Grumpy Oldie Man
Matthew Norman
‘There are creatures crawling under paving stones that would write better scripts’
The Germans will doubtless have a word for the condition shortly to be outlined. But, no modern linguist, I must resort to long-winded English to describe the mental collapse that reached its zenith yesterday.
Until then, I had smugly assumed that nothing could more succinctly portray the raising of the white flag to useful existence than the arboreal tableau observable in my front garden last spring.
Back then, well into the first lockdown, this tiny patch of unkempt west-london land played host to not one but two years’ worth of discarded Christmas trees. Both had long ago shed all pine needles, the bare branches having turned an unappetisingly wan shade of tan.
Their owner lacking the energy and minimal self-respect to shift them the few feet to the roadside, they lay limply outside the front door like some neovoodoo warning.
Knock, they mutely informed the innocent Jehovah’s Witness or charity pest, and it was long odds-on that the door would be opened by a hunchback named Igor, who would slowly turn his head and utter ‘Earthlings, master’ to a dark, unseen presence within.
Eventually, my son’s patience snapped, and he had sufficiently firm words about the trees to expedite their departure.
I cannot recall them verbatim. But his tone was eerily similar to the one with which he introduced the clothes he gave me for a recent birthday. My wearing these garments, he hoped, ‘will suggest someone less intimately acquainted with mental-health issues or homelessness. Or both.’
What he’ll say about this latest Christmas-related sign of surrender, time will tell. But it’s a safe guess that it will tend towards the trenchant.
Anyway, before the suspense becomes overwhelming, what I have done in preparation for the approaching Yuletide is subscribe to the Hallmark Channel.
This cable network, for any of you blessed with ignorance, is the closest the medium of TV has or will come to gifting the viewer a surgery-free frontal lobotomy.
The lexicon of idiocy (including the German edition) has no words to convey the depth and completeness of imbecility required to so much as tolerate, let alone enjoy, any of the myriad Christmas movies on Hallmark.
Each, apart from anything else, is virtually identical to all the others regarding what we will, with seasonal Christian charity, term the plot.
A young woman who left her idyllically snow-festooned hamlet some decades ago is a hotshot lawyer/musician/architect/ chef/dominatrix (sorry, that last one is my little joke) in LA, New York or Chicago.
Having wisely fled the anodyne winsomeness of small-town America, she is having a ball in the metropolis.
But then some compelling reason – a family illness, perhaps; an elderly aunt’s sudden incapacity to run the nauseatingly twee B&B – brings her home.
At first, being naturally bored beyond endurance, she cannot wait to return to the city. But then she is reunited with her high-school sweetheart, generally a widower with a monstrously cute sevenyear-old child in tow. Before you know it, she is smitten with decorating the Goliathan Christmas tree one knows will duly be off the premises by Twelfth Night.
So it is that she not only rediscovers the child-like wonderment of Christmas; she also learns, as Dorothy needed that arduous detour to the Emerald City to appreciate, that there is indeed no place like home.
Bubbling menacingly away beneath the surface, the subliminal messaging is repellent. This version of what the US far right likes to call ‘the real America’ is as gleamingly white as the snow.
These deceptively rancid offerings propel events on Walton’s Mountain or within that little house on the prairie towards the grittier end of the cinéma
vérité spectrum. There are creatures crawling under paving stones – and not the smartest invertebrates – that would write incomparably better scripts. These screenplays could be, and conceivably are, churned out by the least sophisticated software in the AI arsenal.
And I am irredeemably, unendingly addicted. With all the glorious culture in the world so freely available, night after night between now and mid-march will find me devouring Jingle Around the Clock, Christmas Bells Are Ringing, Christmas on Honeysuckle Lane, Christmas Next Door and dozens more of these clones.
Worse yet, my lachrymals will be sent into overdrive whenever Mary Lou, the allure of her Manhattan law firm having yielded to the passion for baking gingerbread, finally kisses Brad gingerly on the mouth. In this universe, you’re twice as likely to meet a drug lord or drag queen as a tongue.
Somewhere in Hallmark’s enduring commercial success, though it would take a non-self-lobotomised mind to write it, lies an intriguing thesis about how the marriage between casual racism and nostalgia lust helped propel a rampant maniac to the White House.
He will definitely be gone in January. Who knows – this year’s Christmas tree might be, too. The snivelling addiction to Hallmark, and the unconditional mental surrender it so brutally encapsulates, will not.