warwick Avenue my grandparents lived in is in Harrow, a large residential area of West London; it has its own postcodes rather than using standard London ones. It is still old fashioned in style, with remains of factories now retail parks, lots of semi-detached houses, small shopping districts, municipal parks, etc. It still sums up the post-war enthusiasm for a decent life with a community of people living in clean, reasonable sized houses and working in manufacturing or the service sector. You can almost feel that in the streets of the area even to this day when things are old and worn and manufacturing has gone. My grandparents seem to fit into that element perfectly. They lived in a semi-detached house in Warwick Avenue (all the streets in that area are named after British castles). It had three bedrooms. That fact in itself is fascinating as my grandfather was from skilled working class, working in car manufacture and my grandmother was a seamstress, yet they could afford to buy a three-bedroomed semi-detached house. My income is much higher than what someone in those jobs would be today. I earn £34,000 whereas an experienced car manufacturer worker earns £20,000. I am finding myself unable to pay for an almost identical house (his gardens were far larger) to my grandfather's even outside London. The purchasing power of ordinary people in terms of property has slipped a long way since the 1950s when he bought the house in Warwick Avenue.

That economic issue aside, this posting is about the memories of my Warwick Avenue, which are stimulated when I hear the song. I think I retain such affection for it because it was always a nice time when we went to visit my grandparents. Everyone would be happy and we would get treats. So, in contrast, to my parents' home it has only good memories. That is even though the last time I went there was following my grandfather's funeral (my grandmother had died a few years earlier) and yet it was a positive experience as he had died peacefully and as people say, you felt he had gone to a better place. In my mind his Heaven, was probably pretty similar to the house where we had the funeral tea.

To a great extent my memory of the house is as if it was an expansion of the rooms that you might see at the Geffrye Museum in Hackney, London (see http://www.geffrye-museum.org.uk/) which has reproductions of rooms through the ages from 1600 onwards with authentic furniture and fittings. My grandparents' house was like that, a collection of furniture and household items from say 1955-85 and each with their own charm, though many would seem rather 'naff' to many people seeing them, they sum up the culture of millions of ordinary British people in those years.

Moving round the house, I remember the metal gate with the rising sun logo so beloved of suburbia from the 1930s onwards, the steel dustbin with the house number painted on it, by the front door; the little indicator for the milkman that could be turned to show how many pints of milk you wanted in the porch by the door; the big shiny front door itself with the spyhole to see who was there as its glass with stained elements, was frosted. The bay window with the pure white net curtains looking out on to the small front lawn and its carefully tended flowers. Inside by the front door on a dark wooden stand was the telephone and the little box with the ditty on about putting in money to save to pay for the telephone bill.

Then there was the living room or sitting room. This was the first place I ever saw a colour television, with the red turned up so that everything was a bright pink colour. There was the glass-fronted cabinet of ornaments and books. I remember the collection of the popular 1970s series about Edward VII there and books about house plants; a shelf of glass and metal ornaments such as the see/hear/speak no evil monkeys. Above the fireplace with a 1970s gas fire was one of those clocks set on the large star metal backing, with long reaching out rays, below a painting of sailing ships by a hard. Below the gas fire a patterned rug, which for many years had tapestry of 'The Mayflower'. There was a sofa, a magazine rack, a small row of library books on the window sill. Then the large television. There was also the drawers, one of which held the toys for the visiting grandchildren, like a plastic Spitfire, the letter cubes, the plastic monkeys which hooked together, a fascinating 'things to do' magazine that I read again and again, with articles on follies and how to make a paper tiger and a puzzle about which of the children had to stand on which one's shoulders to reach the jam on the cupboard.

This was the main room of the family activities, lunch and tea at the folded out dining table. Plain food for my grandfather, and 1970s version of Chinese food produced by my aunt, lots of pork balls with bright red sauce. This was where we ate my grandmother's scones, both plain and cheese with tiny chives. This was where my grandfather would bring the ice cream, bought as a brick-sized vanilla block from the ice cream van as it stopped on the corner having played its tune. This was where we ate perfectly cut sandwiches, delightfully light sausage rolls and brightly-coloured trifle; meat with gravy and stuffing and brussel sprouts. We also had heavy fruit cake with heavy white icing of the kind deemed in the UK to be perfect for weddings and Christmas, and the yellow and pink chequer patterned Battenburg cake. This is all in jumbled order and straddling across seasons, but you get the ideas. Before the main mean were snacks and I was put off nuts-and-raisins for years because a stale packet was brought out my first time and I assumed that that was what they tasted like all the time.

It was in this room that the new technology was tested. I mention the first colour television, but it was also where I first saw a remote control television in use. Being a semi-detached house, there was concern that if it was pointed at the adjoining wall it would change next door's television channel. Here was kept the cassette recorder, that wonderful piece of 1970s technology, the size of a large brick, that allowed us all easy access to music or audio books and for children to record the sound of birds, little plays and quite often 'sound effects' of the toilet being flushed. It was here that I saw an instamatic camera used, with the piece of plastic you had to pull off to show the image. Here too, my aunt's soda stream that was supposed to be the cheap way to produce fizzy drinks by forcing bubbles into a cordial, but came out tasting of chemicals you would never experience in any other place. There was a door out from the living room to the rear garden, but we never went that way, it was always through the kitchen.

The kitchen was a busy place because food played such a big part. It too held gems of mid-20th century culture. The folding step stool, the various kitchen ornaments, especially the coveted Homepride flour plastic man in the black suit with the bowler hat. From the door frame into the kitchen hung coloured plastic strips making a curtain you could walk through, like many shops had in those days. The sinks had long rubber nipples on the taps to stop drips. There was a walk-in larder going under the stairs which was a treasure trove especially of baking ingredients, notably hundreds-and-thousands.

The back garden had the typical plain lawn running down to a high privet hedge which concealed the house behind. There was a small shed in the corner made of sheets of grey concrete. It contained the tools and odd items, but was never as magical as you hoped from sheds as a child and when older we tried to make it more so, designating it as the place to go for non-parent meetings. However, it lacked the smell of wood and gardens that other people's sheds had. This role was filled more by the large garage. This was jammed with old 'biscuits for cheese' and sweet biscuit selection tins full of nuts and bolts, screws, washers, nails and so on. Here my grandfather produced his bird boxes and wooden stalls. He would practice with his very darts to the sound of 'The Organist Entertains' on the radio. By the garage was the vegetable plot which ran beside the house. Not much of interest to children bar the polystyrene ladies wig head and the round mirrors of cord to scare off the birds. In the corner nearest the front was the coal scuttle where I found a German plate from 1941 with Nazi markings. The garden with its high wooden fences was an oasis in the grey urban setting of Harrow. It was functional too, but as children it could have its attractions.

As to the upstairs, well of course, in those days you were never allowed into your parents' bedroom let alone that of your grandparents'. From what I saw I simply remember dark green. I did go in the spare backroom occasionally, to listen to series on the radio that I was following that came on Sunday lunchtimes when I was at the house. I liked the view across the neighbouring gardens, for some reason it made me feel in connection with all the people around. I have always been fascinated by knowing at anyone moment even in a single street hundreds of different actvities are going on. As a child I always wanted to go home at least once with every child in the school just to see their daily routine. I loved the credit sequence of the BBC drama 'Sweet Revenge' (2001) which starts with an aerial shot running over various London streets for much the same reason. I suppose it is an element of nosiness, maybe an aspect of being a writer. I suppose I also like the cool stillness which was in contrast to the often overly warm living room.

The bathroom was another shrine to items of popular culture. The floor was yellow linoneum flecked with red and black. There was one of those long single bar electric heaters high on the wall that were switched on and off by a cord. There was Radox, in those days a box of crystals. We never had that at home, but I dreamed of the supposedly luxurious baths it was advertised as supplying, 'Relax in a Radox bath', I remember the slogan. These days the name sounds more like a radioactive chemical. Then there was the crocheted cover for the toilet roll with the little dolls head on top. This was the archetypal item of British culture of the third quarter of the 20th century. It fitted in with the leather covers for copies of 'Radio Times', wooden cabinets to hold the television and video cassette boxes that looked like leather-bound classic books.

So, whenever I hear a reference to Warwick Avenue, I am returned to this bubble of culture and of activity, good times stretched out over many years, but all bundled up together. Though the house's decor is so far removed from the places I live now, I guess that in my Heaven my house would probably look very similar or at least I could go and visit for a scone, a cup of tea and some Battenburg cake (which these days I like).