Have you done your Christmas decorations yet? We’re normally amongst the last in our vicinity to do this, but this year we’re somewhat ahead of the game. We’ve discovered that leaving it to the last weekend before Christmas is not acceptable when you have a 3 year old (going on 4) grandson making regular visits. A bit more enthusiasm is, apparently, required.
The outcome of all this was that
last Sunday I was attempting to do practical things. This is never a good idea where I’m
concerned. I’m excused all things
practical. Nevertheless, on a bitterly
cold afternoon, with the grey light fading rapidly, I could be found teetering
on the top of a three-step stepladder, attempting to fix some lights to our car
port in what might be laughingly called, an artistic fashion. When I had dropped a cable clip for the
twelfth time and had climbed down to pick it up again, the air surrounding me
had changed to subtle shade of blue.
Little expletives, like ‘oh heck’, had matured and grown into something
considerably more robust and Anglo-Saxon.
Essentially, my demeanour was that of someone being placed under
considerable strain by some malign force.
I kept asking why, whatever it was, was choosing to do this to me.
In this respect, I realise that I’ve
become very like my dad. Father had
little or no patience for any practical activity. If he was nagged into doing something, we all
shrank back and waited for the growing volume of put-upon expletives and the
inevitable outburst of temper and frustration.
Dad, like me, had no proper tools of any sort, largely because neither I
nor he would have had any clue as to what to do with them and so we’re
marginally safer without. What we did
have were a motley collection of screwdrivers , along with a bunch of assorted
spanners mostly emanating from bicycles past and present. Anything that didn’t fit with any of these
would be tackled with the nearest equivalent from the cutlery drawer.
Father’s wail of anguish would
usually begin with an ‘Oh God!’, often before he had actually attempted
anything and was merely in the contemplative stage. This would then be repeated at regular
intervals in a rising crescendo of frustration.
“I’m chokker” (which I imagine had it origins in choc-a-bloc, but
basically means ‘I’m fed up’) would be a constant chorus, usually leading to a
final outburst of “Oh for….” which usually closely preceded everything being
thrown down and dad heading off to the pub in high dudgeon.
I wonder if the origins of all
this might be found in an incident that took place before I was born? Apparently, as they approached their first
Christmas as a married couple, mother suggested to father that he might make
himself useful by putting up the Christmas decorations. This was in the days when it was the done
thing to have paper streamers draped across the room. Mum had apparently been delayed at a
pre-Christmas drinks thing at the Depot where she worked on Burton Road,
Branston and, unusually for her, had perhaps indulged a little too freely. Therefore, when she got home, full of the
joys of Christmas, she encountered my dad teetering on a chair (they never had
a set of steps in their married life) attempting to attach a paper streamer to
a wall and not in the best of humours.
It was just at this point that the drawing pin he was using must have
come into contact with a barely concealed mains electric wire. Apparently there was a flash and a bang, and
dad was dumped on his derriere on the other side of the room. All of which would have been bad enough but
one of mum’s most endearing characteristics, which stayed with her all of her
life, was that if she found something funny she would abandon herself to
laughter, which she did on this occasion.
So, as father checked his limbs and extremities to ensure he still had
the requisite amount, mum could be found dissolved into a heap of hysterical
laughter on the sofa.
Whenever this story was recounted
over the years (which was many), mum still found the incident hysterically
funny and dad usually glowered and muttered darkly about the dangers he had
braved without being appreciated.
Apparently (and I’m sorry about
this) their first Christmas began with a bang and not with a streamer!
