Why I’m not dreaming of a Skype Christmas
HAS there ever been a more miserable, more infuriating phrase than ‘digital Christmas’? Images of individuals hunched over computer screens waft gloomily to mind, along with festive parties for one punctured by the desolate sound of the WhatsApp ping. Ding Dong Merrily on Zoom indeed!
But perhaps what grates most about a professor’s cavalier suggestion in Scotland this week that we all prepare for a digital Christmas, on the back of his statement that normal festivities this year are ‘a fiction’, is how exclusive it is. Because to be ‘digital’ is to be able to navigate all these new-fangled means of communication, from Zoom to House-party, WhatsApp to Skype to FaceTime.
It means having an iPad, or an up-to-the-minute mobile phone, and preferably a computer, too.
And yet many of those most at risk of having to submit to ‘a digital Christmas’, the elderly and the vulnerable, have neither.
Don’t get me wrong. I know plenty of people from the older generations who are a dab hand at Zoom (hello, Mum).
But for elderly people who have been locked away in care homes for months on end with barely any time with their families, it is a digital Christmas that is the fiction.
And there are other reasons why this sort of chatter nags. Most people – who have been in and out of lockdown since March – have been crawling towards Christmas. The notion of having something worth looking forward to, with twinkly lights, nice food and, gasp, human company, has kept us going. Now, in one short, too-clever-by-half sound bite, it is whipped away.
Talk like this is simply unhelpful. It f uels anxiety and depression, puncturing the hopes we have been holding on to.
I don’t want to hear about a ‘digital Christmas’.
I want to hear about what a ‘good Christmas’ might reasonably look like in the current climate, and what needs to be done to get us there.
THE latest gimmicky product l aunch? Alcohol- f ree Guinness. Hmm. Surely the only thing that made all those calories worthwhile was the fact that it also made you slightly tipsy? EVEN A- l i sters are not immune to ‘lockdown hair’. This week, Rose Leslie, pictured, who is expecting her first child with fellow Game Of Thrones actor Kit Harington, revealed there was something of a domestic accident when she attempted to shave her husband’s hair. ‘I took the shears in my left hand, and... I dug too deep,’ she said. ‘It was rather hilarious, but also awful.’