the brilliantly leaping gazelle

 Another one of the many things that annoy me about Christmas – and believe me there are many – is the way in which Scrooge in Dickens’s ‘A Christmas Carol’ is portrayed as a mean spited cantankerous misanthrope, who is made to see the error of his ways and immediately resolves to be a kinder, nicer person.

Scrooge can be seen as proof of the redemptive effect of Christmas on even those thought beyond redemption, a belief that chimes perfectly with a Christian narrative that every sinner, no matter how full of sin he might be, is capable – though gods help of course – of salvation! Or he could just be terrified into being something he isn’t.

I mean Scrooge is a mean spirited cantankerous misanthrope, but that’s precisely why I think he’s so great! Much like Basil Fawlty, one wouldn’t want to be in their company for long, but as a character who entertains, well really!

Anyone in those times who’d lived that long and was engaged in the business he was and wasn’t a mean spirited cantankerous misanthrope was clearly a demented wrongcock of the first order. My sympathy for Scrooge is in no way related to the fact, uncharitably repeated by my partner, that I bear an uncanny resemblance to Jim Carey’s portrayal of Scrooge in Robert Zemeckis’s film adaptation of “A Christmas Carol’

Yes, granted, it has been pointed out by others that as cartilage continues to grow as one gets older and as the nose is mage up of cartilage and being how my chin has a rather unfortunate Bruce Forsyth thing going on, my chin and my nose are going to meet at some point. My brother hasn’t been the only person to try and squeeze them both together to work out what I’d look like if they did.

So much so, in fact that someone has even had the temerity to suggest that I could work as a children’s entertainer on beaches impersonating Mr. Punch!

I would’ve included an image of Carey as Scrooge to illustrate the point, but as a gesture Scrooge himself would’ve approved of, I couldn’t find free images, so I didn’t.