Two Notes on Impending Christmas ‘24

My Christmas holiday has now begun and I’m really very happy about that. 

I particularly love these years when Christmas falls in a way that allows me to get a few days off before the big day arrives. It gives a little time to walk around and smell the cloves, so to speak, and drink in the feeling of ‘something nice coming’, rather than the bulk of the holiday being spent having a slight tang of ‘something’s over now’.

And I’m walking around, and I get thoughts about things. Christmassy things. As usual, none of these thoughts are of a particular depth or relevance. The main attribute they have is that they are my own. So, I thought I’d see if I can now remember two of these thoughts while I’m typing and, if so, set them down. Then, when I (hopefully) look back on these scribblings in years to come, as I sometimes do, I might get some taste of where my head was at, in December 2024. Don’t expect much from here on. These are, after all, only my thoughts.

Christmas Radio Times: I had a thought about the Christmas edition of the Radio Times. It has been sitting under the tree for the past week. I’ve peeped inside but I haven’t sat with it. Until yesterday, which was Saturday. That was the day the programmes in the Radio Times began. I opened it up, read for a while about what was on offer for Saturday, and set a few bits to record. 

I’ve been getting the Christmas Radio Times since I was a small boy, even though we’re here in Ireland and the RTE Guide is the weapon of choice for 99% of the populace. I loved radio from a very young age and used to get nearly as much from the radio listings as I did from the television ones. So, every year I still get it, even though it’s got really quite expensive now. This year’s outlay was 9 Euro! Anyway, I opened it up yesterday morning and immediately realised that, for me at least, the item in my hand had devalued by a full 50% by the very act of starting to use it. 

I realised that much of the joy in the magazine now lies in a) its arrival on the shop shelves, offering a portent of a holiday to come as clear as a morning star in the east and b) the untapped potential of what might be on offer between those covers. The deterioration of a) is pretty clear. Like the Ghost of Christmas Past, and like most everything of the season, the potency wanes with each passing hour until it is, once again, gone. My Radio Times is like Schrodinger’s Cat, except the box is now open and I can see that, dead or alive, the contents is merely a cat.

Water My Tree: Every year we get a real Christmas tree. I’ve written before here about the extraordinary interaction I have with the Christmas Tree Man since the year I gave my tree away, so we won’t go into that here again. Here’s the thing with my tree, and I hope you won’t brand me as being cruel, I think I have just been a little unthinking, which is perhaps worse. Until this year, I didn’t really understand the real Christmas tree in my living room needs water. Sorry, I just didn’t. I tended to leave a bowl of water adjacent to the base of the tree and thought that was okay. The trees generally clung on to acceptability until the start of the New Year and so everything was fairly okay. 

This year, though, has been slightly different. The tree I got is a little smaller than previous tress. Not substantially so and not for any reason of economics. It was just the prettiest durned tree on the lot, as my American friends might or might not say. Perhaps because the tree is that little bit smaller, it seems to have started to deteriorate more quickly that the trees of yore. It just looks a bit ‘saggy’ and there’s an aura of ‘advanced tree’ about it that I never noticed before. 

When I went and looked it up on the Internet, I was shouted at from all sides, “YOUR TREE NEEDS WATER’ or ’YOUR TREE WILL DIE WITHOUT WATER.’ I was immediately in a high state of guilt and remorse and I resolved to amend my oversight forthwith. But there was a problem, The metal base of my tree (re-used every year) extends out quite a bit, such that I would need a tray with a diameter of just over 800mm to accommodate it. I searched all over town but couldn’t find anything that worked. Removing the base in favour of some other, more water-friendly, base would be a nightmare (before Christmas) what with all the lights and baubles and things in it. 

So what to do? I’m rather proud of myself that I devised a little ‘water delivery’ system at the base of the tree after puzzling over it for a while. A slender plastic lunch box lid, slipped under the slightly elevated part of the stand at the base of the tree, filled with water, and then a cut sponge squeezed between the base of the tree and the water in the Pyrex lid. The sponge, even as I speak, is soaking the water up and delivering it into the base of the tree by a mixture of Capillary Action and Blind Faith. Will it make a blind bit of difference to my dehydrated tree. The newborn Christ only knows. But it’s made me feel a bit better about the whole thing. At least I’ve done something. 

I’ve just been and had a look and the tree seems to be drinking up the water although maybe it’s all in the sponge. Please don’t give me good advice about this. I will do better next year (artificial tree, probably) and my ingenious little arrangement has brought me some temporary peace of mind.

And, at the end of the day, isn’t that what Christmas is all about?

I wish you all a Happy Christmas and, hopefully, some Temporary Peace of Mind.

x

It’s Coming on Christmas…

The title this week is quoting an old Joni Mitchell song, and the opening lyrics seem particularly appropriate here in Castlebar this week.

It's coming on Christmas.

They're cutting down trees.

It’s coming on Christmas for sure and, yes, here in town, they are indeed cutting down trees.

But the trees they are cutting down are not those of the Yuletide persuasion. Our beloved town green, known locally as The Mall, has been having a number of very old trees removed this week. As I understand, they have had to cut down four Ash trees in total, at least one of them over three hundred years old.

I didn’t know this was going to happen. What would I have done if I had known? Would I have given the trees a farewell hug? Unlikely. Would I have taken a photo? Unsatisfactory. Would I have stood and looked at them quietly one last time and murmured thanks in my brain for all the green leaves and portents of changing seasons. I think I probably would have done that. But I didn’t. The first thing I knew was that the red and white plastic security tape was up, and the machinery was in, and the saws were roaring.

Huge slices of tree sat on The Mall as I walked back after lunch. Their insides so pale and bare. A temptation, perhaps, to count the rings but there were no rings to be seen from across the plastic tape. Perhaps they were too dense to apprehend. Perhaps they were too white to show.

The trees on The Mall are, for me at least, an intrinsic part of this town I live in. The first thing that drew me to the town was this large green area right at the centre, so similar in ways to Twickenham Green where I had just left. The trees that surround The Mall have never sat still. They have always been changing and turning. One of them claimed my son’s boomerang twenty years ago and probably still has it. The trees have seen people sit under them and rest and read and look at their phones. The trees have borne pale white Christmas lights to remind us of the season and to effectively ease the darkness. The trees have seen people hung from them, in earlier times.

The removal of the trees is a little like having four teeth out all at once. It hurts a little and one’s senses naturally migrate to the empty spaces where they used to be. But we will get used to their absence, as we get used to almost all other absences. We will plough on.

The trees had to come down. They were diseased and split and had become a hazard to the good people of the town. The work was done cleanly and safely and well, and I feel sure that the wood will be considerately used.

So, thanks, trees, thanks for everything. As the old song goes, we can run on for a long time, but sooner or later, someone or something is going to cut us down.

 

 

Blue Skies and Possible Second Chances

I’ve had a social media account on Bluesky for quite a while. I hadn’t been using it much, to be honest. One update a week, generally, a link to the blog post. Maybe a reply or two here and there, the odd ‘like’. Nothing major. In case you’re wondering, it’s like Twitter/X but nicer.

Then, a few weeks ago, it kind of just took off. After you-know-who won you-know-what, more and more people jumped ship and turned up on Bluesky, which was the equivalent of the ‘RMS Carpathia’, if you know what I mean. Old familiar faces appeared, Tentative exchanges and sapling conversations sprang up. It was nice. 

Could it be something? A possible second chance at a working social media interface, without the barriers and the blocks and the forced information and adverts? We’ll see, I guess.

Today will be the first day that I won’t do a tweet on ‘X’ for this weekly blog post. That’s been pretty much the only tweet I’ve done for some time now. It’s been a pointless exercise because ‘X’ won’t share a tweet with a link like that in it. Two or three friends will see it, that’s all (as far as I can tell). I’d got used to that. But what I hadn’t got used to was the fact that I was giving some kind of support or acknowledgement to the current owner of ‘X’ and that is something I don’t want to be doing. Hypocritically, maybe, I’ll hold on to the account for another while but won’t use it unless I see a friend who needs a word of support. I should terminate it but there’s 15 years of friends and stuff put into it and maybe someday someone else will come along and it will be a good thing again. I know, I know, but that’s how I think. A tad naive, at best.

Meanwhile, there’s Bluesky.

Something small but nice happened to me on Bluesky yesterday. It started, as nice things sometimes do, with the excellent Moose Allain. I had the pleasure of meeting Moose once, but it was on a very sad day, and I don’t feel I was as outgoing or genial as I wish I had been. Moose is very clever, very creative and very, very inventive and you should go and look him up and support his Art. He and I share an’ involvement’ in Architecture but I reckon he’s way better at it than I am. (Ed: That’s enough about Moose now, what did he do yesterday?)

Okay, yesterday Moose posted a message on Bluesky. I really don’t know what people call that. A Bluesky-Tweet. A Bleat, maybe? I have no clue. Here’s what he bleated. No, doesn’t work, anyway…

Just thinking about dad jokes I’ve made which have annoyed/embarrassed my children. For example in a restaurant I ordered a coke. The waitress asked if I wanted a pint or a half. I said, “Better make it a half, I’m driving.” No one laughed, apart from me.

I read it, enjoyed it and was about to move on when I suddenly remembered that I’d had my own spontaneous Dad-Joke moment in just the last couple of days. So I typed that up in a message and sent it as a reply to Moose. No reason, really. I didn’t even think it was all that worth sending. But I did anyway. Here’s what I sent back.

Just the other day, I was buying two of the same book, in the bookshop, as pressies. The lady asked me if I was sure I needed two and I said yes, I'm going to read it twice. She just looked at me.

On of the good things I always found about Twitter/X/Bluesky is how it teaches you to edit yourself. I could have made a whole blog post out of that (true) story. I suppose, in a way, I have. Anyway, Moose replied (kindly) that this was ‘Marvellous Stuff’ and passed it on to the people who read his stuff. This was kind and much appreciated. One would expect a little traction from a Moose seal of approval like this. I kind of figured I would see about three ‘likes’ and maybe one repost of my thing if I was lucky.

As I l glance now at my little message, I see that there are… 370 likes and… twenty-nine reposts. A brace of new people has come and followed my mutterings. Yesterday was a pleasant experience, the few times I checked in to Bluesky saw more and more reaction and replies to my couple of lines and new people dropping by. It was an experience reminiscent of old school Twitter from ten or fifteen years ago. It was not really about being ultra-clever or super-funny. It was something considerably more subtle than that.

It’s a twofold thing, really. The first part is a renewed spirit of generosity that Twitter had beaten out of most of us. ‘That’s kind of good, I’ll give it a like’ is no longer the Twitter/X way, not in my experience anyway. The second part is simply about seeing and being seen. Twitter/X shut me down to such an extent that no more than a literal handful of people were seeing anything I chose to say, which unsurprisingly became less and less and less. But, like a frog in slowly heating water, I never really took notice until I was virtual escargot.

This post isn’t here to say, look at me, I did a funny and got loads of likes. 370 doesn't even qualify as 'loads of likes' by old-school standards. But it is something. It is a positive sign. One of positivity and engagement. Stretching the point, it may be a possible sign of regeneration and of social media rebirth.

Do I go too far? Of course I do! Haven’t you met me?

Perhaps the likelihood is that Bluesky will mark time in a grossly accelerated fashion, rather like that water planet in Interstellar. It will warm up and cool down and congeal at ten times the rate of the other places we have landed, and we will hoof through its bubbling scraps again for a while before hopping on to some other doomed planet for another while. 

But maybe not. Maybe this is the place.

The place for us.

 

Doubting Thomas Versus Armageddon

Two things happened this week that colour what I’m going to try to say.

As I type, the votes in our General Election are being counted. It’s a fun few days if you enjoy that kind of thing. Our Proportional Representation system means that second, third, fourth or even fifth-choice votes can often elect somebody. So it comes down to late night showdowns in large halls which end up with one person being hoisted awkwardly onto the shoulders of his new minions, while another person slinks miserably off towards the rear exit.

But, when all the interpersonal battling and general flim-flam is set aside, the story of this election seems to have been already written in the exit polls and in the faces of the people. The emerging headline is clear. ‘Nothing Will Change.’

So, that’s the first thing that happened.

The second thing that happened this week is that Sally Rooney wrote an article in the Irish Times on the subject of Climate Change. For some reason, the paywall let me through and I got to read it. You should too if you can. It got me thinking about Climate Change… and about General Elections… and about how nothing will change.

Two things... and here I am, typing.

In her article, Sally considers Climate Change and Elections together. She says, “ Voters concerned about the future of human life on Earth can still choose to support the few radical left-wing parties that are trying to understand the scale of the challenge, like People Before Profit here in Ireland. Equally, consumers who are worried about the climate can reduce their own impact on carbon emissions by cutting out flights, eating less or no meat, buying fewer unnecessary items, and so on. These are in no way meaningless gestures, but neither are they sufficient to bring the fossil-fuel establishment to its knees.”

It’s that end bit. We can stop eating meat, we can travel nowhere, we can be more mindful generally… and we should… we definitely should. But those things won’t save the planet. That’s the problem. I can do my bit, but my bit and your bit and all our bits together won’t come anywhere close to even starting to sort it out. It’s going to need something earth-shattering and massive to turn this around. And, in case you haven’t noticed, it just ain’t happening. I’m still typing, and the election results are rolling in as my fingers work. Nothing is changing. Nothing at all.

Allow me to make two diverse cultural references, draw one conclusion, and then shut up for this week.

First cultural reference: Doubting Thomas. You all know him, right? Or am I wrongly assuming you do because I exist in a somewhat Catholic world. In case you don’t know, when Jesus returned from being dead, he visited the apostles in a locked room, just to show them that he was back. Ten of them seemed quite chuffed about this, one of them was dead and the remainder, Thomas, was off somewhere else ‘doing a message’ as we say in Ireland. When he got back and heard the scoop, his response was something like the 33 AD equivalent of “Fuck no, I’m not buying any of that.” He announced that unless he could, among other things, see the piercings of the nails and place his hand inside the wound that Jesus got on the cross, he would not believe. That was Doubting Thomas. Jesus duly came back on another day. “Reach hither thy finger and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless.” Thomas came round pretty sharpish after all that prodding and poking.

I’m a writer. I listen, I eavesdrop, I overhear. And the word I hear on the street about Climate Change is the word of Doubting Thomas. What I hear goes something like this; Storms and hurricanes, we’ve had them forever; It’s all a load of bullshit; Global warming? We haven’t seen the sun all summer; It’s all talk, exactly like the Millenium Bug, keep us afraid, keep us in line. Of course that’s not all I hear. I hear the people who know the truth too, like Sally. But this is quite a lot of what I hear. Make no mistake. People are not getting the message that we are in trouble.

And, like they said in The X Files (that’s not the second cultural reference, it’s just a bonus one) “The Truth is Out There.’ You don’t have to look very hard to find the scientific evidence, to learn of the icecaps falling into the sea, to see the devastating weather on the news every other night. It’s not like we are not being told. So what’s the problem? The problem is twofold, as far as we the plain people are concerned. Firstly, we are simply not listening and secondly, and most crucially, like old Doubting Tom himself, we do not really believe.

This shouldn’t be surprising. We are finite creatures in many ways. And this is too damn big. Too big to believe. It is, almost literally, beyond our comprehension. Contemplating the actual end of the world as we know it is a little like contemplating eternity. We can go a certain distance with it, we can even get concerned about it. But if we push too far with our contemplation of it, our little minds will start to reel and stagger and we will have to go and sit in a quiet corner and think about something smaller instead.

Here’s my second cultural reference and I should warn you that if you’ve read this far and are hoping for some happy conclusion to all this then you should temper your expectations. I know what’s coming in this piece and it ain’t all that positive.

The second reference is the movie ‘Armageddon’ with Bruce Willis and God knows who else. It could be ‘Deep Impact’ just as easily. Both came out at the same time and both are on the same rough narrative. A big fuck-off asteroid is heading straight for us. What are we going to do? Bruce is sent off in a space shuttle to sort it all out (Yippee Kay Aye, Asteroid) or Robert Duvall is sent off, if you’re in the other movie. National differences are set aside for the planetary good. The whole world unites behind them. All that stuff.

But here’s the thing. In these movies, the world wasn’t simply looking skyward in terror because they were informed that there was a problem. They weren’t all focused on the incoming disaster because a bunch of scientists had written articles about it or because some old presidential candidate had made a documentary about it.

They were focused… and terrified… and united… because extremely bad shit had happened to them personally.

It wasn’t just about a big asteroid that’s still a million miles off. Nobody would have believed that. Nobody would have given a shit. To get everyone on board with the disaster, there had to be a bunch of awful precursors. Mini asteroids started taking out capital cities here and there. God knows why there were mini asperiods so far ahead of the big one or where they all came from. The movie just needed them. For the world to believably unite, there needed be no doubt whatsoever, in everybody’s heads, that really bad stuff was coming.

Any that’s the problem, as I see it anyway.

The plain people of the world are currently in considerable doubt that the end is nigh. Quite considerable doubt. And my fear is that the only thing that will focus the plain people of the world, on the strife that they genuinely in, is some super-colossal disaster.

Here’s one tiny, quite terrible, example to try to illustrate this large point.

In the early Eighties, Fire Regulations in Ireland needed updating. They got updated. But not before a nightclub burned down and killed forty-eight people. Need I say more?

If you have a heart, and I know you do, you will possibly say to yourself that the world is already inundated with the kind of super-colossal natural disasters that I think the sea-change will require. Look to Spain, for God’s sake, look to Haiti, Columbia, Costa Rica. Look anywhere. The portents are all there. And you’re right, of course, except you’re also wrong. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, but it’s going to take something worse than that, something exponentially worse, before we as a planet sit up in terror and start to do, as one, the things we are going to need to do.

I told you there was no happy conclusion.

Except to say that this bleak outlook does not let us off the hook. We have to continue to do whatever we can to change our own personal ways, to change our own habits. At the very least, it will be good practice for the things we will be forced to do in the coming decades. But, most crucially of all, we need to find some way to turn up the volume on the Ecological narrative. 

And, if possible, we need to find a way to do it that doesn't involve another few million people getting killed.