COMPLIMENTS OF THE SEASON

It is the very Devil, isn't it, Christmas, all the hypocrisies rolled into one,  the rich man in his castle, the poor man sleeping on the street;  the mistreated, mateless mother, her soul trashed by her kids' consumerist expectations;  the poor,  the sick, the lonely, those estranged by familial strife, the bereaved, all  mercilessly dragooned into believing that the footfall in the shopping malls,  the scorching cyber avenues and  the simpering, noncing monsignors are actually something to do with them, something, for fuck's sake,  to celebrate.  For many it will be a misery and for even more it will a disappointing delusion.

I saw a woman on the box, yesterday,  I nearly said the News, silly me.  Some Godless, heathenbastard moron, gobbing away at her self-scripted nonsense about how not getting home by rail was not an option,  as though her life, and it's momentary intersection with mine, was a Bruce Willis film , in which she would star for me, triumphantly;  her arrival at her family's  MincePie House was not subject to things like  the weather or to what we call Acts of God,  fuck me, no;  silly cunt.  Just another one of those conceited Ruinettes, her brain turned to mush by Infotainment Inc;  God knows, they're everywhere, dribbling platitudes which they can hardly pronounce.  Dunno why she irritated me so much, maybe because, in the same bulletin,  two people had been washed away to their Merry Christmas deaths by angry, swollen rivers;  maybe because as I write this I'm looking at the sky again, at the sea boiling and frothing over a road it has just washed away.  I'd love to grab that stupid bitch by the throat and Say, There y'are, go and walk through that lot and tell me that Failure's not an option. It's ninety miles an hour forecast here but that can mean gusts of a hundred and thirty, blew me over, yesterday, flat on my arse,  Harris barking his head off, tangling his lead in my fallen legs.

And that, of course, the mighty weather, is what it has always been about, the mid-winter feasting and  firing and fucking;  it really tells, up here in the North, from now on  the days will get longer, perceptibly,  there'll be gales and storms and hightides but there'll be light, in which to cope with them.  After a decade or so here at the End of the World that is what we and I guess all our neighbours, all the islanders, are actually celebrating,  the triumph over,  the survival of Darkness.  Down South, even a Godless heathenbastard such as I would find church or cathedral at midnight and sing lustily with good courage. The Christians, of course, would humour me and say That, Ishmael,  Hallelujah, is what the Christ child's message is,  the triumph of Light over Darknesss. That and  Religions Incorporated.

I don't begrudge them their services and I love their carols and to anyone here who is a believer I wish you a happy and a holy time, in Heaven the bells are ringing.  For the rest, as mrs narcolept says, wherever you are I hope you withstand the weather,  each other, the crassness of it all and emerge safely on the other side.

Thanks for so many good wishes this year and please accept my own in return, with the compliments of the season. Normal service will continue.

STEELEYE SPAN, FROM BEFORE BEFORE.