E-mail clogged with usual festive missives
TIS the season for email accounts to become clogged by festive missives. They are, by and large, the usual Christmas culprits.
Today, I have received four charity pleas, three “fabulous” gift ideas, two police drink-drive press releases and a “dog’s not just for Christmas” warning.
The latter has bestowed upon me a lightbulb moment.
The individual who creates a pet that is just for Christmas – a small rodent guaranteed to peg it by New Year’s Eve or your money back – would make a mint.
As ever, a charity has urged me to think of those less fortunate.
I do. It’s a tremendous, warm feeling and possibly the only thing that gets me through the annual carnage.
An organisation called The Goose Council has urged me to simply “Think Goose” this Christmas. Actually, the email is bizarrely entitled, “Just a reminder to think goose this Christmas”.
I have tried, I honestly have, but happy mental images of those less fortunate than myself constantly hi-jack the “goose thoughts”.
This is probably for the best. One can spend too long pondering geese.
The “10 different things to do with your turkey” bulletin disappointed me, frankly.
Repeatedly striking a relative over the head with the bird, while still frozen, did not make the chart. It’s Number One on my list.
A “stilt-walking Santa” has also forwarded his details in an attempt to garner Christmas engagements. As an adult, I find the accompanying pictures disturbing and can only imagine the elongated Father Christmas is best used as a deterrent by parents: “Eat your sprouts or the nine-foot Santa will waddle into your room again.”
Tis the season for gushing, frantic phone calls from dizzy PR girls called Jemima, Jonquil and Amelia. “Hi, Mike,” la-di-daed one, “I just had to call you because something absolutely fantastic is happening this Christmas.”
“Are we all getting drunk, perchance?” I replied.
She dissolved into bubbles of faux laughter, surfacing only to gasp: “Wow, that Black Country sense of humour, totally love it! I recently bought a horse from somewhere just outside Wolverhampton.”
For “just outside Wolverhampton”, read Cheltenham.
“No, it’s even better than that,” she pledged, returning to the well-oiled script.
The life force slowly seeped from my body as she recited the sales shtick, ending her performance with a dramatic: “Then just spray ‘PooPal’ on the dog excrement stain on your carpet...”
“I’ve got a press release,” she added hopefully, “with images. Can I send it to you?”
I stared distantly at Broad Street’s glistening decorations and mumbled
“Just send it” by way of surrender. What the hell. Readers may find pictures of soiled carpeting a welcome reprieve from the stream of school nativity shots.
Tis the season for gifts from myriad organisations desperate to lead the pack in the race for pre-seasonal publicity.
Such is the paranoia surrounding the popular press that each unsolicited present has to be documented, a form filled out in triplicate then forwarded to my editor. He will then decide if it constitutes a bung.
“Spit out that chocolate brazil,” he shouted yesterday. “We’re not sure about accepting this one.”
“Is the organisation a bit ‘iffy’?” I mumbled through a mouth crammed with splintered nuts.
“No,” he bellowed, “but the sell-by date certainly is. They should’ve been eaten by February 13.”
This morning, colleague Graham Young, famously the Birmingham
Mail’s fish and chip shop reviewer, submitted a form that simply stated: “Roe (x2).”
Tis the season for very silly stories, the most silly being news that abandoned mutts at Birmingham Dogs Home are being “soothed” by Michael Bublé’s cover of “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas”. Sounds like a shaggy dog story to me.
The syrupy ballad is piped into their kennels, apparently. with one member of staff explaining: “The dogs absolutely love the Christmas tunes and they have a real calming effect.”
Am I alone in finding this akin to forcing bears to dance on hot plates? What ghastly experiment will they next foist on our furry friends?
Will men in white coats force lab hamsters to toil on their wheels to the soundtrack of East 17’s Christmas hit, Stay Another Day?
The RSPCA needs to be informed before the unthinkable happens and beagles smoke to Shakin’ Stevens.