Making the Cat Laugh (30 page)

Much has been made of the popular ‘unheard’ characters in
The Archers
– such people as Higgs, Shane and Pru Forrest, who neatly contrive to pop out suddenly (‘He was here a minute ago –’) to check the Bentley, the quiche, or the victoria sponge,
and so avoid contact with the listening public. But only at Christmas does one become powerfully aware of the Ambridge plebs – that mob of mute, unnamed, disenfranchised villagers who must surely constitute the bums on seats for each miserably jolly extravaganza the Ambridge nobs can dream up for their delectation.
Who are they, these faceless inferiors? What does it feel like to be valued only for one’s bum?
The rest of the year, they patronize the village shop, use the services of the doctor and vet, buy pints of Shires in the Bull, and take early morning swims at the Grey Gables health club – and presumably don’t feel particularly second-class or invisible. But at Christmas, as they shuffle into that village hall, sit down and open their programmes, their wraith-like howls of bitter dismay must be audible all the way to Borchester.

I was put in mind of these non-people when reading yesterday of the nine-year-old Shetland schoolgirl whose mother is keeping her at home because of a disagreement with the head teacher. Nothing remarkable in that, you might think, until you discover that the girl (poor thing) is the real-life equivalent of the Ambridge nobs. If this school has a panto, she stars in it automatically. If it has a hockey team, she is its captain and goalie. And if there is a maths test she sets the standard. She is, in short, the only child at the school; and no wonder she is having problems. Other children can stand at the back when netball teams are picked; they can bend down and tie up their shoelaces. Not this girl. For her, there is no hiding place; she is forever in the spotlight. And every time the English teacher says, ‘Now who’s going to read aloud this morning?’, she is obliged resignedly to raise her hand, otherwise the whole pedagogic caboodle crumbles instantly to dust. On speech day, when she wins all the prizes but nobody claps, she must dearly wish for another life.

Where the intense weirdness comes in, however, is that initially she was sent home for misbehaviour – a very strange
case of
pour encourager les autres.
Sometimes she must dream of classmates – of skipping while other people turn the rope, of marble games in which you lose the yellow one and go home crying, of rough children pushing you into a hedge for no reason – just as Phil Archer must sometimes think that in a place like Ambridge there must be some other muggins who can play the joanna. But at least she knows that having been sent home, she is not the subject of a whispering campaign. One just wonders whether her head teacher, having evidently lost his patience with the girl and said, ‘You! Trouble-maker! Out!’, really felt much better when she’d obeyed, shrugged and gone home. Is the school running more smoothly now? Do the nativity play rehearsals progress without incident? In this Shetland school, as in Ambridge, I suspect you may eavesdrop on the festivities this year, and hear the famous eerie sound of one hand clapping.

The announcement of the Princess of Wales’s controversial Christmas holiday plans contained an important sub-text, I thought, which somehow got ignored in the usual flurry of pecking and stripping to the bone when the vultures descended. ‘You are blind!’ I shouted at nobody in particular, as I pawed through my heap of tabloids. I mean, of course, yes, Diana’s decision to spend Christmas away from the royal in-laws has ‘fuelled speculation’ (yawn). And yes, too, it has encouraged sentimental visions of Christmas Future at Sandringham, with the royal family casting sad-eyed Cratchit-like glances at the forlorn little wooden stool on which the princess formerly sat. But in the rush for that 4-star speculation-fuel, nobody noticed that in terms of universal yuletide family politics, Diana had achieved a tremendous coup. She had really caught them on the hop. To announce your Christmas plans in the first week
of November is the mark of a brilliant tactician, family-wise. They can’t possibly have been prepared for it. What she did was the equivalent of winning the race while her competitors were still indoors lacing up their plimsolls.

Christmas is an awful thing, in my book. Ding Dong Merrily has little to do with it; and there is a limit to the number of times you can pretend not to know the ending of
Superman II
. Sometimes I sit back and imagine that Christmas will really be cancelled this year, and the idea fills me with excitement. So I envy the princess her determined effort to avoid the tidal pull of the family Christmas, and I would emulate her like a shot (‘Off to Morocco, sorry!’) if I did not suffer currently from ‘denial’. You know that you can be ‘in denial’ about bereavement or alcoholism? Well, I have a theory that you can also be ‘in denial’ about Christmas, which makes it ultimately more dangerous.

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:

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.

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.