LIGHTBULBS FOR FUDDY-DUDDIES

Here we are then. End of the year, start of another. Fireworks, champagne, promises and reflections, as the clock gently ticks over.

I am not fussed. I’m researching lightbulbs.

Hey kids, want to know what fuddy-duddies get excited about? Over here. 6500k lumens versus soft white, efficiency versus brightness, halogens or LEDs? This is where it’s at.

When I was young and cool (maybe two weeks in the summer of 1995?) I would have laughed at the idea that lightbulbs could one day be exciting. But they are, aren’t they? I mean, Thomas Edison works out how to pass electricity through a wire filament and it’s so bright and small and revolutionary, it’s as though a (ha) lightbulb (sorry) has just come on! No more gas lamps! They’re dirty and greasy and expensive. So long, naked flame! Hello, electric illumination! And then suddenly, it’s the twenty first century and here we are making our bathrooms glisten with daylight!

The funniest thing of all about being a fuddy-duddy though, is that it proves that we’re connected, like points along a ruler. Here I am at this end, watching videos about lightbulbs, and there I am too, young and silly, and laughing at middle-aged people who get excited about lightbulbs. You’ve got to admit that’s funny - like a person in a queue for a roller coaster thanking God that the terrified passengers whizzing over head will never be them.

Anyway, the little marks along the ruler of time are reaching an improbable measure of 2024, and we tick on. The plan for us is a little family time, some quiet games (we’re not exactly party people) and quite probably a cup of tea, Big Ben, and the inevitable volleys of fireworks that signal so much hope and so much thankfulness.

Oh, and maybe another quick flick through Amazon to see if they have any sales on lightbulbs.

FELL IN, WOKE UP, SIGMUND

“I dreamed I fell in a river,” I said nonchalantly.

No laugh came. She just reminded me that we’d listened to an audiobook where somebody fell in a river, just before we went to sleep.

My dream was different though. In it, I’d rented a boat that had run out of petrol, and had decided to paddle back to the bank using my phone as a makeshift oar. Logic (in case you were wondering) doesn’t have the same rules in dreams. In the panic of paddling, the phone slipped out of my wet hands and I watched it slide forever under the waves and out of sight, at which point, I somehow fell in after it.

“Sounds to me,” said Sammy wryly, “Like you’re too attached to your phone…”

“Alright Sigmund!” I cried, turning my voice up an octave, “What did you dream about, being featured in Psychoanalysis Monthly?”

That at least got a chuckle, but as with every sliver of humour I seem to come up with, it was gilded with the truth. I’m no doubt too attached to my phone. I think Sigmund over there, might be absolutely right.

I’m treading old ground. Screen Free Saturdays didn’t work when I needed to arrange things with friends and family. I read The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, just like everyone else, and the challenge was good, but so hard to put into action. Then I listened to Johann Hari’s excellent Stolen Focus and felt as hopeless about it as he said I would. Did I do anything about the addiction in my pocket? Nothing lasting.

Now here again, my dreams and my wife coincide to tell me the same thing again - not that I should chuck my phone into the Thames, but more that I should slowly let go of its attention-grabbing antics, and try to let it work for me, instead of the other way around. Perhaps that’s foolish - the talk of slaves who think they’re masters, or, let’s face it, addicts who can ‘quit at any time’.

What I really need a phone for is to send and receive messages, to be a satnav, a handy oven timer when my wife has already asked Siri to ‘set a timer for x minutes’, an alarm clock, and, surprisingly, a phone. Everything else can get in the sea. Or the river. Whatever. The trouble is there are other devices that can easily do those things aren’t there? Like, a satnav, an oven timer, an alarm clock, and, yes, even a landline. So when I really boil it down, what a phone gives me is speed and convenience, and that is honestly it. The contract is that in return you make yourself immediately available to the rest of the world by default. It’s messed up, really.

No wonder I fell in the river.

CHRISTMAS RETROSPECTIVE IN THE EARLY HOURS

It seemed odd to admit defeat to a sleepless night at 8am, but, I reasoned in the half-light, that’s Betwixtmas for you.

(By the way, society’s calling it Twixmas nowadays, which, for me, is a little too chocolatey, but I thought I ought to mention it. You know, just in case you thought I was getting it ‘wrong’.)

Anyway. A sleepless night. I wondered whether I had  stuffed in too much leftover pie the day before? It’s possible I suppose. Or perhaps that teeny glass of wine had taken its usual effect, and once I was dehydrated in the small hours of the night, there was no going back to sleep for me. I had, I realised, forgotten about the wine.

Either way, I was lying in bed scratching and turning, all to no avail, reading the news, scrolling the endless halls of social media, and thinking carefully about what I wanted to say about this Christmas.

We had a decent Christmas Day. I was so joyful to see Sammy’s reaction to her gifts both from me and  from Father Christmas. I’d almost forgotten that I’d be opening stuff too on Christmas Morning! I won’t bore you with the unwrapped details, but I loved every moment of that.

Dinner with Sammy’s family was a triumph, then the pudding was fanfared in, bright blue with brandy-flame, just as the King himself told us to be nice to people and look after them, which if you think about it, is rather a good thing to say.

I grew up in a house where presents were always opened after dinner, and in an almost post-Victorian manner, we’d go round one-by-one opening a single gift at a time, youngest first, of course. I hadn’t thought about that in a while. It used to take forever. That’s probably why, as the family grew and we started doing secret Santa, we found ourselves ripping off the paper all together, all at once. Three, two, one, go!

But this year, in Sammy’s family, we went round the circle, one-by-one, opening all the presents in our stack. If that’s not your tradition and the scenario instantly makes you feel a bit of stage fright, I want to say that I really do understand. From early years, my sisters and I were trained on how to react to gifts from relatives with an audience - some from far away and some in assorted armchairs around the room. I get it. My dad kept a notebook and made sure we had a record of whom to say thank you to. I got it - we did it. But admittedly it had been a while since I’d actually done any present-opening in the round, like that.

Well. It was fine. Around we went on Christmas Afternoon. But I sat there, astonished that I was suddenly missing my family. I thought about that for a while.

Boxing Day came. That was the day for it. We squashed into my sister’s front room - my parents, my nephews, my sister and her husband, my other sister (not the one who finds Christmas so painful), and her boyfriend. He is not a celebrator of any occasion, but he sat quietly and quite graciously, while Fortnite (the video game) was played on the telly and conversation ricocheted like interference patterns around the room. Sammy and I sat on wooden kitchen chairs. The rest sank into well-used sofas. I pondered a feeling I was having that I couldn’t understand, as though the last two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle were somehow not going to fit their spaces. Some things are too deep to explore all at once, I imagine.

The sky was growing slightly less grey, perhaps more white, out there on the other side of the window. I sighed, watching the duvet move up and down with my breathing. It looked like mountains, ruckled into place, cast into slopes of dark shade and weak light - like some alien planet, or the moon, where once a Lego space rover might have rumbled over the duvet hill on its way to a moon base, and a small plastic astronaut smiled helplessly from beneath its orange visor. Those were the days, I thought.

Those were the days.

FESTIVE SLIPPERS

We pulled away from my parents’ drive.

“It’s okay for Christmas to change shape,” said Sammy, kindly.

It’s a discussion we’ve been having over the last few days. The more Christmases you have, I suppose, the more keenly you feel it - that tension of trying to keep Christmas fixed into place, to lock it in position so it looks the same as ever it did, while Christmas itself has this habit of always changing.

Or, it’s fairer to say that people change, and it’s people, families, we, who celebrate this season. We change. And sometimes that means Christmas is a lovely pair of slippers you just can’t fit into any more.

This Christmas feels like one of those. We’re not making it huge for four-year-olds, or excited cousins. We’re not racing around making everyone happy, or spending the day like appeasers in an argument. There’s no drama; there’s just different, responding to the fact that we are the shape we are, that things have happened, that life has led us here. And what Sammy was reminding me was that that has to be okay.

Or, in other words, you make the most of your new slippers. I think that’s pretty sensible. Merry Christmas.

PRAYING DOESN’T SEEM LIKE ENOUGH

Hey Christians, have you ever faced a situation when you’ve wondered whether praying really is enough?

Not you, atheists; we know what you think. Although if you were plummeting through the sky on a plane with no working engines, I wonder if you’d give prayer a shot. Anyway, that aside, this thought’s for people who pray more often, and (if I can put it like this) actually write an address on the envelope and give it a stamp.

Anyway. Back to prayer feeling insufficient. I mean there are situations when people message you and ask you to pray and you can’t help feeling that closing your eyes and speaking to God about it is more of a platitude than a situation-changing prayer. That’s how I feel about my friend who has cancer and is fighting tonight in hospital. I can pray for a minute, maybe two, say ‘amen’ and then go back to my Christmas wrapping and hope that God does something. I can even message back with the praying emoji.

To be honest though, what I want to do, what I really want to do, is thunder on heaven’s gate until my fists bleed, wake up Saint Peter, and burst right into the throne room of God demanding to stay until he does… something, anything, to heal my friend.

Now, I reckon some of you will find that a disrespectful thing to say, and some of you will say that that’s exactly what prayer is. I don’t know who’s right, only that I don’t care about disrespect, any more than those friends who lowered the sick man through the roof. And I’m afraid that if the second group are right then I just don’t know how to do that in quite the way they mean.

I keep returning to the idea that whatever I mutter with my eyes closed and my head bowed, God hears my heart. I hope so. I hope he hears it through the night too, and I hope he knows the voice of a petition of people each lifting tear-stained faces to him on behalf of my friend.

THE BIG CHRISTMAS SHOP

We did the so-called Big Christmas Shop this morning. It was quite a stressful way to use up our nectar points, and given that there’s only two of us, we bought what I would conservatively describe as ‘half the shop’.

Honestly, by the end the trolley was so hard to push it was digging tracks into the tiled flooring.

I think on reflection, going early should mean going super-early. We arrived at about ten to eight, at which point there were barely spaces in the lamplit car park, and many a trolley load in and out of the store. It was busy.

Our second reflection is that using two zappers is fine, but only if you use different trolleys or bags as well. Embarrassingly obvious really, but when it came to a rescan, we didn’t remember what was what, and had to put everything through the self-checkout till. By then of course, it was about 9:30am and the supermarket was all trolleys and chatter. That was annoying.

We went round the Christmas tunes loop as well. I knew as soon as I heard Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s The Power of Love again (okay, not strictly a Christmas song, but John Lewis used it in one of their adverts years ago and these things just get stuck). Dean Martin or some other crooner ran tirelessly through all twelve days of Christmas again, and of course Ertha Kitt was pleading flirtatiously with ‘Santa Baby’ as though it were mildly funny. It’s not, by the way. Give it a rest, Ertha. I feel as though some of those songs have been on repeat for far too long.

“Just think: that’s the last time we have to come here before Christmas!” I sighed happily as we flopped back into the car and did up our seatbelts. Sammy chuckled as if I’d made some sort of joke.

It was nice that it was completed though. Oh sure my nectar points are reset to a cool £1.17 and it’ll take a year to build them back up again. Sure, we came away tired and a wee bit snappy at 10am, and sure we needed a hot drink to balance ourselves after the bustle of it all. But I kind of think it’s worth it.

WHITE CHRISTMAS

Our local paper has the chances of a white Christmas at 11%, with snowfall on Christmas Day at 9%.

Thanks, local paper. You’re about 10% too optimistic I reckon. I don’t even remember the last white Christmas, and every year the modicum of hope that an already unlikely and unpredictable event will happen on one particular day, is usually snuffed out a like warm snowflake. The Met Office has a predicted air temperature of 12 degrees, overcast and dry. From here, a white Christmas seems once again, a bit of a dream.

I wonder where Bing Crosby grew up. Every year he gets brought out to sing about the white Christmases he ‘used to know’, but how come he even remembers more than one? Where was this magical winter wonderland?

All of that aside, I think I prefer a cold-blue-sky Christmas anyway. You know, where it’s bright and chilly, and the brilliant sun casts long shadows over grass that’s still stiff with ice. Those are the Christmas days I remember. Merry and bright! And where the treetops glisten with December sunlight as you walk home from church, or through the park or wherever.

I’d have had a hard time slotting that into a heartwarming song though, I suppose.

CITY GIRL AND COUNTRY HUNK

We’ve been using our time wisely today with a few Christmas movies. Let me save you the bother of watching, with a neat summary of the plot… for every single one…

City Girl (usually a whizz at marketing) inherits a farm/town festival/bakery in Small Town she grew up in, up-state. She leaves Slick Boyfriend behind and drives there. Immediately, she meets Country Hunk and they dislike each other, probably over some simple misunderstanding. Country Hunk is of course surrounded by Cute Old Couple, Concerned Sister, and Adorable Child, who is the first to warm to City Girl over shared love of horses/cookies/Christmas. City Girl and Country Hunk embark on Festive Project, and it all goes swimmingly as she gradually falls in love with Small Town and, yes, with Country Hunk, until Slick Boyfriend suddenly arrives with his Moral Choice. Will she pick the level-headed, economically-obvious, community-destroying option to turn the town into a leisure park/condo development/wasteland, or the wholesome option of keeping everything just as twinkly and warm as it’s always been? Meanwhile, Concerned Sister works out that Country Hunk likes City Girl and confronts him. Just as he’s about to do something about it though, City Girl of course, picks the city, angering Country Hunk, Concerned Sister and Cute Old Couple, and making Adorable Child wide-eyed with tears over her hot chocolate on Christmas Eve. But then City Girl has Epiphany Moment, ends it with Slick Boyfriend and rushes back to Small Town to reverse Moral Choice and sweep up Country Hunk in a repentant smooch while Small Town celebrates underneath the twinkling lights and perfectly-timed falling snow.

There you go. Merry Christmas, and, you’re welcome.

CONFIDANTS AND BLASTERS

I’ve been thinking. How come there are so many things I’m not ‘allowed’ to talk about, and also a whole bunch of people who say they ‘don’t care what people think’ and just ‘say what they like’?

How can both of those things circle around each other? I mean, it requires algorithmic tact to pull the first one off. The second requires no discipline whatsoever, but could be considered, well, courageous. Hmm. Courageous or foolish? I’m not sure which, and, I’m not sure those people care anyway.

They do really though. I think there’s a strong human impulse to be liked, to fit in, to belong - offending everyone around you with a forthright I’m-right-you’re-wrong vibe is a quick way to a lonely life if you ask me.

But sometimes being a confidant, a keeper of many secrets, is just as difficult. We tend to gossip with those in the know, and be wary of what we carry when it comes to those outside the circle. We are constantly in danger of letting it slip, and every interaction feels like a puzzle in which our task is to work out who knows what, what chain of questions leads to where, and how safe it is to share an opinion.

I’m trying to be a better listener. It’s tough work sometimes - I think things - and information often gets lodged in my brain. I have opinions. Many of them are strongly held opinions, but I keep finding myself in situations where sharing them precisely is actually going to be detrimental to the group, or person I’m with, and possibly to myself. Listening to people feels like I’m watching an obstacle course being set up for me at the end of each paragraph. Will I make it over the wall, under the net, through the tunnel?

In a way, the blasters have it far easier. They bomb through those obstacles, make it to the other side in record time and don’t stop to think about it. I’ve known many a blaster.

It’s interesting how both of these things can lead to different types of loneliness - one where you know too much, the other where you care too little.

What we all need is safe, impartial friendships - people we trust and love, regardless of how we might accidentally treat and be treated by them. Confidants and blasters we might be, but the deep need for safe human friendship is wired into us all, I reckon.

VISIBLE PROBABILITIES

I wish you could actually see the pathway of probabilities. Say, you have an app that works on some wearable tech - glasses, for example. Then you say:

“Hey Siri. What’s the probability of seeing Gary Barlow in Sainsbury’s?”

And Siri flashes up (I don’t know) 6.7% as you walk towards the entrance, locking your car with the beeper. Then, as you go round, the number in the top right corner of your view changes. 4.2% in the meat aisle. 3% next to the headphones and electricals, and eventually 0% as you leave, and the chances expire altogether.

It would have been useful. What are the chances our kitchen will be done by Christmas? I might have asked it. Then, this week, I could have observed as the number slowly dwindled. It would have enabled us to get our hope focused somewhere else, I think.

Sigh. The one thing I didn’t want was to still be in that pod over the holidays. It’s so bleak; it’s like a builder’s portakabin, only with slightly less charm. It’s freezing in there, and the heater does next to nothing - and this, our first real, proper Christmas together in our house, is not likely to be enhanced by the ‘building site’ ambience. I honestly feel like I’ve let Sammy down by not managing to get this sorted out. I um. I can’t really bear that thought.

Gary Barlow probably has his Christmas hamper flown in from Fortnum & Mason by the way. Siri would know that. I just think it would be fun to actually see how likely a thing is, ebbing and flowing with real-time parameters, if AI could eventually take everything into account.

But of course, life is about navigating the minefields of catastrophe the old-fashioned way. Intuition, common-sense, tact, feeling, emotional resonance. I have a feeling that if we really did hand that over to a quick-thinking, omniscient computer, we’d be eroding our own humanity a bit.

We need the unpredictability, the bustle and fuss of Sainsbury’s, the last desperate dash for cranberry sauce and brandy butter - it reminds us that we are all humans, jostling alongside each other in a hugely unpredictable supermarket with the hidden probabilities of triumph and disaster rolling like a billion invisible dice, showing us the wafer-thin differences between the outcomes. We can’t all be Gary Barlow.

A SURVEY FROM THE BANK

End of the year. My bank sent me a survey asking me for my ‘honest opinion’.

Fair enough. My dishonest opinion wouldn’t be much use to them. Come to think of it, it wouldn’t be much use to me either, so honesty it turns out, was clearly the best policy.

I clicked through the screens.

Yes, yes, very good, very good, adequate, yes, no, no, adequate, yes, closing too many local branches, yes, and…

“Do you feel [the bank] has your best interests at heart?“

What an odd question. Of course they don’t! The bank, like every other business out there, like almost every person out there, has its own interests at heart, obviously. What kind of bank would it be, if my interests were top of its priority list? I’ll tell you. It would be my bank. I’d own it. And that would be awful.

My interests roughly align with ‘owning the home we live in’ - well that would be a lot easier if you just forgot about the interest rate on our mortgage. How about it, Mr Moneybags? Oh but my interests are literally my interests too, so you know that savings account that’s ticking over? You could just turn up the dial on that one, yes?

Oh. And how about that £1.7 billion you invested into nuclear weapons over the last two years? And the £12 billion into fossil fuel companies since 2016? That’s not exactly in my interest either. To be honest I’d rather you’d spent it on flowers, or maybe hospitals or something. Fancy switching tack and being a bit nicer to the planet?

No, I think the question was more about how positive a consumer-experience I’ve had, putting money in and taking money out - which is let’s be honest, it - the entire reason for the bank in the first place. I clicked disagree, out of principle. Though I actually think they do a pretty good job at the bits I interface with, even if they’d rather not talk about what goes on at the back of the shop.

Well they did ask for my ‘honest opinion’ after all. Maybe (and this is probably an unexpected result of their survey) they’ve convinced me it’s time to switch.

STRETCHING

Some days all I want to do is stretch out. You know, arms straight, fingers extended, legs strained and toes wiggling - everything pulled tight, the full starfish.

I’ve said this before, I know I have. But it is true - there are moments like this; moments when you realise you sleep curled up, you eat squashed and hunched over the plate, you work sitting down, then you drive and you’re still not flat. All I want to do is spread out.

Our house though, isn’t really conducive. Until the kitchen is rebuilt, the passage through the living room is barred, making the sofa out of bounds. Not that I could stretch on the sofa anyway.

The floor (everywhere) is dirty. So no floor stretching for me either. I have an office chair which is, well, a chair, and the only way to stretch fully on it would be so that the seat digs neatly into your bum. No thanks. Plus, there’s a high risk of slipping off it. Again, no thank you.

The bath’s too short. That’s just the mechanics of it, though it is quite nice to float in.

And all of that leaves the bed - which is what I would describe as 'perfect for the task'. Enough room to starfish? Yes. Completely flat? You betcha. Comfortable? Almost as though it was designed for it.

The only tiny snag with the bed is that I have to share it. And doing the starfish isn’t popular with someone who might get poked in the eye by an outstretched arm.

I think it’s about more than just physically stretching though. I think part of me needs to push and strain and test my limits, not remain coiled in the same old familiar way of things. I need everything within me to tense and relax, tense and relax, pound the rhythm of the heart as blood pumps to every outstretched limb. I need space, and time, and freedom.

And quite specifically, I need not to poke anyone in the eye.