the brilliantly leaping gazelle

One of the things I hate about christmas – and there are many -are Christmas songs.

Before my brain injury curtailed my shopping capability, which meant I was no longer able to troll about the West End and to faff aimlessly in Covent Garden as I used to, one way in which I measured my success in christmas shopping was by how long I’d managed to avoid Slades ‘ perennially awful So here it is, Merry Christmas’. Noddy Holders scream of ‘It’s Christmas’ was proof enough that everyone wasn’t ‘having fun’ as was rather ambitiously claimed, but instead suffering aural torture.

I was forcibly reminded of this the other day I had to get a black cab and the cabbie had the radio tuned into a radio station playing nothing but Christmas records. For the only time in my life I wished that they were playing rock, or better still, nothing at all. However, one thing you can do with a cab is ask them to turn it off. But at the barbers today, when he was shaving me with a cut-throat razor, I thought of the old adage ‘discretion is the wisest part of valour as I considered the wisdom of asking the barber to turn off the television that was tuned to ‘Magic FM’ It was playing a ‘sleighlist’ of Christmas songs, which wasn’t so named because listening to them all would set one off on a murderous rampage. Instead with forlorn ambition matched by dogged persistence, it was hoped that pampered pop stars, singing sentimental tosh about a reality that no-one in the history of ever has experienced, might induce one to lose their reason and believe in such trumpery moonshine.

Perhaps that’s why it’s called ‘Magic FM’