Christmas Poem 2024. In English and in French. Happy Feasts.

A massive shadow shifts behind the line of the horizon.

It is the head of Santa approaching from the North.

It climbs over the hills and peaks. It is now amongst us.

Like during the annexation of Austria. Infiltrating

Into our world. With its jollity, its Christmas songs,

Its frantic desire to sell us more stuff.

But be comforted. This annexation

Will only last a couple of weeks.

Soon the invasion will disperse, the forces will retreat

And sweet normality will resume.

Une ombre massive se profile sur l’horizon.

C’est la tête du Père Noel qui s’approche du Nord.

Il grimpe les collines, les sommets. Il est parmi nous à présent.

On dirait l’annexion de l’Autriche. Il s’infiltre

Dans notre monde. Avec ses chansons saisonnières, son fun,

Son désir frénétique de nous vendre plus de trucs.

Soyez rassuré. Cette annexion

Ne durera qu’une quinzaine.

Bientôt l’invasion se dispersera. L’ennemi se retirera

Et la douce normalité  reprendra son règne.

http://www.peoplearerubbish.com

In my movements from home to one place of work to another place of work to home I maintain a strict and instinctive adherence to the regularities of the clock. I leave home at 8.30 every morning. I am not looking at the clock. I just sense it. Like I sense that the alarm will ring at 7.30 and so wake up automatically at 7.29. I am like that, embedded in time. This means that I tend to come across other people who also obey the demands of the clock: children going to school; adults going to work. There is a particular pair of mother and child that I unfailingly pass on the curve of the Oval at about 8.34 every morning. This has been going on for a couple of years now. I know them well and they, or at least the mother, know me well, though we have never spoken, nor even exchanged other than a furtive glance. Certainly never acknowledged the other’s presence. But the periodicity of our superficial encounters has produced a strange, magical relationship. Magical in that it has sprung up from no active behaviour on our part. It is, I suppose, the same kind of almost erotic frisson that occurs when two people are stuck in a lift together. The imposed intimacy can often sent up a highly charged bond between the two, the sense of having experienced a moment that fate has ordained. I wonder if I will ever acknowledge that mother and child. If, in some future moment we are ever obliged to confront each other, to say hallo or good morning in a village fete or a town hall community meeting to discuss the saving of the local post office, it would be as if we are picking up a historical relationship with all its melancholy and regret.

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My back is increasingly becoming the focus for much of my speculation and memory. A parcel of it near the shoulder blade on one side was given a mild massage about four days ago and only now is it recovering from the painful aftereffect. My conclusion is that it needs mostly to be kept underwraps and not overly stimulated. It was only a few years ago that I located the pain I habitually feel after walking for a mile or so. It is just to the right of my spine about three quarters of the way up. I suspect it is a nerve that gets bothered because of faulty posture. The only solution when this happens is for me to stretch out on a park bench on my front and for me to be sat on for a couple of minutes. This gives me another mile of relatively pain free walking before it starts again and we look for another empty park bench. Sometimes we wait by an occupied park bench, hovering in the sinister manner that someone who doesn’t look right is supposed to in a train station before planting a so-called device. I don’t know what happened to my back in the dark backward of time. I have a misty recollection of when I slipped on the lawn behind our house as an adolescent and fell, as they used to say, arse over elbow right onto my spine. Was that blurry moment the cause of all my back issues? In any case, it’s all bearable, and I only need this back for one lifetime.

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On the tube today a man came along the carriage begging for money. For once, I had some coins in my pocket and handed over £1.25. The man gave me a fist pump and a tap on the shoulder and called me his brother. I smugly sat back and tried not to catch the eye of any fellow travelers who were perhaps suitably humbled. At the next stop a slew of five or six-year-old children tumbled into the carriage with their teachers and minders, on the way to the museums at South Kensington. The teacher spoke out: would anyone be willing to stand up to let the children sit down? The woman next to me stood up. Well, one: I’m against grown-ups standing up for children. Two: I’d already forked out £1.25 that morning. I did not let the woman who had stood up catch my eye. So I sat next to the kids and overheard one boy starting up a game of I Spy. I spy with my little eye. Something beginning with…, he said. Black, blurted out an Indian boy next to me and laughed. The boy starting the game was black. Yes. It’s a moral minefield on the district line.

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It was the dreadful Milton hurricane that struck Florida last night. This morning I caught an edge of an interview with someone on the radio who said it hadn’t been as bad as she had imagined. Instinctively my heart sunk. I felt it descend, even though I knew it shouldn’t. The little boy in me wanted some great footage of devastation. I immediately tried to haul myself back into feeling a sense of relief that it had not been as catastrophic as had been foreseen. I am not a cruel man. and I am not a kid. And yet, there is this nasty residue from some more primitive nature somewhere that wants an action movie rather than a humane outcome.

‘The poetry is in the pity’, someone once said (was it Wilfred Owen?). The poet looks through the drama and finds the human, by-passing the lust for chaos which might just brighten up a dull morning.

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I have been looking for a chocolate brown jumper for many years now. Men don’t get colours offered to them by the commerce. All we seem to require is grey and navy blue. Recently I have turned my attentions to a pair of yoga pants/sports bottoms for my trips to the gym. My most recent pair of bottoms I got from Decathlon. Useless looking in the men’s aisles. Men’s sports bottoms are gathered at the ankle and low in the crotch. They make you look like an ape. So I looked in the women’s section and tried on a pair of Extra Large women’s. Black, so discreet enough. Perfect for my purposes. Elegant and not too effeminate. This week I pushed the boat out into unchartered waters and bought a chocolate brown pair of women’s sports bottoms on line. Today was their first outing. They are more risky than the black decathlon pair. I think I carried it off all right. As a northerner I am sensitive to the accusations of effeminate dress. But, to be honest, these days with earrings, necklaces and bracelets, not to mention make-up, all active in the modern man’s look, why am I worrying? Still, this is a trend I think I need to be wary of. I wouldn’t want to end up inching into dubious eddies of those afore mentioned unchartered waters.

http://www.peoplearerubbish.com

I am trying to be open to people in my daily navigations in town. I helped a couple take a buggy and child up some stairs on the tube the other day, missing my train in the process. You see the sacrifices I make. There was another one two minutes later, mind. Modern life pushes us away from contact. If you can get an app for it, do it, they say. So that we are raising a generation with pods in their ears, noses in their phones, hoods over their heads, scarves over their faces, sometimes covering everything except an eye slit. As they say in French. Bonjour, le contact. That’s contact down the drain. Older people are better but madder, or, rather, more idiosyncratic in their madness. I suppose, when someone starts jabbering on the tube you move away. It’s either personal mental chaos or religion-inspired chaos. We have to pick our communications. The young are more in thrall to the seductions of tech. I have silently, surreptitiously, in a way that will be deemed abhorrent by the great powers of our world, become a technophobe. I like to see it as a kind of occult and very dreadful resistance.

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Henges were important in the Stone age. They were places, often surrounded by a ditch or an elevation, often circular, often containing standing stones or mounds of stones, where the members of the community or tribe came together for a ritual or ceremony of some type. It would be arrogant to believe we do not function in the same way today. Probably football stadia or rock arenas are too large to consider as henges. You do not have enough knowledge of the other members of the group for complex kinship, although they are mostly motivated by the same ambitions (to see Man Utd win/to affirm their love of Oasis or Taylor Swift). The church altar would have been a henge but it has almost died out in this country for most people. Maybe the henge has become virtual. Facebook or WhatsApp groups. Often in a henge you may require a goat or maiden, for sacrificial purposes. The nature of on-line culture has retained this element. It could be one of the consistent features of the henge. Someone to absorb the necessary violence of the members.

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I live in a narrowing window. In the morning I am ineffective for a couple of hours. I stir gently. My eyes are gummed up from the business of night. The human body shifts awkwardly. First, weak tea. Next, a visit to the toilet. Later, coffee. By ten I can function. At night I need winding down. I start in early evening if I can because it takes time. My window of activity is getting narrower.

In the winter the seasons run a narrow window too. It is now my natural place. When the window opens wide in summer I am as if stranded in a desert.

Coffee, I realize, is very good for me. I may up my cupage to keep me functional.

peoplearerubbish.com

I am curious as to when the backlash on the extreme sport boast will begin. The mania for self-punishment is great these days. The running of multi-marathons; the self-exhortations to drive the self into the ground for some kind of virtue; the desire to feel the pain, as if this were the healthy option. It is difficult not to see much of this material as a variation on self-loathing, a form of masochism whereby you make the body hurt so much that the mind does not need to face other truths. Surely the best option for the body is the attainment of harmony, not some perverse form of self-punishment.

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