Festive fun
Alex James
It’s underrated, winter. I love it all the way to spring, but Christmas is absolutely my favourite time of the year. It was an utterly immaculate morning this morning: festive with the startling glamour of a snap frost, a brittle dawn. Pale clear skies screaming forever over a frozen landscape, the horizon a curtain of lilac far beyond the deep frozen lawns and calm pristine parallels of box, yew and dry-stone walls. Warm light spilling from painted wooden windows. All across the petrified valley it was toy-like. There was nothing that wasn’t pretty. Pylons like sculptures. Even shrink-wrapped one tonne hay bales — normally the ugliest things on display in the countryside — had a chunky kind of elegance, all in neat rows, incapable of spoiling the view. Ancient oaks mystical, street lamps enchanting, town square crammed with huffing blowing traders.
I love Christmas and I’m starting to feel it now. Carol concerts, Babycham, stilton and pears, cheddar and pickled onions, the smell of tinsel, going to Booker and going bananas — it’s pointless trying to deal with the festivities via retail. Go trade. If the VAT is included in the price, you’re at the wrong shop. It’s all brilliant but once the flames of the pudding have died down and the embers of Christmas are glowing nicely there’s nothing I like more than a jigsaw. Parlour games come and go. Cranium was good a couple of years back. There is plenty of fun to be had with a bag of Scrabble letters, but jigsaws are evergreen. I’m coming over quite cosy and warm, just thinking about jigsaws.
I don’t want to go to the Caribbean. Ghastly thought at Christmas time. From lunchtime Christmas Day, there will be a 2,000-piece whopper on the go in our house and the aim will be to get it finished before New Year. If I’m in a room that has a television on it’s quite hard not to get drawn into what’s going on, but that is nothing compared to the black hole traction of a jigsaw puzzle. No one is capable of leaving a jigsaw alone until it is done. People can be sniffy at first, but ultimately no one can resist. Sometimes it’s a binge that can last for days. My sister is the jigsaw champion of the world. She can knock together a 500-piecer while watching the Queen’s Speech, in less time than it takes her to eat a jar of pickled onions (fast). I lack that level of visual acuity, but I do love a puzzle. So companionable, just challenging enough, but not too exasperating. I remember the entire dregs of the Colony Room ringing on my doorbell in Covent Garden at 6 a.m. one morning early in January, and all falling silent over a Tuscan vista for many hours, until it got dark again, and they were safe to go out.
But if there’s one thing that’s better than a jigsaw, it’s a pantomime. Even when I was a teenager, and didn’t like anything there was something irresistible about pantomime. Every Christmas something good happened in the panto. In fact, it wouldn’t be Christmas without pantomime. I’ve never missed a year. I used to dream of being on the stage, then I wanted to be in the orchestra pit. I like theatres — so much nicer than real life. I remember a long uninterrupted run of Cinderellas in the late Eighties and early Nineties, often at the Bristol Hippodrome. Every year it was Cinderella.
Of course there were less celebrities around back then. We could hardly believe how lucky we were to have Isla St Clair from the Generation Game as Buttons in 1987. Gary Wilmot was sensational in the role the following year. I saw Derek Griffiths really nail the part at Poole Arts Centre in the late Seventies. He was the best Buttons I ever saw. But my mother once saw Les Dawson at Southampton and his performance has become a legendary benchmark.
I’m not even sure why I do like pantomime or if it’s any good, really, like cigarettes or television. It doesn’t really do anything useful. The jokes are cheesey, the plots are stupid. They must be a nightmare to stage, even harder to make money from. I just like them. Maybe because it’s all so silly. It’s hard to think what Newsnight Review, or The Culture Show would have to say about any of this year’s offerings, but pantomime remains incredibly popular. ‘Why is that man dressed up as a lady, Daddy?’ The more I think about it, the more unlikely it all seems. This year we have Sleeping Beauty at our local theatre. I can’t wait. q
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