O, you bloated interregnum between Christmas and New Year’s Eve! You mute limbo of inertia and fetid leftovers! You Sunday Squared, you!
Where was I last time? Oh yes. Talking of leftovers, here’s the rest of my Christmas Day photos.
11am: Avenue Road. Vyvian the cat suddenly throws himself into a nearby cardboard box. I didn’t put him there, honest. He wants to play.
11.30am. Walk from Avenue Road to Waterlow Park, via Hornsey Lane. It’s raining heavily. Stop on Archway Bridge. Also known as Suicide Bridge. So this is the view looking towards Central London on Christmas Day 2007.
A Wet Christmas, needless to say. Given the time of year, I’m on a bridge favoured by the suicidal, and I’ve banked a cheque on the 24th, I can’t help thinking of It’s A Wonderful Life. ‘No man is a failure while he has friends.’
As I’m musing on this, a car comes by and drenches my entire lower half via this very puddle:
1145am. Meet Silke in Highgate Village, and we walk to the duck pond in Waterlow Park. I have this annual ritual of feeding the local waterfowl on Christmas Day. Don’t ask me why, or indeed how long I’ve been doing it. This time, Ms Silke is also spending Christmas by herself in Highgate, so I invite her to join me.
Here, defiant in the pouring rain, we throw bread to the coots, moorhens and mallards, pull crackers, wear party hats, and drink hot mulled wine from Silke’s Thermos. Joggers pass by us with bemused expressions. It’s quite a Capra moment.
(Actually, I think going jogging in the rain on Christmas Day is equally eccentric, but anyway).
Pulling crackers in the freezing rain:
Mulled wine in Emily Strange & Virginia Woolf mugs:
Afternoon: Sleep off the effects of the wine. Have bought some special gluten-free, dairy-free dark chocolates, in the hope of preventing any IBS stomach aches. They are so delicious that I wolf the entire box down in one session. Thus giving me, yes, a stomach ache.
Read the Alan Moore LOEG Black Dossier, including the further adventures of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Treats for bookish trainspotters: one alias for Orlando’s many female incarnations is ‘Vita’ (Ms Sackville-West being the original muse for Orlando). There’s also a reference to a period spent as a ‘bloody orange cat’ (a nod to Ms Hale’s series of children’s books, Orlando The Marmalade Cat).
6pm. Off to Claudia Andrei’s in Archway. Claudia has been forced to snake-sit for her upstairs neighbour. Turns out the lady in the flat above couldn’t fit her pet snake’s tank in her car at the last minute. So poor Claudia has had to feed the thing over Christmas. And she has a phobia of snakes. I would offer to feed it for her, but I’m even more fearful of the things. Rather negligent of the neighbour to leave it to the last minute, really, telling Claudia it’s her or nobody. With snake power comes snake responsibility.
I’m easier to feed. Claudia cooks me dinner, we pull more crackers, and enjoy the rip-roaring disaster movie that is the Doctor Who special:
Claudia and Sevig:
8.30pm. To Lucy & Dale’s new flat in Muswell Hill, for TV console party games: quizzes (Buzz) and karaoke (SingStar). Charley Stone and Alex P are there, as are Lucy’s sister Pheobe and mum Jill, plus alcohol, and we all have a suitably dizzy, fizzy time. Dale cooks me yet more dinner while I sit out the Rock Guitar game. A toy guitar, with buttons instead of strings, is connected to the console. You have to get the buttons in the right order for the likes of ‘Smoke On The Water’ to play out, in time with the screen. If you make a mistake, the game makes clunky feedback noises. Sadly, there’s no Jesus & Mary Chain version, where to NOT make clunky feedback noises would be the mistake.
Somewhere in all this, I tell Charley that Fosca are touring Sweden in March, and that neither Kate nor Tom can make it. Would she – as a member of Fosca herself circa 1998 – be willing to help out and play guitar for us? She says yes, all being well. A ten year symmetry in line-up.
The two of us walk home at about 1.30AM, back to Crouch End and Highgate. I have been fed and watered several times over, and now I have a guitarist for the tour who’s talented and fine company, and whom I’ve managed to stay friends with since 1994. No man is a failure, indeed. Thank you, O Christmas Day Friends, O London Family. Ducks, cats, rain and puddle water included.
