It's Christmas?

BEING LOCKED AWAY with a glass of port and a slice of game pie, like some exiled club bore (sans tweed), is a synecdoche for the main benefits of the yuletide season; libation and gluttony. In one’s own company Christmas is a time of peace and quiet sanctuary. Suffice to say that this is an idyll have I yet to enjoy. As when you add practically anyone else to the equation, even people you like (not to mention those whose company you are forced to endure only at this time of year), the burden of enforced jollity and having to hold back on the gin is enough to break the spirits of the most persistent caroller.

Speaking of which, I am lucky enough to live beyond the boundaries of several high-security fences and starved packs of attack dogs, and thus I can avoid a pack of yobs mumbling the first verse of ‘We Wish You a Merry Christmas’ – which they begin to ‘sing’ only after you have opened the front door (entrapment). But it doesn’t end there. Wall-to-wall guilt-trippingly tearful charity ads? Ruined ‘Uncle Buck’. Free sample of M&S mince pie, sir? Using more sawdust than last year, I see. E-card of a family I’ve never met from a person I can’t stand? Why do I even have a junk mail filter?

All of these, however, I almost gladly submit myself to, thanking the spirits of Christmas, when I realise with bile-fizzing relief that I don’t have to suffer the annual hardships that many millions of people across the globe surely must experience in the form of the office Christmas party. Not belonging to any such organisation (though Will Self does provide a solitary alternative) I have never joined a conga-line around the desks, photocopied my intimate parts, thrown up on my boss (or vice versa) or a potentially reputation-ruiningly bad tryst with the-blonde-from-accounts. Some people would yell ‘bah humbug’ at me or call me a ‘Grinch’ for such unseasonable misanthropy – but let them jeer; let bad gifts and unwanted relatives come – for I am one of the sainted few who can hold their heads up high safe in the knowledge that, no, we did not have any Lambrini with that new temp under the desk.