the brilliantly leaping gazelle

And another thing that annoys me about chistmas – and there are a lot – is mistletoe.

Or rather, being kissed under the mistletoe.

Oh alright then, the real reason why I don’t like mistletoe is because those slightly awkward teenage snogs everyone had under the mistletoe?

They always happened to other people. I mean presumably I could if I’d’ve wanted to, at parties where alcohol helped loosen more than tongues but even as a teenager, it was an unshakeable belief with me – and trust me, my belief did a lot of shaking! –  that teenage girls, or a tad older than me, were just as clueless about  things as I was. By the time I was in my twenties the damage had been done. I blame my parents for this, because they had deeply unattractive female fiends, some of them looked more like Edward G Robinson than Mrs. Robinson! – as a hormonal teenager I could only imagine of the fleshy pleasures Benjamin enjoyed – and who had given their daughters an unfortunate genetic inheritance; I was a hormonal teenager, and as hormonal male teenagers are wont to do, I wasn’t always thinking with my brain. Not something I had much control over,  I blame evolution!

Naturally, I was as fine a figure of manhood then as indeed I am now.

So how was it that my bells were never jingled?