PIZZA AND IMPERFECTION

The whole world seems to be enveloped in a cloud today. A dank mist hangs over the lake and rain droplets shimmy from the bare branches.

It's grey and cold out there - the kind of day when you're glad to be indoors under warm lighting, clutching a cup of tea and writing about spam.

I'm actually busily avoiding a technical lunch on C++ 11. I'm not a developer; this foreign world of coding and classes and objects is not for me.

"There's pizza," said Marie, trying to convince me to go. I quickly remembered that for software developers, the promise of pizza is motivation enough for attending almost anything. That of course is why 'there's pizza' in the first place at these things.

You can see the reason it's popular: pizza is super-efficient. You phone up (or click online), order it, it arrives, you open a box, pick it up slice by slice, and eat it. It's a tasty combination of vegetables, meat and cheese, providing enough variety in each hand-held wedge. No cutlery, no fuss, no plates, no washing up - quick and delicious. To people who write code, pizza is an awesome solution to the age-old time-stretched, hunger-problem.

It also has that other delightful quality of being a handy reminder of how to calculate the volume of a cylinder. I've said this before, while waffling about the efficiency of mugs in the kitchen, but the volume of a pizza is of course = Pi x z^2 x a, where z is the pizza's radius and a is its thickness. Or, comedically, V = Pi.z.z.a.

If that doesn't appeal to neatly minded developers, I'm not sure what will.

Anyway, I'm avoiding all that today.

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The Christmas tree has arrived in the lobby. It's real and enormous. I reckon it's 12 feet high.

Again, it's far from conical and the branches taper unevenly to the top, where a gigantic five-pointed star glitters above the blue lights. There's a significant difference in branch-density between the bottom and the top of the tree.

Having surveyed pretty much all the artificial trees in Tesco, Dunelm, Sainsbury's and Stockholmhaven, I can confirm that a real tree rarely has the standard 6-6-5-5-4-3 pattern of branch distribution perfected by these plastic imposters.

This one's huge and imperfect.

Maybe, I wondered, gazing up at it, it's the imperfections that matter with a real tree. After all, Christmas is sort of about the nature of perfection and imperfection. In a peculiar way, real trees, the genuine articles, are recognisable for their lack of symmetry, their unevenness and their flimsy branches. Real trees are unique and imperfect.

Meanwhile, artificial trees probably reflect our desire for Christmas to be wonderfully symmetrical, perfectly complete, and the fairy-tale which we secretly long for and remember from our own childhoods. The perfectly conical tree with full evergreen branches is a shadow of the 'perfection' that we've actually created for ourselves, fashioned out of hope and ignoring the rather wonky reality.

It's possible that we need them both.

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Hmm. I think I might go get a slice of pizza.