I am going to be away at Christmas, lying in a hammock on a secluded beach in Grenada (oh I'll think of you all, don't worry), so today I bombed over to Cheddar to have a mini-Christmas dinner with my folks. As is fitting I stuffed myself stupid and ended the day full of red wine and feeling sick. It's what Jesus was born for. That and, as I experienced yesterday, to make Oxford St so full of consumers scrabbling to spend money on gifts, that it is impossible to move at more than fifteen paces a minute, even though the street has been blocked off to traffic. I'd be tempted to appear in a cloud and shout "Weren't you fucking listening to anything I said? I got crucified for you wankers!" I suspect he would but he's scared that some bulldog faced woman will swing her pram and knock him off his perch and nick his holy cloud as a fitting decoration for her Christmas tree.
Don't let the facts of Christianity stop you having fun celebrating it. It's like putting on your bedsheets and going out and doing some lynching on Martin Luther King's Birthday and claiming it's in honour of everything he achieved.
Still I am glad not to have missed out on a bit of turkey and chocolate (two things that Jesus would never have seen, of course, unless he magicked himself over to the New World at some point without telling any of his nosey Gospel writers) just because of my selfish desire to escape this general madness in a couple of weeks.
I took my girlfriend on a tour of a cold and dark Cheddar in the evening. I was impressed that some optomistic shopkeepers up the Gorge were still open at 5pm on a Sunday in December, but not surprised that they were mainly alone in their stores. There were a few sad faced tourists sitting in a newly opened chip shop near the old ice cream cafe (newly opened to me, though I haven't been up here for a while).
As usual I was quite affected with walking past the haunts of my youth. Even though I'm in town a few days each year, I rarely go walkabout, so most places I passed for only the second or third time in the last twenty odd years. And the crushing realisation that my youth was actually quarter of a century ago made me feel a little oppressed and crushed at times. God knows how you must feel in your sixties or seventies when you pass those places where strong memories still linger. Because it made me feel like crying tonight.
The most astonishing thing about Cheddar is the number of new little roads crammed with new houses that have sprung up on old bits of wasteland. Though the town itself is more or less within the same boundaries it feels like there might be twice as many houses in it. The swimming pool is gone and there's a sprawling estate there instead, even the little patch of land that once had our scout hut on it is now home to three massive detached houses. I wondered if the ghosts of us as cubs ever ran through the kitchen. I know we're not dead, but those little boys are gone now and must be somewhere, scuffing up their shiny shoes and farting.
"I remember when all this was fields," became a recurring comment. Even the patch of land where I'd seen the old white haired tramp who looked a bit like my grandad but wasn't, shitting in broad daylight back in the late 1970s had four or five big houses on it. They didn't know they were living on top of tramp faeces, but they were. That's worse than living atop a Red Indian Burial Ground.
Cheddar is miles better than it used to, but I still felt depressed by the changes. And that's why we don't like things to alter, isn't it? Because it reminds us that we're not what we once were. Even though sometimes it feels like we were last here just a finger-click ago.
The biggest new collection of houses and roads that weren't there thirty years ago runs over what was once the meadow with a lane through it, which used to have kissing-gates at one end, by the primary school. I was flabbergasted by what appeared to be a competition to find out who could put the most garrish and tacky Christmas lights outside of their home. I have no objection to people celebrating Christmas in the privacy of their own home, using whatever unChristian and environment destroying decorations they wish, but why subject the rest of the world to this?
I wanted to knock on the doors of these people and tell them how offensive and tasteless I found their displays, but figured that they wouldn't respond too well to my unsolicited entreaties.
When I was a kid we didn't even have electricity in this town. It seems a shame that it is used so wrongly and wastefully now.
But if Jesus is floating over on his cloud and finds it similarly galling then he is, for the moment at least, keeping his mouth shut.
I gave my mum and dad a copy of "Bye Bye Balham". Dad looked at it from across the room - "I can't see that selling," he commented.
If you want to prove him wrong then you'll be pleased to know that you can order it right now at
the Go Faster Stripe website. It's not available in shops! The "Oh Fuck, I'm 40" DVD should be arriving on Wednesday and I believe Chris is working on putting it on the site before then for preorder if you want to get them both together and save yourself some postage and be eligible for the draw for the T-shirt. But he can use his computer magic to include you even if you buy the items separately. You need to place your order for both products by close of play on Friday to be entered into the draw.
