Don't even think about it!

What is the worst thing that can happen to you in the run up to Christmas?

Just think for a moment. The worst thing.

There are the petty annoyances which don’t really count: forgetting to post your cards in time for Christmas; forgetting a card for someone who has just sent you a particularly expensive and impressive card; putting the wrong stamp on a card to Australia; finding yourself present-less when you have just been given a thoughtful and appropriate surprise gift from someone who has never given you a gift before; finding that the gift you have given someone is the same as the one that they have given you – and therefore they must have seen the same half price bargain as you! These are the minor tragedies of the festive season.

Food mishaps are in a league above. The frozen turkey and the burnt vegetables; the desiccated Christmas pudding; the prawn ring which tastes slightly odd and the mince pies which appear to retain temperatures which match the heat level of a solar flare. These are bad.

Drink is in the top league. Too much or too little; the same horrors can be unleashed. Finding that you are forced to use the cooking sherry (honestly, that’s what it was bought for!) as an alcoholic standby. Realising that to be polite you will have to sacrifice that rather wonderful bottle of vintage Rioja that you had been saving up; watching your guests knock back booze as if it was free, rather than the almost three pounds a bottle that you paid for it – these are not nice. Discovering that you have a hitherto unsuspected penchant for Snowballs and indulging it until the whole bottle of advocaat has magically evaporated. Testing your appreciation of whiskey and telling everyone that you really can tell the difference between decent single malt and Teachers while swigging it back like pop – these are shaming things. But not the full Monty, the real horror.

Let me set the scene. Conversation (ha!) has become, perhaps, a little insipid; the coruscating wit and incisive aphorism have momentarily fizzled into sullen silence and even the latest exploits of the doubly incontinent offspring fail to evince any exited interest – now is the time to do the modern equivalent of opening the piano and producing a home make concert party. The time has arrived to surrender to the pitiless God of entertainment, the omnipresent comforter, the healer of fractured relationships – the television.

So the full horror of the Christmas Season should now be obvious: the bloody thing breaks down!

Last night we were watching the exploits of the ever creepy Damien (still in their militaristic infancy) with our evil hero merely looking ‘like that’ and giving viewers the creeps as his evil corps begins to form around him. Leo Mckern (bless him!) had just been suffocated by cascading sand while praying resolutely against the future naughtiness of the military cadet with the longer than regulation hair when the picture suddenly and without warning became a long think streak of light and then, darkness with the sepulchral voices of American horror sounding from the dead box.

No television! Life without pictures! Unthinkable!

So we went to Tesco and got another one. At night! In the fog! Just think of it: in Britain, at midnight, a television! The wonders of a 24 hour culture! Your every materialistic need catered for.

This was, however, forgetting about the box. Boxes today are wonders of three (or possibly four) dimensional geometry. The ipod packaging is a masterpiece of understated elegance. The sort of box which, when you have taken out the contents it is virtually impossible repack without irreparable damage to contents and self.

This is in contrast to vacuum packed items which are impossible to get to. Some vacuum packed items are cunningly packaged in a thermostatically sealed package with an outer edge which looks as though all it needs is to insert a stout finger nail for the parts to fall asunder allowing you access to the delights inside.

Do not be tempted! The only thing that will fall apart will be the flesh which used to attach your stout nail to your finger.

If, after bloody experience, you scorn to leave body parts at the margin of industrial packaging and resort instead to a pair of scissors, you will still be thwarted.

You are not stupid and so you will realise that injudicious and cavalier use of the scissors might well result in damage to instructions which are squeezed into some arbitrary internal space. If you avoid the destruction of the instructions then you will probably cut through some essential element in the item which is invisible to the naked eye. So you snip your way through the plastic leaving a margin of safety.

And it won’t open. What you thought was open space between the two sides of the package is, in fact, sealed plastic with the tensile strength of tempered steel. You have to augment your primary incision with other cuts of increasing desperation until you have destroyed through sheer frustration an essential part of the instructions (leaving the only complete instructions as those in Serbo Croat) and you will also have sliced though something else which you soon realise is essential to the efficient working of whatever it is that you have bought.

So having failed to open the damn thing efficiently; having destroyed the only understandable instructions and having broken An Important Part, you would think that the inanimate artefact would be satisfied, but no, there is more.

Your cutting has produced a variety of interesting plastic shapes, many of them assuming the form of crude blades or knives and, sure enough, as a final initiation into the Fraternity of Failed Openers, one of them will plunge deep into the fleshy part of a finger to produce the sanguine culmination of the ceremony.

At least the television box was made of cardboard. But it could not fit into the car however we pushed, prodded, angled and cursed.

The dimensions of the box could have served the old fashioned theatre companies as a travelling auditorium!

The horror of getting the thing back home is as nothing compared with the logistics of getting rid of the packaging. It is a double bluff situation because I am now conversant with the techniques of shops which reject any attempt on the part of any disgruntled purchaser to return the item in anything other than its original packaging. (Is that legal?) Most modern homes would need a moderate sized warehouse to house the packaging which they need to keep in perpetuity (or at least until the expiry of the warranty!) I must be one of the few people in the modern world who can put his hand on the cases and boxes for all the computer programs on the machine!

Smug is good! Anyone want any cardboard?