Two down

26 December 1999

I must be crazy writing to you like this. Well - there's no "must" about it. I am crazy. Stark staring bonkers. I'll probably delete the lot in the fullness of time, but for now let it stand, as a monument. Stet. Imprimatur.

Yesterday, Christmas day, was little less than agony. For the first time this season I found myself desperately counting the hours. Comforting myself that seeing as it had started, then the worst was over, and all that was left was to remain alive until the end. Which I did.

The weather could hardly have been more depressing either. Thick, almost unbroken cloud, with just that glimmer of bright on the horizon which does nothing more than remind you that things are better elsewhere, at the rainbow's end. Thanks for that one, Judy. Then lashing rain in the evening. Not that I wanted to go anywhere, mind you, as I have nowhere to go.

It's certainly at times like this that you count your friends, and they don't take long to count. I would imagine an average one-year old could enumerate the totality. Fifty-three (almost) years of selfless giving to others, both young and adult, for what? Who loves ya, baby? No fucker. But thanks to those who did make that tiny effort, and they know who they are.

The depression boards also fell silent, as each of us grapples with the enormity of the Christmas myth. Not the spiritual myth - not that at all - that hardly occupies a moment of the programming. No - the myth of love and family.

"Oh - it's for the children!" we all cluck, paternally. Fuck that. It's because we nearly all have such happy childhood Christmases that the full horror of the adult version - old, alone and unwanted - has such devastating poignancy. Had we not been exposed to that childhood sugariness, that false promise of of unending yuletide Teletubby bliss, then the contrast with the stark reality might not be so heart-wrenching. Christmas, as currently practised, is not just humbug. It is evil incarnate.

And that's why people top themselves in such numbers at this time of year. Sitting shivering in their bedsits with only cathode-trash for companionship, we have, each and every one of us, the indelible memory of joys and gifts and warmth and love from our parents, who sometimes (but not always) managed to stop fighting for a day. Not usually more than a day.

Old, unloved and unwanted we can handle. We have them all year round. It's not other people we fear at Christmas, it is the ghost within us.

That's the shortest day and the happiest day coped with again. Now there's just the millennium. I don't know how many more times I can stand this. Two down.