MODERN STEREOTYPES

The decoration downer

Marcus and Rose are in the middle of something even more horrible than the challenge of Dry January: taking down the Christmas decorations. It is a race against time as Rose suddenly realised it is Epiphany, Jan 6, Twelfth Night – call it what you will but if they don’t get the bloody tree down by midday they’ll have bad luck for the rest of the year. And, frankly, it isn’t looking too good anyway. Every dinner party they’ve been to has descended to a Brexit-moan by time the Waitrose salted caramel tart hit the table.

Deconstructing Christmas creates even more ill-temper than putting the tree up. As ever, it is the fairy lights. Marcus, determined to put them away scientifically, is in denial that no lights in the history of fairy lights have ever fitted back in the box. Particularly not a 1,000-bulb string bought online. The children, who might have helped, melted away to friends when the depressing task was mentioned. Then there’s the tree, so recently the harbinger of merriment, now denuded and forlorn, awaiting Marcus’s ministrations with the saw. It never fails to incite the first domestic row of the new year that he insists on performing amputation indoors “because, Rose, it will be easier to get it into the garden through the French windows. Obviously.” There’s a hideous threat that “stupid woman” may be muttered under his breath.

The windows have to remain open as the branches are expedited, so both Marcus and Rose require polar clothing and her hands are so cold that she has dropped several favourite baubles. “Now look what you’ve made me do! That glass robin was Granny’s, it was on her tree all through my childhood.”

Tears are imminent, little being more satisfyingly lachrymose as the evocation of Christmases past. Or irritating than the fact that Rose will find pine needles under the furniture until June. Marcus’s punishment is that, come next December, the lights will have ravelled themselves into a Gordian knot and he’ll have to test 999 bulbs to find the one that needs replacing.

No fairy lights in history have ever fitted back in the box