Self last

Well, thank God that’s over for another year!

New readers may not know that in 1998 I was convicted of improperly consorting with a pistachio nut. A ridiculous charge that should never have come to court – I was only doing what the nut wanted, and don’t tell me I couldn’t possibly know about the desires of a nut, as this particular nut was communicating with me via special nut telepathy audible only to me, but they don’t understand that in the Crown Prosecution Service.

Any road up, I was spared jail, after a petition signed by all current inmates of British jails, pleading not to have to put up with me on top of everything else, was read to the court. Instead I got the so-called easy option: thirty weeks’ Community Service.

Easy, my pancreas. Do you realise that as a result of this ghastly business I haven’t had a proper Christmas or New Year since 1997?

You see, what I was sentenced to was thirty weeks to be served in annual three-week chunks commencing on December 25th.

The first seven days are spent in a secret lead-lined bunker beneath a gasometer in Hounslow. They give me a crate of orange juice, a sack of untoasted crumpets, a book called How To Spell, and a computer that can’t receive incoming mail.

And I then have to write all the post-Christmas journalism, thus releasing our wonderful sociopathic, space-filling, pig-ignorant hacks to spend quality time with the families who hate them.

All those belly-aching columns and ‘lighter vein’ opinion pieces about how it’s impossible to keep your festive goodwill going when your mother-in-law inadvertently spits her false teeth into the cranberry sauce while your maiden aunt’s flea-ridden mongrel shags your favourite whoopee cushion…

And isn’t it sad that the simple joys of Christmas are being howled down by an orgy of materialism and spend-spend-spend, and oh for those poor-but-happy Yuletides of yore when everyone munched on crunchy robins and all you really wanted from Santa was a period of remission in your frostbite…

And money’s tight after Xmas, isn’t it, so be first in the queue for the post-Christmas sales, except there’s nothing worth shoplifting as all the good stuff was sold in the pre-Christmas sales, and here’s how to turn turkey lungs and bowels into an Emergency Soup that lasts for ten days (because no one wants to drink it) and now’s the time to book your holiday, except the only place you can afford to go is next door’s car-port…

Haven’t you ever thought that all this stuff is utterly identical, year after year?

Now you know why.

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My second week of misery is spent hobbling around Salisbury Plain and Sherwood Forest on all fours in a black jumpsuit, trying to breathe another year’s life into those ‘mysterious big cat’ stories.

But it’s the third week that really does my head in.

Under a cloak of secrecy I’m hovercrafted into Dublin, kitted out in ancient rags and dragged down to the catacombs beneath the Basilica of Saint Shellailleaggghhhh of the Polypins.

As you probably know, in these catacombs the miraculously uncorrupt (but still pretty knackered-looking) body of Saint Shellailleaggghhhh is preserved on top of his tomb, and goggle-eyed pilgrims gape by candlelight at the withered, waxy, scarcely human features of the old twit – except between the 8th and the 15th of January every year when it isn’t Saint Shellailleaggghhhh at all, it’s me – the supposed ‘lookalike’.

What, you ask, is Saint Shellailleaggghhhh up to all this while? Kitted out in skin-tight lycra, with his new blond highlights gleaming in the sun, he’s riding the surf in some tropical hideaway, or hurling himself into a frenzy of body-popping in the nighthawks’ fleshpots of NYC. Nauseating, really, a man of his age. But, as he rightly croaks, it’s only once a year.

Once too often for me, mate. You’ve no idea what those rats can do to a body that still has some juice in it. And as for pilgrims, you can catch things off them.

Anything’s gotta be better than that.

Even writing Toasty’s Futon again…

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(REAL) DEATHS IN DECEMBER 2005

19 December: Dr Julio Iglesias Puga, who fathered a child at the age of 87 and suffered a fatal heart attack, aged 90, days after the announcement that his wife was pregnant by him again. 27 December: Captain Peter Moore, ‘military adviser’ to Salvador Dali (Dali thought that every banana republic had a military adviser and, being much more important than a banana republic, he should have one too).