Raymond Briggs

So, thank heaven, at long last it’s all over. Cards, cards and endless lists of cards in, cards out, addresses of cards pending. Then, address book which disgorges yet another list: the dead.

Oh, well, saves having to write him a card, I suppose, got to look on the bright side at this time of year... but then, big shock, one entire family gone. Mother, father, both in their sixties, son in his thirties. Unbelievable.

Twenty-two people in all, not old folk either, but contemporaries – contemporaries!? That still means old folk, twerp! You are an old folk yourself. Eighty-four in January. Wake up!

But two were really old: Ron, my neighbour on the left, lived alone, 92, died on a Monday; Ann, my neighbour on the right, lived alone, 90, died on the following Wednesday. Muggins in the middle, living alone, me, was wondering why he’d been missed out, on the Tuesday. Better luck next time? Known them both for exactly fifty years.

Also, every one of my friends and contemporaries has something wrong with them. So I am forced to think that, if you are in your seventies or eighties and you’ve got nothing wrong with you, there must be something wrong with you. QED.

Even while sitting here, writing the usual tripe and thinking of clearing up the breakfast things, it has just dawned on me it is time for The Big Clear-up. Both neighbours died in their early nineties, and very few of us will reach that age; so it’s only six years to go, if that.

I have already received one or two lifetime achievement awards and you can’t get one of those unless your lifetime is over, can you? They must be thinking, ‘This bloke… Wotsisname? Boggs? Buggs? Biggs? Briggs! He’s over eighty, better give him our award pretty pronto before he pops his clogs, could be any day now. I’ll tell Mabel to get going on all the paperwork bumf. She’s no spring chicken herself.’

Now, to cap it all, a kind neighbour has given me a cutting from the Daily Telegraph where my name is the answer to a question in the crossword puzzle. Hell’s bells and buckets of blood, as we used to say in the olden dayes at school; that is the final nail in the coffin, isn’t it? Go down in history as the answer to a crossword puzzle!

‘Illustrator/graphic Novelist noted for family favourites, including Father Christmas and The Snowman.’

Well, how could anyone living on Planet Earth not know the answer to that? I’ll have it on my gravestone, underneath ‘raymond is not a normal person’. Connie Benjamin was threeand-a-half years old when she said that. Little blighter.