Decorations & Detritus

My little frost-flecked Fulham-flavoured sprites.

Where have I been?

Deadheading busy lizzies in neglected suburban graveyards?
Playing head tennis with Les Dennis?

Amidst the profane chaos of your unravelling psyches, perhaps.

In actuality, I’ve been mooning around this manor like some forsaken phantom with no-one to haunt.

Ringmer, Hestercombe and Gowan, and all their blessed allies, lie engloomed within the fug of a Christmas passed.

Seasonal detritus dots them, discarded, forlorn.

And how pathetic my leaking brogues, only sustained these days by Parade Gloss and prayer, as they listlessly toe transparent sacks of Christmas wrapping stacked against the bases of lamp-posts. Bright red ribbon veins the pavements, as the crimson ink on a discarded gift tag slowly bleeds it’s greeting towards the kerb.

It’s over. The goose has been cooked, the copper cleaned. The angel has descended to earth and the gaudy baubles have all been boxed.

As I float about, living-rooms are subdued and lounges no longer resonate with festivity. Windows are dark now, their lacy tableaus of blinking lights dimmed for another year.

Scrawny firs and pineless pines lie abandoned on corners, curls of tinsel, like silvered catkins petrified by frost, trapped within their branches.

It’s queer, chums, but this recurring new year limbo always tends to attenuate my sparkle. In fact, the other day Mr. Rutter (antiquarian bookseller) cuffed me for skulking. The predictable sermon followed: “If you can’t be chipper, Maurice, at least be downright miserable. Suicidal, even. Mediocrity is man’s biggest enemy. Don’t mess with Mr. Inbetween.”

It only addled me further.

This pagan gaiety is fine, but a low pecuniary ebb always limits us. Christmas day, then, is like most days: a stand-up wash followed by a sit-down meal. Drink is drunk, the uneasy peace ultimately ruptures, and soon a swarm of cooking utensils is clouding the kitchen like chaff. It’s like an improv session at a knife-throwers’ convention.

Indulgences are few. Grilled kippers might melt beneath an extra scrape of butter. A few lobes of some grey mechanically-recovered game might be crowned by a solitary cranberry, menacingly crushed beneath the heel of Pa’s shoe. A cube of Raspberry Chivers with a marble poked inside can double as a pudding and a present.

Similarly the Maurice refuge remains undecorated, as Pa refuses to purchase anything that is not at least 40% ABV. He tried to convince me that there would be a market for paper chains backed with Whisky-infused glue.

Thus, as usual, Ma and me improvised. She purloined a candle from her part-time cleaning job at the church (the vicar insists upon fresh rushes up the aisle at this time of year). Inspired, and lacking any bona fide phizogs of Ol’ Santa, I cut a picture of Mr. Hodgson from the Hammersmith and Fulham News, fixed it around an empty pickled egg jar with a few spots of wax, and placed the candle inside.

It proudly illuminated our mantlepiece, radiating benevolence, right through to Twelfth Night.

Apparently, some erudite scholar once posited a world in which he wished it could be “Christmas every day”, which sounds like some kind of gluttonous dystopia if you ask me. Christ, imagine the walnuts!

Well, I know he’s lauded aplenty ‘round these parts as it is, and I’m not one for prostrating before false idols, but with St. Roy steering the sleigh around SW6 it’s pretty much Christmas every week anyway!

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!