Home for the Holidays

Well, that's it.  I'm home for the holidays.  My working year ended this afternoon and I don't return to the circle of Hell that constitutes my employment until January.  A quick seasonally-related aside: only yesterday I heard Chris Rhea's 'Driving Home For Christmas' on the radio whilst I was driving and it occurred to me that I had never heard the song whilst I was actually driving home for Christmas, (I wasn't headed for home at the time, although it was, obviously, the Christmas season).  Then, this evening, as I was driving home after doing some shopping, the song came on the radio.  So, I can at last say that I was driving home for Christmas whilst listening to 'Driving Home For Christmas'.  OK, I know that was a spectacularly pointless diversion, but this whole week has felt like a pointless diversion, something to be gotten through with as little hassle as possible before the holidays started.  It has been an exercise in keeping my head down and doing just as much as necessary to keep things turning over.  The fact that, as usual by this point in the year, I'm feeling exhausted, just made it seem all that more pointless.

Still, whilst I might have just been going through the motions this week, the world has kept turning.  Usually over the Christmas period something happens to make us all feel guilty about enjoying ourselves - a disaster along the lines of the Boxing Day Tsunami a few years ago.  This year I thought that it had come early, in the form of the Philippines hurricane, but even after that, stuff has just kept happening.  Only this week, in London alone, we've had theatre roofs collapsing on audiences and a serious bus crash.  Both come hard on the heels of that helicopter crashing on a pub in Glasgow.  What's going on?  Have government spending cuts really affected public safety this much?  Then there are the celebrity deaths: first Peter O'Toole, then Joan Fontaine.  Not to mention the death of writer and all-round crackpot Colin Wilson (although his crackpot books are highly entertaining and, compared to latter-day crackpots like David Icke, he seems quite sane).  It all leaves you wondering what disaster will strike next and which celebrity will pop their clogs next.  Of course, the reality is that these things are happening all the time, it just that at times like Christmas they seem to take on an added significance and appear to us to be much worse than they would at any other time of year.  It's always worth remembering that tragedy is all around us all year round and we shouldn't just be concerned with natural disasters and the like just because they happened at Christmas and make us feel guilty - for the victims the results of such events are the same, regardless of the time of year.