Life
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Surviving Christmas, with Jilly Cooper
The trouble with Christmas, says the late Jilly Cooper in her 1986 handbook How to Survive Christmas, is that it occurs infrequently enough for us to always “blot out the horrors of the previous one”. I deliberately forget about presents until the week before, at which point I spend three times as much as I ought to, “out of guilt and panic”. When I once told my son I couldn’t afford the shotgun he wanted, he replied “with perfect logic” that I could have afforded it if I hadn’t spent the past year pouring drink down people’s throats. One friend goes round several shops and makes a list for her hopeless husband, but I’m “dead easy”. All I want are cashmere jerseys and “the man who plays Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice”.
In the run-up to the day, you’ll receive countless cards from unidentified people called John, and probably a photograph of a couple surrounded by their children, indicating that they’ve just circumnavigated a particularly sticky patch in their marriage. You’ll have to endure decorating the tree, which I once avoided by buying baubles my daughter despised so much, I had a “blissful excuse” to sulk in the drawing room with a large vodka. It’s a tricky time for the lovelorn, who will often find that admirers go off the boil, but the answer is to “hang in and don’t make scenes” – he may temporarily have succumbed to some Jezebel at the office party but he’ll be back in the new year. And if you feel compelled to give a New Year’s Eve party, put on the radio at full volume at midnight so that everyone can hear the chimes of Big Ben and “start kissing everyone else’s wives and husbands”.
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Property
THE MANOR Stour Provost Manor in Dorset is 198 years old, says Country Life. Across the property are nine bedrooms, three of which are en-suite, two family bathrooms, a kitchen and dining room, four reception rooms, a study and a utility. Outside there are a series of tiered lawns, a tennis court, a croquet lawn, a jacuzzi and two outbuildings, one of which is a guest cottage, and the River Stour forms the property’s northern border. Gillingham station is a 10-minute drive with trains to London in two hours. £5.5m. Click on the image to see the listing.
Heroes and villains
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Hero
Susan Boyle, according to Hollywood megastar Timothée Chalamet. Asked by the BBC which Britons he considers “great”, the 29-year-old listed Lewis Hamilton, David and Victoria Beckham, the rapper Fakemink, and, “after a long pause and some deep thought”, Susan Boyle. The Britain’s Got Talent star “dreamt bigger than all of us”, Chalamet explained, saying he remembered her viral 2009 rendition of I Dreamed a Dream from Les Misérables “like it was yesterday”.
Villains
An irritatingly fortunate couple in Wales who have become £1m national lottery winners for the second time. Richard Davies, 49, and Faye Stevenson-Davies, 43, won their first seven-figure prize in June 2018 on the EuroMillions and their second in the Lotto draw on 26 November. The odds of winning two such jackpots are apparently more than 24 trillion to one. Happy Christmas, you jammy bastards.
Heroes
Three Canadian feminist academics who want to reject Newtonian and Einsteinian concepts of time in favour of “inter time”, which they describe as “a joyous refusal of the timelines that mark intersex people as failed or tragic”. In their paper, titled Temporal Disobedience: Intersex Timescapes, Chronopolitics and Intersex Joy, the trio say they want to “disrupt intersex deficit narratives” and invite “further integration of intersex studies” into broader critiques of time. “Go, you pioneering Canadian feminists!” says Rod Liddle in The Sunday Times. “Abolish time!”
Villains
Influencers, for encouraging ill-prepared young men to attempt overly challenging hiking routes. Llanberis Mountain Rescue Team, which covers Snowdon, says roughly a third of its callouts in November were to rescue blokes under 24 attempting the knife-edge Grib Goch scramble – the subject of thousands of videos on TikTok. Jurgen Dissman, who leads the team, says in many cases “the terrain has been underestimated or experience overestimated”.
Comment
Macaulay Culkin – and wallpaper – in Home Alone (1990)
The golden age of Gen X decor
Generation X is the “last great generation”, says Hadley Freeman in The Sunday Times. Those of us born between 1961 and 1981 – “the satisfying filling between the boomer and millennial bread” – are more interested in art than activism, we’re more ironic than ideological and we’re the last cohort to grow up offline, finding all that social media narcissism totally moronic. But there is another, less commonly cited reason for our superiority: our childhood decor. Take the enormous family house in the 1990 movie Home Alone, stuffed full of carpets, jewel colours, sash curtains and (“be still, my beating heart”) patterned wallpaper. Photos of how the home looks now recently surfaced online and it was miserable: all white, with mean little blinds and cold stone slabs. “Now I know how ancient scholars felt when the Library of Alexandria was destroyed.”
The truth is that every home nowadays look the same: “white, grey, impersonal, blah”, like “deathly Airbnbs”. As a Gen X-er I’m allergic to hysterical overstatement, but I think this decline in decor says a lot about what’s wrong with the modern world. We’ve replaced personality with homogeneity and comfort with anxiety. It started in the 1990s when we began describing pre-fab kitchens as “Tuscan” and bathrooms as “Provençal”, and accelerated in the 2000s when, thanks to the internet and a reduction in trade barriers, globalisation fully kicked in. Now, everything is made in Asia, and not only “looks like garbage and feels like garbage”, but it’s all totally indistinguishable. It used to be easy to tell if you were in a Brooklyn bar or a pub in Penge. Today, it’s “interchangeable design slop”. Looking back at Gen X’s 1980s homes shows just how much we’ve lost.
The Knowledge Crossword
Books
David Suchet in Hercule Poirot’s Christmas (1994)
The cathartic joy of a Christmas murder mystery
In the late 1930s, says Lou Selfridge in The New Statesman, Agatha Christie’s brother-in-law complained that the deaths in her books had become “too refined”. He longed, he said, for a “good violent murder with lots of blood”. Christie was all too happy to oblige. A quarter of the way through Hercule Poirot’s Christmas (1938), someone is found lying in a great crimson pool, prompting one character to quote Macbeth: “Who would have thought the old man to have so much blood in him?” It’s an example of a perplexing, but thriving, subgenre of crime fiction: “the festive murder mystery”.
These novels trade profitably in the juxtaposition of Christmas cheer and graphic violence. In the (extravagantly pen-named) Noelle Albright’s The Christmas Eve Murders (2024), the lights come on after a power cut and a guest is found with a corkscrew sticking out of his neck – whereupon the radio kicks back in, and the hero finds himself checking the victim’s pulse to Dean Martin’s Silver Bells. In Ada Moncrieff’s Murder Most Festive (2020), a guest at a large country house is found with his shotgun-blasted brains seeping into the Christmas morning snow. As a police constable in Hercule Poirot’s Christmas says, it seems an “unlikely season for crime”. Poirot disagrees. “Families who have been separated throughout the year,” he says, “assemble once more together. Now under these conditions, my friend, you must admit that there will occur a great amount of strain…” This may explain the genre’s success. For readers feeling faint homicidal urges, there is catharsis: here, someone really will pick up the carving knife and stab their infuriating cousin, or “lace the trifle with strychnine”, or garrotte their stepfather with a garland of tinsel. Bliss.
Weather
Quoted
“The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.”
American poet Randall Jarrell
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