Poor old Doris, is, as a couple of you reminded me, often the butt of my family's unfortunate propensity towards slapstick. When they are not smashing snow-globes over her when she's trying to sleep, they are discharging
party popper Champagne bottles over her astonished face. Still, that isn't as uncomfortable as my champagne bottle story.
Anyway, happy Christmas one and all. I spent the whole day engaged in the first stage of my new diet. It's a complex plan which involves me eating as much as possible over the three days of Christmas, so that once I am back home I will never want to eat again. It's putting on half a stone in the hope that that will encourage me to lose a stone. Let's see if it works. I was certainly sick of food by the end of today, but still shovelling sweets into my face with startling regularity. But I got through the day without drinking, so that's another difficult milestone broken through. If I can survive New Year's Eve then I should easily make it to six months and who knows beyond that?
Not drinking at Christmas lunch was easier than you might think and though booze can help us get through the long day with the family (thanks to the now famous theory of relativity - time moves more slowly when you spend it with you relatives) it does make arguments more likely. Funnily enough at around sixish I did hit that wall of tiredness which I always thought was due to lunchtime drinking, but turns out to be to do with stuffing your face or stress or whatever (I had slept in this morning too, so didn't have too much excuse) and went for a little nap. It might be the country air or the fact that I have allowed myself to relax for a second, but my guess is its the Quality Street and the liquorice allsorts.
It was a white Christmas too, even if it didn't actually snow today. There was thick snow on the ground. It's what I had always wanted to happen as a child, but as an adult I barely noticed and didn't even step out of the door. I am pretty sure this is the first time in my life that snow has been lying on the ground on Christmas day. It was not as magical as I had dreamed. Or maybe I am too old for magic. Or maybe snow is just some frozen water which is actually a bit unpleasant.
I was taken back to childhood (when frozen water still had strong powers of necromancy) by one of my presents. I was given a space hopper - a big orange ball with a face on it and horns that you can hold on to so you can bounce along on it. I had had one as a child and I had loved it very much indeed. It was one of those toys that becomes an actual friend to you when you're tiny and for some reason I called my original space hopper Boono. Maybe I was aiming for Bruno but couldn't say it. Or maybe I thought Boono was a good name for it. It's the kind of name that could only come to someone for whom language is a new and mysterious thing, which suggests that Boono was with important to me as soon as I could talk. Or at least as soon as I could bounce.
I don't know what happened to the original Boono. I recall he was kept in an outside shed for a while and I rediscovered him when I was about 12 and had some nostalgic "ironic" fun playing with him again. Though there was no irony really. I still loved him and even then missed those innocent days of tiny childhood and was glad to relive them and escape all my 12 year old responsibilities. I think Boono was passed on down to my sister's children (all now grown up - the oldest an unbelievable almost 27) who think they probably kicked him into the undergrowth at the end of their garden. An ignomonious end for a once adored toy. I wonder if he's still there, deflated and wondering where the children who loved him have gone, without even the comfort of having had his sad story turned into a film franchise. So important once and now just a piece of orange rubber with a faded funny face on it. I hope he at least ends up discovered by archaeologists and becomes an exhibit in a museum, so that he will be remembered when all the bums that bounced on him are dust.
Nor do I know what I will call the new space hopper - probably something like Ian Norman, for language is now no longer a mysterious force to me, just something I can subvert with banality. Although I like him well enough he is no replacement for Boono. The people selling him have no doubt aimed for that nostalgia market, envisaging armies of 40 somethings bouncing around one last time, before letting the air out of the present and putting it at the back of a cupboard. But they have slightly miscalculated, because although it is still orange (though too bright a shade surely) and the face is the same, it uses modern day plastics, which are better than the old kind in so many ways, being lighter and able to stretch further. But that makes it all wrong. The ball is too round and Ian Norman doesn't feel right to the touch. He hasn't got that reassuring football style heaviness. He looks too clean, too happy and too full of himself. He just makes me miss Boono more. Creating a longing that I had surpressed. Even though Ian Norman is superior in every degree, this only makes him an unsatisfactory replacement, a reminder of why, in some ways at least, things were better then. He is the second wife of space hoppers. Prettier, firmer, more fun to bounce on, but somehow just reminding me of all that has been lost and making me look silly to the outside observer who is left feeling sorry for Boono and wondering why I could have cast him so cruelly aside.
Happy Christmas mofos. We will be back to non-sentimental entries as soon as the festive season is over!
