Cold, cold my lord!

Up, as they say, betimes; because vertical is better than horizontal: at least I can breathe sitting down, which is more than can be said for lying in bed! So, the Holiday Horror continues and, by my calculation, at least one other member of the family should be struck down by illness today; just to keep up the averages!

I have taken no pictures of the Christmas decorations in Terrassa this year as the Generalitat seems to have opted for the tasteful rather than the in-your-face approach. The main design feature is the string light effect: a combination of a number of hanging strips of small lights which form a rectangle which is suspended above the middle of the street. It seems altogether more muted than usual and lacks impact. The lights themselves are boring and only achieve any effect by repetition, and the fact that the hanging strip of lights has become a shopping mall cliché doesn’t help the civic impression.

The expectations from Christmas lights are changing (except in Cardiff where annual disappointment over the lack of effort for a capital city is an unchanging assumption) and, it seems to me, the local authorities are taking little effort to respond to this enhanced expectation.

When I was very young, the highlight (!) of the illuminations in Cardiff was, I remember, an animated depiction provided by W A Brain: a galloping horse with the body of a barrel of beer. I also remember one year’s Christmas class party in Glan yr Avon Primary School where Brains were the main sponsors with particularly large balloons and other impedimenta with the company logo inscribed on them. What politically correct local authorities would think now about providing young impressionable minds with early years advertising by a brewery, I shudder to think! How times have changed!

As British society continues in its dogged determination sluggishly to traipse after the worst elements in American popular culture: from their God awful food; their sinister take on Halloween, with its open invitation to infantile extortion; to their contemptible taste in sport (if you can call over-oiled, testosterone pumped, camp caricatures of macho man wrestlers sport) and finally including their approach to Christmas.

It is not enough for Americans that they have caused the traditional colour of Father Christmas to change from green to red to accommodate the company colour of the ubiquitous coca-cola corporation [I refuse to afford them the courtesy of capital letters] but they have also exported to us their vulgar taste for domestic illumination. I understand (and there is a current film which uses this as its raison d’etre) that Christmas in America is not only a time for rampant consumerism to assume its rightful mantle of the godhead; for the suicide rate to rise to epidemic levels and for theft to become de rigueur, but also for the tasteless domestic display of garden illuminations.

Aunt Bet tells me from her visits to affluent American suburbia, that Christmas was a time to tour the neighbourhood and marvel at the extravagance of public luminosity that free use of dollars could give. Translated into British this means seeing an endlessly unfunny series of illuminated Santas climbing up bizarrely truncated ladders past cheap scab-like plastic squares of meaningless lights like childish hieroglyphics which must have caused more road traffic accidents by drivers bemusedly trying to decipher them than those caused by black ice.

One house in Rumney has a rash of these glinting cartouches ‘decorating’ its road visible walls making the building pullulate with bad taste. Another house on North Road in Cardiff has become something of an institution by a sort of overkill in domestic lighting which transcends bad taste and goes into another universe by the sheer horror of its conception and the vast number of individual lights which are used. It is the Christmas equivalent of that house with a shark in its roof: an early Damien Hurst? Something which makes people stop and question: if only to ask, “Why?”

It is now half past nine: no one is up except for my good self. I am beginning to be able to breathe again, sometimes through my nose. Perhaps the world is not too bad after all.

This evening to Toni’s aunt for New Year’s Eve celebrations with small child and yapping dog and plenty of opportunities for cross infection! I am, of course, looking forward to the prawn mayonnaise loaf which is a feature of the New Year for me.

You can always trust food!