Why does the whole country shut down?

AND so the big day approaches and here’s a second dollop of seasonal bad will. Last week it was Christmas cards; this week it’s Christmas travel, or rather the lack of it. Because, just like every year, there will be no public transport of any description. Just the odd plane. Every year they do this and every year it puts a fair few of us to massive inconvenience and expense. The powers that be who decide these things don’t seem to realise that quite a few of us have to travel on Christmas Day and we don’t all have cars. Many businesses are open including (to take an example at random) newspaper offices. The emergency services are still on full alert, hospitals don’t take the day off and there are any number of hotels and restaurants plying their seasonal trade. And yet everyone without access to a car who has to travel any distance at all has to use private hire cabs which, of course, all double their fares as a result.

Is it any wonder this is the time of year when tempers rise to boiling point? If you’re trapped at home, eating and drinking too much with no chance of escape and you can’t even take a bus ride to see a friend, it’s not exactly a great surprise if you lash out instead. If you’re going in to work, then you have to spend a fortune to get there, which doesn’t do a great deal for spiritual calm. The entire country comes to a complete halt with millions of little hot spots housing people who are about to explode and the lack of transport makes it even worse.

If someone, somewhere had devised a plan to make Christmas pretty unbearable for an awful lot of people, they couldn’t have come up with a better state of affairs than the one that exists in this country. A few years ago it got so much that I ran off to Vietnam and what with the flight and the time change lost track of the calendar until, eating noodles in Hanoi, one of our party remarked, “Oh, it’s Christmas.” And bah humbug to you too.

❑

ANT (as in Dec) has been pictured out and about, beaming happily and is said to be ready to return to TV. I bet he is. Holly Willoughby has won nothing but praise for her performance in the jungle while Dec seems more than able to go it alone. Ant wouldn’t be human if he didn’t have mixed feelings about all this success.