Great Success

Christmas went well, I thought. Went quickly, of course, but went well. The previous post was done in a state of panic--the war gong had sounded and the time for physical shopping was upon me, and from my extensive virtual shopping effort certain things had not yet arrived that were meant to have arrived...the potential for Total Christmas Failure was still very real. I don't want to explore the heinous chain of events that would have unfolded from that. That Other Self is out there now, right in the thick of it, and good luck to him.

Everything arrived in good time in the end, and I was able to pick up some cool stuff in town. Stocking fillers, supplimental gifts, gewgaws and baubles. We had the decorations up on the 23rd, which is a new record (we're usually busy right up until about 1am on what is technically Christmas morning, and then we get the decorations up and collapse exhausted on the sofa to watch Christmas Vacation). Christmas Eve was spent wrapping presents and boiling up a tasty ham (still have some left in the fridge, five days later, to be fried up for a sandwich in about ten minutes.) Christmas Day went by in a blur as usual...Boxing Day went much the same way.

It wasn't until the 27th, which I now call Neil's Day Of Peace, that I got to play around with any of my new stuff. My main present this year was a rockin' new weight bench, which will allow me to more perfectly BLAST various MUSCLE GROUPS and so on. Took about two hours to build it--the initial glance at the instructions broke my mind, and I had to be talked down from the upstairs bedroom where I was sat against the door sobbing quietly, whispering "no, no, no...". After building it and populating it with the seven stone of assorted barbell weights I had gathering dust in the junk room I gave everything a solid go. Bench presses first, then the various species of curl and crunch that it facilitated. Two days later I'm still in pain--turns out that the last eight months of workouts with the cross trainer and free weights made me a tad overconfident. Should have gone on the cross trainer first for a while to warm everything up, yes, like everything and everybody says. Well, lesson learned, and at least the newly-affected muscle groups have been very clearly identified through the medium of dull proprioceptic agony.

The Fear

Heading into town soon, into the maw.

It is the best of traditions, this Christmas death-grapple. The month must be December, the date must be greater than the 19th and less than the 25th. None of the same desperate energy on the 25th--the fight is already lost. You launch yourself into town and you do battle for objects of desire. It fires the blood, returns us all to our warlike roots, reminds us that it is truly every man for himself out there and everything else is just grease on the Great Reamer.

Meanwhile you are forced to think, think, think...grasp at inspiration from anywhere...I've searched my dreams and consulted the I Ching for ideas. Apparently the superior person examines the nature of things and keeps each in its proper place--so I should look for an organising tool of some sort, a shelving unit? I'd say it was suggesting a new jewelry box might be in order, but she has about seventeen of those. A filofax! Too anxious the young fox gets his tail wet, just as he completes his crossing. This is probably a more literal portent; half the town seems to be under water at the moment. There will be a certain amount of aquatic action; I must take care not to drop my stuff right before extraction.

The Late December Christmas Shop is a thinking man's battle, not some bloody pit-fight; victory goes to the smartest and the strongest, as is only right. Sun Tsu famously did all his shopping on the 23rd. Of his Nine Situations, this was number 4; contentious ground. Desireable ground, where victory conferred great advantages to the winner. Make no mistake, the Christmas Shop is the modern equivalent of tearing off your chunk of the kill and returning to your den with fresh Caribu flank dripping from your jaws. There is no option of returning empty-jawed, here; you'd be slain by your own kin and eaten yourself. You can see that same awful knowledge in the eyes of your fellow man at this time of year as they scurry to and fro.

In truth the desperation is not the same as in previous years. The presents for the wider family are all bought. I have a few things to aquire, and I'm still looking for inspiration...but at least this time I have a solid insurance policy against total failure tonight. That will confer an advantage; they will see the relaxation on my face and wonder, how? How is he not panicking?

What does he know?

791

This blog has 791 posts (including this one...why not?) It was started 2,338 days ago, giving an average of one post every three days. That sounds pretty healthy until you take into account that about 750 of those posts were made in the bountiful years between 2005 and 2009. Twitter put its wide-bore needle in me in 2007 and began to drain the pus from around my brain; by the end of 2009 it had drained off gallons and gallons of it, reducing the intracranial pressure below .48 psi, that critical point. Instead of letting things come to a head and sitting down for a monster blog session (with a mile of footnotes in the comments), it goes on Twitter.

Still the blog lives and breathes, though it is a sluggish, despondent thing, fat around the middle. It is faced with the dilemma of the immortal. Knowing it'll never die (and it will never truly die--this place will still be around in 2021, or as long as I need it), it's in no great rush to get anything done. It might as well sip piña coladas by the pool, watch girls pass, read a couple of crinkled and yellowed crime thrillers from the hotel library, and wait for the handful of more permanent things I throw its way. Meanwhile it can see beyond the pool, beyond the whitewashed walls of the resort; there's poor heavy-laden Twitter, whipped along the promenade day and night.

There will of course be a traditional Christmas Post and New Year Lament.

Jangling Hangover Theatre

It's Saturday morning...or 'afternoon', probably, to good Christians and working men. Evening even. Here on the edge of the Arctic Circle it's better to declare morning when you wake up, switch on your million-watt solar prosthesis and ignore whatever's going on outside. Grim nonsense by the looks of it.

You didn't know Derry was in the Arctic? Neither did I, but all the evidence points to it...the mercury hit -2 a few nights ago, as the front page of a certain newspaper declared below a headline like Arctic Horror Hits Northwest and pictures of frosty hedgerows. Frost in December! Christ almighty. Nature at its most perverse! I think, probably, they wrote their sky-is-falling-down announcement up front and ran with it even alongside that disappointingly mundane temperature.

I've been up for about three hours now, watching the snooker and trying to keep my poor rotten brain from foaming out of my ears. It's been a while since Bacchus and his mad court were invited round. His terrible Maenads are working on me now, clawing and wailing, playing their jangling atonal music and making sure I pay for last night. A bowl of Cheerios and pints of Robinson's Lemon Barley Water have brought me round a fraction; I think I'll live to rock another day. Sausages tonight I think. A shamble to the shop is in order. 

"Come Dine With Me" is on TV now. It's on about sixteen hours a day at the weekend, designed no doubt to make the masses abandon their living rooms and stimulate the economy. Five or six assorted weirdoes and perverts gather to nosy about each other's houses and eat cat-hair cheesecakes. There's always a wretched translucent vegan and some bawling manchild with a faytaw chweese awwergy to spice things up. There's going to be a Derry one, which will be amazing...I know because I got an invite from them to my old address, and recoiled in horror at the idea of being on some secret Channel 4 register of Weird Perverts, but discovered that they had carpet-bombed the town with invites, knowing full well that weird perverts are self-selecting. I can only imagine: Nazi memorabilia enthusiast Jan from The Fountain mixing a soufflé in a genuine German army helmet from the North African Campaign, big unibrowed Mickey from the Little Diamond going through her underwear drawers upstairs. Some fey gent called Dominic in full tweed waxing miserable about the loss he made on his four-hundred thousand pound flat overlooking an abandoned building site and the service entrance of the KFC. Nigerian immigrant Paulie Superman will be leafing through Jan's photo album from her last visit to Stalingrad and nibbling nervously on a custard cream. It will be brilliant.

I'm off to the shop.