‘Tis the season of goodwill — even to Parcelforce, who actually did turn up with my parcel on Saturday morning, after all my problems (see last week. I am thus going to restrain my usual acerbic misanthropy, and offer instead the following piece, which someone sent me, and which captures the true spirit of Christmas perfectly. [And anyone who thinks it’s a cop-out should be aware it took twice as long to convert the freaking thing to HTML, as it would to write a normal editorial!]

Merry Christmas, and all the best for 1998…
Jim

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The X(mas) Files

Mulder: We’re too late. It’s already been here.

Scully: Mulder, I hope you know what you are doing.

Mulder: Look, Scully, just like the other homes: Douglas fir, truncated, mounted, transformed into some sort of shrine; halls decked with boughs of holly; stockings hung by the chimney, with care.

Scully: You really think someone’s been here?

Mulder: Someone or some THING.

Scully: Mulder, over here – it’s fruitcake.

Mulder: Don’t touch it! Those things can be lethal.

Scully: It’s O.K. There’s a note attached: “Gonna find out who’s naughty and nice.”

Mulder: It’s judging them, Scully. It’s making a list.

Scully: Who? What are you talking about?

Mulder: Ancient mythology tells of an obese humanoid entity who could travel at great speed in a craft powered by antlered servants. Once each year, near the winter solstice, this creature is said to descend from the heavens to reward its followers and punish its disbelievers with jagged chunks of anthracite.

Scully: But that’s legend, Mulder – a story told by parents to frighten children. Surely, you don’t believe it?

Mulder: Something was here tonite, Scully. Check out the bite marks on this gingerbread man. Whatever tore through this plate of cookies was massive – and in a hurry.

Scully: It left crumbs everywhere. And look, Mulder, this milk glass has been completely drained.

Mulder: It gorged itself, Scully. It fed without remorse.

Scully: But why would they leave it milk and cookies?

Mulder: Appeasement. Tonight is the Eve, and nothing can stop its wilding.

Scully: But if this thing does exist, how did it get in? The doors and windows were locked. There’s no sign of forced entry.

Mulder: Unless I miss my guess, it came through the fireplace.

Scully: Wait a minute, Mulder. If you are saying some huge creature landed on the roof and came down the chimney, you’re crazy. The flue is barely six inches wide. Nothing could get through there.

Mulder: But what if it could alter its shape, move in all directions.

Scully: You mean, like a bowl full of jelly?

Mulder: Exactly. Scully, I’ve never told anyone this, but when I was a child my home was visited. I saw the creature. It had long white strips of fur surrounding its ruddy, misshapen head. Its bloated torso was red and white. I’ll never forget the horror. I turned away, and when I looked back it had somehow taken on the facial features of my father.

Scully: Impossible.

Mulder: I know what I saw. And that night it read my mind. It brought me a Mr. Potato Head, Scully. IT KNEW I WANTED A MR. POTATO HEAD.

Scully: I’m sorry, Mulder, but you’re asking me to disregard the laws of physics. You want me to believe in some supernatural being who soars across the skies and brings gifts to good little girls and boys. Listen to what you are saying. Do you understand the repercussions? If this gets out, they’ll close the X-files.

Mulder: Scully, listen to me: It knows when you are sleeping. It knows when you’re awake.

Scully: But we have no proof.

Mulder: Last year, on this exact date, S.E.T.I. radio telescopes detected bogeys in the airspace over twenty-seven states. The White House ordered a Condition Red.

Scully: But that was a meteor shower.

Mulder: Officially. Two days ago, eight prized Scandinavian reindeer vanished from the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. Nobody – not even the zookeeper – was told about it. The government doesn’t want people to know about Project Kringle. They fear that if this thing is proved to exist, then the public would stop spending half its annual income in a holiday shopping frenzy. Retail markets will collapse. Scully, they cannot let the world believe this creature lives. There’s too much at stake. They’ll do whatever it takes to insure another silent night.

Scully: Mulder, I-

Mulder: Sh-h-h! Do you hear what I hear?

Scully: On the roof. It sounds like . . . a clatter.

Mulder: The truth is up there. Let’s see what’s the matter…

This particular TC editorial comes under the category of ‘cathartic’ — as can probably be told from the fact that, for the first time ever, the heading is exactly as written on the title page. Combine this fact with the significant beer intake this evening, and you know that you are heading for a full-scale JhM rant. But at least the caption should trigger a few misdirected hits from the dumber members of the Internet community, seeking undressed postwomen…

I got a card through the door from Parcelforce the other day. Y’know, one of those “we tried to deliver a parcel but you weren’t in” ones. In this case, with some Ł37 excess to pay on it — which gave me a damn good idea of what it actually was, HK laserdiscs. Though, as yet, I still don’t know. This is because trying to speak to Parcelforce is like contacting the dead, except only less likely. The South London depot of Parcelforce do not answer their phones; thus, when you call them up, you generally get an engaged tone, because some other sucker has got there first, and is waiting on the ringing tone, in the forlorn hope that someone at the other end wil be stupid enough to pick it up. On very rare occasions, however, you get the chance to *be* that sucker, and are left to contemplate how the employees at Parcelforce must have have their auditory functions surgically removed.

Finally, I got through, and was told the computer systems have been down for the past couple of days. Yeah, sure — coming from a work environment where five minutes of computer failure is deemed unacceptable, I was less than sympathetic, but I gave them my details and asked for the parcel to be delivered on Saturday. They took my number and said they’d phone me back. With the benefit of hindsight, I can hear them cackling manically as they put the phone down, “I said I’d phone him back, and he BELIEVED me!”. For no call ever came. At 5:30, I tried to find out what was going on, only to get the engaged/ring till Doomsday approach once more. I even tried to fax them, only to find that their FAX had also had its auditory functions surgically removed, as it wasn’t answering the phone either.

So, as it stands, I have no idea what’s going to happen tomorrow. I know if I go to the depot to try and collect the parcel, it’ll have been put in a van and sent to Perran Road, and I’ll get back to find another poignant little card saying “we tried to deliver a parcel but you weren’t in”. However, if I sit here and wait for it, the package will be stuck resolutely in their warehouse. This should, theoretically, be a 50/50 chance, but few things are less certain than Parcelforce.

Do you care about this? Probably not. Do I? Not really. I’m sure that my parcel and I will be united at some point. But is it just me? Or is there some larger, demonic scheme at work? And at least it did help to pass an otherwise tedious Friday in the office. Oh, fuck it — I’m going to have another beer…

Someone tried to break into the house the other day

This small phrase covers a host of paranoia, starting with the sudden clenching of your stomach into a small, hard knot as you realise that the gouge marks in the door-frame are unlikely to have been caused by a genetically engineered strain of giant woodpecker. That they didn’t get in – we replaced the door last year, and it stood up to the test well – somehow makes it worse: are they going to come back and try again? I like to think not; if they have any sense, they will have gone off to find an easier mark, knowing we’re now on our guard. But these people were dumb enough to target one of the very few houses in the street with a burglar alarm, so who knows how they think?

After such an incident, you start to view everything in a suspicious light. That guy who came round selling double glazing last week — was he legitimate? What about the building site that started constuction at the end of the road? And perhaps most tellingly of all, a housemate bought a video recorder from Curry’s down in Brixton last weekend. It seems MOST suspicious that within days of that (when he gave his name and address — as you must, for TV licencing purposes), we suffer an attempted burglary. Now, I don’t think that this is a Curry’s sanctioned scheme to repossess their stock (though it does make me wonder where ‘Manager’s Specials’ come from!), but it’s not a mistake we’ll make again. The next electronic gadget we get will be bought by Max Renn, of 83 Channel Road.

Further security measures are now in hand for TC Towers, turning it into a fortress worthy of a crack-dealing paedophile with a persecution complex. Mini-nukes will be installed to cover the hallway, while a pack of leopards roam the stairwell. Capsules of nerve gas have been attached to the VCR (God forbid I forget to disarm them, while seeking some post-pub entertainment) and we’re negotiating with the SAS to see if they can spare a regiment for the cellar. I am, of course, just joking. But only JUST. If this is what a mere attempt is like, we do *not* want to go through the real thing. And if that means we have to spend three-quarters of an hour unlocking the deadbolts, so be it.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I feel a strong urge to go and check all the doors and windows.

1997 looks like being a truly bad year for celebrities; the Dead Pools must have been working overtime, especially over the past few months. I blame Princess Diana, for triggering a wave of copycat terminations. Mother Teresa, Jeffrey Bernard, John Denver, and now Michael Hutchence, joining the list of rock ‘n’ roll suicides — at least pending the outcome of the coroner’s report. However, at least no-one can mutter about unfulfilled potential in this case, since INXS’s last hit was years ago — Hutchence’s funeral was the biggest crowd he’d pulled in quite some time. And there’s been no polite period of mourning before the Hutchence jokes started to fly. Tuesday morning, and the following landed on my desk:

What’s the difference between Michael Hutchence and Manchester United?
United can still play Giggs.

But it remains the ultimate publicity stunt, guaranteed to revive the most flagging of career, at least briefly — for any publicity is good publicity, more or less (though I think Gary Glitter may have overstepped the mark a little). Even I must confess to having pulled out the one INXS album I possess, and putting it on — perhaps in some ghoulish attempt to see if there was a subliminal message in there. [Of course, it could be in there, backwards masked, but that’s a problem with CDs, that they don’t really lend themselves to such things — unlike record players, which needed no more than your finger, and an absolute disregard for the state of your stylus] Hmmm, does ‘Suicide Blonde’ indicate anything? God knows, when you can make out about one word in six.

His wake was, admittedly, a kind of who’s who of Antipodean tottie, and I almost expected Kylie Minogue and Paula Yates to engage in a hair-pulling catfight in the middle of the floor. [Ok, make that “hoped”] And for all his faults, Hutchence was a rock ‘n’ roll star. None of this clean-living, sandal-wearing, rain-forest saving nonsense favoured by the new generation of pop stars (Liam and Noel Gallagher excepted — though the size of their egos negates any praise due). It’s hard to imagine, say, Baby Spice hanging herself with a black belt. Er, actually, it’s not, but that probably counts as some kind of hopeful wish fulfillment, alongside thoughts about their tour bus crashing into an enclosure of ravenous panthers.

But perhaps it’s not so hard to understand. You wake up and suddenly realise that a) you have a daughter called Heavenly Hirani Tiger Lily, and b) you gave up Helena Christiansen for Paula Yates. Given that, who can blame Mr.Hutchence for taking his own life…

I have a theory about the 70 tourists who were killed in Egypt earlier on this week. It’s easy to blame the usual Islamic fundamentalists, but my theory would be that the Luxorites just got pissed off with enormous hordes of dumb foreigners wandering round their city, and decided to take the direct route to…well, to quote that fine philosopher T.Bickle, “Someday a rain’s gonna come and wash the scum off the streets”.

I fervently pray that someone does something similar here, and if I knew their address, would even write to the Islamic Jihad committee (or whatever they’re called), and hint that London is a hotbed of seething Western decadence, worthy of being put to the sword. And the centre of this evil empire is Leicester Square, which you could safely napalm and not even touch anyone with a London bank account. In fact, pretty much anywhere in Zone 1 would do — chalk up another reason why South London is superior to North London, any tourist who ventures down here is embarking on a trip which makes ‘Heart of Darkness’ look like a ride at EuroDisney.

“But think of the damage to the economy”, I hear you whine. Well, let’s look at the businesses most likely to go under if we practiced a little ethnic cleansing:

• Shops that sell plastic policemen’s helmets
• Theme restaurants — the Rainforest Cafe, I *ask* you! Bring on Belsen King…
• Most of Covent Garden
• Rock Circus and Madam Tussaud’s
• English language schools
• Fleabag hotels charging fifty quid a night
• Europa Food Stores

With regard to the last, can someone explain to me why a loaf of bread should be twice as expensive because you’re buying it near Trafalgar Square. And don’t give me that ‘rent’ bullshit; neither HMV, Books Etc nor anyone else feel the need to jack their prices up. But that really deserves an entire rant to itself. Suffice it to say that I fail to be overly heartbroken at the prospect of any of these places biting the dust.

When the Libyans and friends were blowing up American planes, life in London was great, because tourism dropped so much. You could shop, eat, live in comfort, even go to the theatre if you wanted (though, let’s face it, only tourists do that sort of thing). And I still treasure memories of walking through a deserted Camden Town just after the IRA set off a bomb there — though admittedly those memories are mostly ones of fear and panic because I was carrying a suitcase of ‘questionable’ video tapes through an area where there were more police than pedestrians.

But that’s still preferable to thoughts of “get out of the way, you STUPID tourist”, as they stand on the wrong side of the escalators on the tube, then when they get to the top, fumble around in their bum bags for their one-day Travelcards, seemingly surprised by the presence of a ticket barrier LIKE THERE IS AT EVERY OTHER GODDAMN TUBE STATION! And after they get through, they don’t move smartly away, but hover around, blocking it up as they wait for their friends. This is just one facet of London life, a single area that they make unbearable.

It’s all an interesting exercise in divisive intelligence. If one tourist has an IQ of N, then two will have a *combined* intelligence of N. So will three. Or five. Or twenty. Get enough, and you have something which would lose at Trivial Pursuit to a dish of penicillin. So, pretty please, I’m begging any terrorist groups who feel a need to kill tourists. Come to London. Shoot all you want. Just don’t stand on the wrong side of the escalators…