Home life
Boxing day
Alice Thomas Ellis
Iwas sitting on Glasgow station when somebody remarked aloud, `Och, this is disgusting.' I turned my head and saw an old lady regarding a meat pasty with amazement. As I watched she took another bite, remarking as she did so, 'I tried some on those pigeons over there and it's so horrrrible even they wouldn't eat it.' There was an orange plastic litter bin beside us and I suggested that she might be well advised to put the pasty in it, but she said she'd given up smoking and couldn't stop eating.
I am interested in people stopping smok- ing, so I asked how she'd done it. She said that some years ago she'd contracted dou- ble pneumonia and could hardly, inhale air, let alone smoke, so she'd given up then, only it had felt like a bereavement and she'd been so sad she'd wept all the time, and when her pneumonia cleared up she'd bought herself a packet of 20 and she was away. So how had she given up again? She said she had confided in her doctor who was in possession of some pills which, taken in conjunction with fags, make you feel diabolical — worse, said my old lady, than the most appalling hangover. The doctor had said to her, It's no' everyone I'd give these to', and the old lady had said with feeling, 'It's no' everyone would tak' them.' Anyway they'd worked. She'd been given 100 and she'd only needed two. I wonder what they're called.
On New Year's Eve I went for a little lie-down at seven o'clock in order to be fresh for the festivities later, only when the time came to get up and join the party I found that 1988 had nearly killed me and I was damned if I was ready to face 1989 let alone go round singing and dancing about it — so I stayed put and slept through the whole thing. The next day we stood leaning on the gate, eating Black Magic chocolates, weeping with cold and watching a friend take a ritual dip in the ocean, when another friend rode up on his bike with a bottle of Scotch lashed to the handlebars. We had some of that while he played Swimmin' with the Wimmin on his ukulele, and thus I welcomed the New Year, which has rapidly been going down- hill ever since.
On arriving home and coming into the kitchen I became aware of the presence of three policemen and the pervasive atmos- phere of frustrated wrath common when a burglary has occurred. Luckily the bastards had only nicked the telly before it dawned on the daughter (who'd been watching the whole enterprise from her window) that a felony was being committed, at which she did one of her banshee numbers and they left. The third son was particularly irritated because he'd been in the back kitchen the whole time making himself a cheese sand- wich, and I'm annoyed because Someone has had to buy, a new telly.
On the (perfectly sound) advice of the fifth son we got the biggest and best in the shop and the picture is superb, only it also has two boxes which are to do with stereo or something and reverberate all over the house. It also has a remote control of baffling complexity and a dinky little stand to support it. This stand has glass doors and a wee shelf — intended, we surmise, for the householder's books — and, as the first-born remarked, it's not so much the sort of telly you buy to look at as to show to the neighbours. And, of course, it comes in a bloody great cardboard box which we shall have to spend hours breaking up and disposing of. Cardboard boxes are second only to Christmas trees in their maddening intractability.
Alfie just chucked a totally naked Christmas tree off the balcony and it seems an awful pity that the burglars weren't underneath at the time. Killing a burglar with a Christmas tree would have been a magnificently heartening start to the New Year, and I have a sense that bodies are easier to dispose of than either Christmas trees or cardboard boxes. What a wasted opportunity.
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