Business
as Usual
By
Dominic Horton
Thankfully
the festive season is now just booze under the bridge and life can
get back to business as usual. The day trippers who gleefully set up
temporary camp in the Flagon & Gorses in their lurid Christmas
jumpers will retreat back to their gymnasiums and television sets
with their New Year's resolutions that they won't keep, leaving us
regular inmates to dutifully go about our drinking and to settle back
into the gentle rhythm of pub life.
 |
| Philly the Gent (on the right, with Harry Stottle on the left) |
The
festive season can be an unwelcome time of year for those of us who
plough a single furrow. Every year I childishly look forward to
Christmas and have a naive expectation that I will
thoroughly enjoy every minute of it and have a glorious time.
But that has not been the the case any preceding year and this time
around it was no exception, though there were some highlights. The
expense, heartache and nuisance falls someway short of justifying my
participation in Christmas at all and if it were not for my dear son
Kenteke I would opt out of the circus altogether, not write a
Christmas card or buy a present or eat a single mouthful of turkey.
I would implore others to not to gift me anything or to invite me to
any festive events and if they challenged me on it, calling me
Scrooge (which seems to be the usual disparaging comment towards
anyone who dares to question the value of Christmas) then I would
tell them to shove their chestnuts up their ar*e.
Talking
of Scrooge I read Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol recently
but even that book, and the well known fable contained within it,
didn't have much of an effect of me and left me with no desire to buy
Bob Cratchit a whacking great turkey. For many people Christmas is
a sort of a suspension of reality, an escape and so is pub
going; if those of us who clock up the beer miles suspend reality any
more we would end up in cloud cuckoo land. Which might be a good
place to be while waiting for Christmas to pass over.
This
time of year everyone says “Happy New Year” to each other. There
is no doubt that it is the New Year, unless you are Chinese or Mayan
of course, but it has hardly been a happy one thus far so I hope that
things are on the upturn soon. My New Year started in the Flagon &
Gorses as I ventured up there on New Year's Eve and although it was a
pleasant enough evening, it was in essence just another night up the
pub but with a greater consumption of drink all round. There is a
heightened sense that one should be having the time of one's life
just because it is New Year's Eve and this can only lead to
disappointment. Being somewhat resigned to my fate I saw little
purpose in making any New Year's resolutions and I would bet that the
only resolution that most Flagoners make is to not make any
resolutions at all.
 |
| Ivor the Engine, by request of Toby In-Tents. |
Things
improved little on New Year's Day. I thought that a bit of fresh air
at the football would be the best tonic for my hangover and malaise,
so Kenteke and I paid our usual pilgrimage to Villa Park to watch our
beloved team play Crystal Palace, who are below us in the league
table, so hopes were high of a victory and a bit of entertainment.
The 10 fixtures in the Premier League boasted a bumper total of 33
goals, which is more goals than any other New Year's Day in the top
flight since 1987, so there were goals and free flowing football
everywhere. Except at Villa Park that is, where we were subjected to
a dour, lifeless 0-0 draw. The game was beyond grim. On the way back
from the match Kenteke and I had to take our demoralisation to the
Flagon & Gorses for a quick drink to help to begin to thaw out
the frozen conviviality in our spirits.
On
Friday I could barely wait to take the Christmas trimmings down and
return the living room at Codger Mansions to it's normal spartan
self; the operation didn't take long, mostly on account of the pop up
tree with baubles and lights already affixed to it. For a person like
me, who derives more pleasure in taking the Christmas tree down than
putting it up, the tree would have been better marketed as a “pop
down tree.” The tree and other festive lighting were put away and
the Christmas cards condemned to the recycling bag in
record time, certainly less than five minutes.
 |
| The Botanical Gardens, Birmingham. |
There
seems to be an explosion in the fashion for people putting up vulgar,
flashing Christmas lights outside their properties and I would
imagine a “keeping up with the Jones's” attitude has had a lot to
do with it, with neighbouring households trying to out do each other.
Those Jones's have an awful lot to answer for and it is about time
that they were held to account for what they have been responsible
for over the years. I do not understand why some incur the trouble
and cost to place Christmas lights outside of their dwellings as once
you are inside the household you cannot see them and therefore take
any gratification from them. And having to take them down in a
downcast mood once the Yuletide party is over must be a significantly
more soul destroying task than having to put them up (at the behest
of the kids but against your wishes) in the first place.
If
you are going to put up fancy lights outside then you might as well
do it in the back garden in the summer and enjoy their illuminating
glow whilst lounging on the patio. You could even invite the Jones's
round for a barbecue and show the lights off to them solely
for the purposes of one-upmanship but the smug b*stards will probably
tell you that they've had similar patio lights for years.
Philly
the Gent was telling me on Friday night in the Flagon that it will
take him hours to take his extensive Christmas decorations down as he
has more trees in his house than the Botanical Gardens and a display
of tinsel that can only be bettered by Hollywood itself. Given what
Philly was drinking I doubt whether he undertook the task on Saturday
but I might be doing him a disservice. If he's anything like me it
could go one of two ways – when I wake up booze tainted I can
either be highly productive or the morning can be a write off, it is
usually one of the two extremes. Often I view being hung over as dead
time as it is not possible to enjoy pleasurable activity, so I fill
the time by doing menial housework tasks and the like that are going
to be a drag at the best of times. And if you stay active and on
the move it makes it harder for the booze terror devils to keep up
with you.
 |
| Vulgar Christmas lights. |
One
thing that I have enjoyed doing over the festive period is playing
with my dongle. For those technophobes among you (which I would
hazard is the majority of my readership) a dongle is a small device
that can be plugged into a USB port to enable wireless access from a
computer to an external device. The dongle in question in this case
is a Chromecast, which you plug into your television set and it will
then play anything on your screen that you are streaming over the
internet on your laptop, tablet or smartphone. It was very simple to
set up and even a Luddite like me managed it.
I
had no idea of the amount of television programmes and the like that
are now available on Youtube, so for a mere £18 the dongle has given
me access to a practically unlimited supply of entertainment. I
started off with a few episodes of a childhood favourite, Ivor
the Engine, and I was delighted to find that the ravages of
time have not diminished the programme one jot, it still has the
becalming and uplifting effect that it always had. The wonders of
modern home entertainment are all well and good but all of the
laptops, X-Boxes, flat screen televisions and dongles in the world
cannot replace the pleasure of a pint of decent beer and a friendly
chat in the Flagon & Gorses.
©
Dominic Horton, January 2015.
Lowlife
is dedicated to the memory of the late Jonathan Rendall
Email:
lordhofr@gmail.com
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