8 hours ago
15
Monday
A canal in Shropshire has disappeared into a sinkhole. I paraphrase, but not by much.
A report from the Cornwall Wildlife Trust tells us that 13 times as many octopuses as usual – about 233,000, or nearly 2m legs’ worth – were caught in UK waters this year.
Look, I don’t believe in signs but – these things are a sign. I don’t know precisely what of, but they’re a sign. When two freaky variants of two already freaky things happen, it’s a sign. And what’s freakier than sinkholes appearing or octopuses? Sinkholes are holes that appear out of nowhere. They are nowhere made manifest. They can happen anywhere, at any time. They just don’t care. You are safe never. The literal ground you are walking on could just give up on being ground and open up beneath you at any moment. This is no way to live. Holes need to be a thing that are only ever dug, laboriously, slowly, deliberately.
And as for the other guys. I mean. No bones. Eight legs. Brains everywhere. No bones. And now they are clearly mustering for an invasion.
Stay alert in 2026, that’s all I’m saying. Stay alert.
Tuesday
Here’s what I don’t understand. In the weeks leading up to Christmas, I have been doing twice as much work every day as I usually do so that I am free and clear for a bit over the actual proper Christmas bit and yet – no. I still have oodles to do before Boxing Day. How?
I’m not complaining, please understand. I love to work and I love my job, two facts that I frequently send up prayer-type-things of thanks for before I bend back over my laptop to recommune therewith. I simply cannot fathom the maths. Twice as much for ages should eventually result in some kind of gap in the timetable, no? Deadlines met early, extra stuff filed, cached away, that should mean something, eventually, should it not?
I eventually expressed some of my bafflement to a friend. “No,” she said. “What you have discovered is the essence of life as an adult. Time has no meaning. Existence is just one thing after another. You embrace that fact and move on. Or rather, you don’t. Because, as I say, this is life now.”
I’m not sure this is exactly what Wizzard meant when they sang that they wished it could be Christmas every day. But we are where we are.
Christmas Eve
A change is as good as a rest, they say, and today I am working on the train as my mother and I head to Devon to spend Christmas with my sister. The train left from Waterloo at 11.20am so my mother has been camping at the station for the last four days. I was in charge of buying the tickets so neither of us can be sure they’re right.
We discuss my character flaws all the way there. I try to distinguish between my moral weaknesses and what I call “just being a different person from you”. But it’s a hard sell.
Fortunately, one of my many defects is a willingness to partake of sustenance in public, because I was not raised by nuns who patrolled the streets of Preston looking for convent girls indulging in such venial sins and beating them to death outside Booths.
And one of my mother’s few points of ignorance is that she doesn’t know that alcohol comes in vessels other than big green gin bottles. So I am downing cocktails in cans without her being any the wiser and Christmas is looking good.
Christmas Day
My sister managed the whole thing perfectly. Great food, great presents, great reminding me to put my son’s stocking out before I went to bed – top work all round. The rest of the family did well too. I’d bought my husband the correct edition of the Dorset Pevsner he’d asked for, so he disappeared with that all afternoon.
We gave Mum all our odd socks in a big basket and she happily sorted those all afternoon while trying to remember the names of everyone in White Christmas and refusing her grandson’s pleas to let him look it up on Google.
We ate, we napped, we listened for the first time ever to the king’s speech and decided his mother probably wouldn’t be too ashamed of him. We washed up, we went for a little walk with the dog, we napped again, we agreed we should play a board game rather than stare at our phones, we did not play a board game, we went to bed. Strong recommend, especially the sock thing. She’s been quiet all day.
Boxing Day
We are, as I say, in the Devon countryside this year, so the traditional trip round the sales that my sister and I customarily take was not possible, alas.
I love the Boxing Day sale vibe. People are just so glad to be out, to be free instead of surrounded by loving relatives and weirdo uncles, to be looking round meaningless stuff again instead of having to feel gratitude and love and blessings and things. It’s got little to do with bargain hunting. In fact, if retailers had any sense, they would put their prices up. Everyone would pay the Boxing Day premium – the price of liberation.
Christmas is lovely but, like sex or massages, it is even better when it stops.
