Another Crappy Crapchester Christmas

I think it safe to say that, once again, Christmas, (or Winterval as we like to call it here, in order to wind up Daily Mail readers and their ilk), has crept up and taken me unawares, as always.  You know, I thought that when I gave up full time work I'd have more time on my  hands to notice things like Christmas in advance.  The trouble is that November and December have, for various reasons, become incredibly busy months for me, leaving me with little time to think about religious festivals.  As well as being busy, this time of year is also increasingly expensive for me, even before the added costs of the Christmas season.  November, of course, was dominated by my attempts to find a plumber who could fix my hot water system without breaking the bank.  While the eventual solution was less expensive than I feared it would be, it was still a significant outgoing and a major distraction.  December is even worse, jusy yoday, for instance, I had to get the car serviced and MoT'd, something I had hoped to do in late November, but had to put off because of the plumbing situation, which itself should have been sorted in October, if the first plumber I tried to get to do it hadn't been such a pillock.  While, again, the service and MoT proved to be less expensive and painful than expected, I still have a parking permit to renew this month, not to mention a quarterly energy bill - which is only lower than expected because I couldn't have mt heating on until it was repaired in November.  It's just spend, spend, spend.  

Still, I have at least managed, in amongst the chaos, to sort out my great nieces' Christmas presents, which are the important ones.  Of course, I should have been alerted as to the close proximity of Christmas by the appearance of Christmas decorations in Crapchester town centre.  But they can always be dismissed with the thought that they 'get earlier every year'.  This year, of course, in keeping with the general feeling of doom and poverty currently enveloping the UK, the decorations have been pretty minimalist, particularly those the local council are responsible for - the Market Square Christmas tree, for instance, looks like it has come out of someone's living room, so scrawny and undernourished it looks.  Still, the erection, the other weekend, of those wooden huts down in the main shopping centre from which, every Christmas, traders sell overpriced seasonal tat, should really have rung alarm bells for me.  Again, in keeping with the national mood of gloom and skintness, these seem to be far less patronised than usual - clearly, the punters have spent all their money paying their energy bills.  The same goes for the shops, which seem less busy, not to mention less full of festive goods, than usual.  Even the Christmas themed TV ads have been pretty muted this year, which is why it has taken so long for them to register on me, plus, having that bloody fake World Cup going on has also made it feel less like the festive season than usual.  But hey, I see the BBC has started using its Christmas idents between programmes, so I suppose that it must be Christmas.  Even if, thanks to government's utter economic incompetence it feels even less like Christmas than it did during the pandemic, when we were all locked down.