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Dear AKIA:
HELP!!!! It's December! Already! The lights are up on the high street (actually, on our high street they've been up all year, they just don't bother turning them on till now). The cafés are done up like Santa's Grottos (lights round the menu board and glitter in the tea). The shop windows are stuffed with things everybody either wants or ought to want. Any day now that Coca-Cola ad (you know, the one that makes you think that Coca-Cola invented Christmas) is going to be on the telly. And I am majorly BROKE. As in penniless. As in without a sovereign to my name. (I don't really feel this is my fault. I'm a product of my society. The magazines all make it pretty clear as a plastic water bottle that the tree isn't the only thing that's meant to sparkle at this time of year. And there's no use in digging out the glam duds from last Christmas, because NOBODY would be caught dead in them this year. So I had to have some new gear, didn't I? I do reckon that I'm worth it.) Anyway, that leaves me with a problem. Presents. My dad's okay - he still hasn't worn the socks I gave him last year, so I can just get them out of his drawer and wrap them up. But that leaves the rest of the family and all my close friends. I can scrape a bit of dosh together by the end of the month, but not enough for more than a couple of humble offerings. How am I going to give a present to everybody who's going to give me a present if I have no money? (I did consider putting lights on the dog and sitting in a doorway with a hat and a sign that says PLEASE HELP MAKE OUR CHRISTMAS BRIGHT, but if my mum catches me I won't be allowed to leave the house till July.)
Christmas Is Looking Blue
Dear Blue:
There are people about (many of them related to me, I confess) who would say that the fact that someone is giving YOU a present isn't a really brilliant reason for giving them one. You should give presents because you want to, not because you're expected to, etc. blahblahblah. But those people don't even remember what it's like to be in their twenties, never mind knowing what it's like to be a teenage girl. We work under a lot of pressure. In any event, you have SO come to the right place with this particular problem. It's times like these that I think how lucky I am to come from a family that has officially banned the salivating, commercial face of Christmas from their lives. (That's as opposed to the times when, quite frankly, I'd rather be showered in every meaningless, unnecessary gift they could get their hands on.) I haven't bought a Christmas present in years!!! Seriously. Coming from my sort of background (fanatical eco-warriors and hard-line Christians) the answer to your problem is pretty much a no brainer. You probably haven't thought of this because, like many people, you think of presents as clothing, jewellery and state-of-the-art electrical gadgets. But you're wrong. A gift is something YOU GIVE TO SOMEONE. It doesn't matter what it is. It's the GIVING bit that counts. Naturally, the easiest is to dig through your wardrobe and find all the things you got last year that you didn't like and simply redistribute them. But if you find all you've got is some stripy tights, a yoga mat, a few CDs that turned out to be well boring and a couple of tops that went out of fashion on the 3rd of January (all unsuitable for mothers and people of that ilk), then all you have to do is make something! I know... I know... but it isn't as hard as it sounds. And you don't even have to be able to knit of anything über-ambitious like that. There's lots of stuff you can make with glue or a needle and thread. You can make dolls out of old socks and gloves. You can make a jewellery box by covering an old cigar box (given away free in most cigar stores!) with paper and pictures. You can make earrings out of the pull tabs from fizzy drinks. You can make key rings out of old bits of chain and just about any doodad you find. You can sew two bits of old material together and make a cushion or a This Is Not A Plastic Bag for shopping. The possibilities are endless. All you have to hope is that they're not making your presents, too!
Dear AK:
Every year I have to go Christmas shopping with my dad. You know because he can't be trusted on his own. Especially when it comes to buying a gift for my mum. The last time he went on his own he bought her a set of pots and pans. He kept saying, "But darling, you said you needed a new set." She cried, threw the soup pot at him (knocked over the tree) and stormed off to her room. By the time she came out again it was too late to start the turkey and we all ended up in the only café we could find open, eating beans on toast and drinking tea with bits of tinsel in it. Anyway, that's why I have to go shopping with my dad. (Also because no one else will go.) I hate it. I more than hate it. I'd rather go to school in my pyjamas, the Mickey Mouse ears I got when I was six and my owl slippers. The reason I hate it is because my dad's like the anti-Christmas. It's all 'Look at how much this is!' and 'Look how much that is!' and "Are they having a laugh? Five hundred quid for a handbag? What are you meant to do? Live in it?' and 'Why would anyone in his right mind pay fifteen pounds for an electrical gadget to turn you other electrical gadgets off when you could get off your bum and do it yourself?' I'm not joking. I don't think even you could image how stressful and endlessly humiliating it is. (The reason NO ONE ELSE will go with him is because of the time my brother asked for a Toy Story advent calendar and my dad went completely ballistic and started screaming that it wasn't the coming of Buzz Lightyear we were celebrating it was the coming of Our Lord and Saviour, and if he was getting an advent calendar it was blinkin' well going to be about the Baby Jesus. The whole shop heard him. People outside the shop heard him. Everyone was just sort of staring at us with their mouths hanging open. My brother was only little and he was so embarrassed he wet himself. My mum and my grandmother and my Aunt Caroline all walked straight out of the shop and into the pub on the corner.) Anyway, my question is, what can I do to get my dad into the spirit of the season?
On the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
Dear Verge:
It may that the years of indoctrination from my own family have taken their toll more than I thought (not only are they all fairly rabidly anti-materialistic but I'm actually related to a Vicar and his dog!), but I find myself thinking: Well, it depends which spirit of the season you're on about, doesn't it? If you're talking about the shop till you drop and have to crawl to the bus stop spirit, then your dad is not only not on the same page, he's not even in the same book. If you're talking about the spirit of the season that's about Christ and getting your priorities right and all, however, then I think a lot of people (like my nan and her husband the Vicar) would probably say that your dad has the Christmas spirit down straight. 'Ask yourself what Jesus would do,' my nan likes to say. And in the case of the Toy Story advent calendar I think most Biblical scholars (remembering the part in the Bible where Christ gets in a bad mood and throws the moneychangers out of the temple) would say He'd probably pretty much do what your dad did. But there is a solution! What I think you should do is just offer to do your dad's shopping for him and leave him at home. It sounds like it would save all of you a lot of stress.
Dear Aunty:
I don't know what's wrong with me, but it seems that the older I get, the less Christmassy Christmas feels. When I was little I thought I'd die of excitement and anticipation. I couldn't wait till we put up the tree. And on Christmas Eve I'd bring all the cats and the dog into my room with me so when they talked at midnight (like everybody said they would) they'd wake me up and I'd hear them. Now I just think, oh well, it's Christmas. My dad's going to complain that the turkey's undercooked and we're all going to get poisoned. My mother and her sisters are going to argue about how to make the eggnog. The lights on the tree will go off and my uncles are going to spend three hours not finding out which bulb it is that's blown. My grandfather and my father are going to argue about politics, my uncles are going to argue about football, my little sister's going to cry because she didn't get a chimpanzee (she always asks for a chimpanzee - she's mental) and my older sister's going to lock herself in OUR room because my mother won't let her go out because Christmas is a family day. I still like the tree and the lights and all, but I know that the animals aren't going to talk at midnight and that by five o'clock on Christmas Day nobody else in the family will be talking either because everybody's mad at everybody else. Is this just part of growing up?
What happened to the magic?
Dear What Happened?
All the experts agree (I come from a family that's chocker block with experts of EVERY persuasion!!!) that part of the problem is that the expectations for Christmas are so high. And when you get down to it, basically what you have is a big meal nobody's that keen on (because they're watching their weight, or their cholesterol, or the turkey's poisoned) and a lot of tired, grumpy people who've been running round shopping and cooking and all as if they're in some sort of marathon and are starting to think about how much money they've spent and how they missed the one film on telly that they really wanted to see because they were fighting over the last pair of burgundy velvet leggings in Primark. I think the trick is to do even just one tiny thing that has nothing to do with food or presents.[NB: This does not include donning a Santa Costume to raise money for orphans. My brother did that last year, and he got mugged!] Every Christmas Eve my boyfriend and I go with my nan, the Vicar and their dog to the Christmas Peace Vigil down at Parliament Square. (I know, one could argue that it's pretty depressing that every year there's a Peace Vigil, but Nan says it'd be a lot more depressing if there wasn't one.) We just stand out in the cold and the rain, and at some point we'll all start singing about Peace on Earth etc and, to tell you the truth it feels sort of magical. Nan says it's because Jesus is Hope, and we're all being hopeful. So you could try it. It works for us.
Dear Aunt Know-It-All:
I like really hope it's true that you KNOW EVERYTHING, because I'm adrift on a really big ocean of uncertainty here and desperately need some help. So here's my problem. There's this bloke at school that I really fancy. He's well cute, super nice and pretty smart (but not in a-let-me-explain-string-theory-to-you sort of way). Plus, we have like gazillions of things in common (he hates plain chocolate, loves The Rocky Horror Picture Show and is allergic to guinea pigs just like me!) We never hang out after school or anything like that, but he's in my tutor group and always chats to me and sometimes he'll sit with me and my mates at lunch. Plus, he's always giving me compliments. You know, I like your boots or That's a cool top - that sort of thing. Once when we were hanging out in the lounge there weren't enough seats and he scooted over so I could share his chair, and the other day at lunch he wrestled me for a bag of crisps. My mate, Dalina, says this all means that he fancies me. Dalina says boys don't notice what a girl's wearing unless her tits are hanging out or they're like really interested in her. Also, there's the chair sharing and the wrestling. Dalina says physical contact is a dead giveaway. But I'm still not convinced. (Dalina has been wrong before. About that 'natural' hair colouring that me break out so much I had to wear GLOVES whenever I went out for the whole summer. About how my mum would never notice if I borrowed her silver heels. About frying spaghetti. About culottes. To name but a few!!!) Plus, I have been dropping hints that if he wanted to ask me out I wouldn't like laugh in his face or throw up or anything like that. You know, nothing like APPALLINGLY obvious, just when he mentions a film he'd like to see I say I'd like to see it too, and when he said he was going to the market on the weekend I said I was thinking of going too - that sort of thing. But so far he hasn't exactly like jumped at the chance to go with me. (He went with his mates to the film and even though I spent HOURS wandering round the market I never even ran into him!) How can I tell if he does like me? (You know, without having to make a complete fool of myself by asking him out and having him reject me.) I reckon if anyone knows, it has to be you.
Drifting out to Sea
Dear Drifting:
I know precisely how you feel. Who amongst us hasn't lain awake at night, watching the shadows flicker in the pitiless darkness, listening to the sirens wail like lost souls in hell and the tap in the bathroom drip like a bleeding heart, thinking: Does he? Doesn't he? Does he? Doesn't he? In simpler times (i.e. when my nan was young and all one had to worry about was being bombed), girls used to pull the petals off daisies to get these questions answered. Or peer into sheep entrails. And I know that one would think that - since this IS the blinking 21st century and we can send robots to Mars and put ears on mice and make life in a test tube and all - some genius would have worked out a foolproof way of telling if some chap's hot for you or not by now. But he hasn't [NB: This is another example of how men would rather tinker with ANYTHING, even life itself, than give any attention to emotional matters.] The main problem is that men are unreliable. So sharing his chair with you could mean that he likes you, or it could just mean that he couldn't be bothered to stand up and let you sit. And wrestling you for the crisps could just mean that he was hungry. Having wasted some of the best hours of my life pursuing someone I thought might be interested in me (and nearly killing myself in the process), I now favour the Direct Approach. Invite him to go to something with you and your mates. Like the cinema. Only don't invite anyone else. When he turns up you explain that everybody else cancelled at the VERY last minute. (What a shame!) Then you say, "Well we could still see the film if you want." If he says he doesn't want, then you know where you stand. Outside the Odeon on your own.
Dear A K:
My boyfriend and I went out for two years. Everybody said what a great couple we were. I'm not saying we never fought or anything, or that he couldn't drive me insane, or that he remembered my birthday without any outside help, but we always patched things up. I figured we were set for life. And then one night when we were meant to be going to a party together he rang up and said he was really sorry but he wasn't coming. I thought he must be sick. Or that he'd borrowed his dad's car without asking again and his parents wouldn't let him out of the house. He said no, he felt fine and this time he didn't drive into a wall so his dad never found out about the car. He said he was really sorry but he'd been thinking about it quite a bit and he just didn't want to go out with me any more. I was DEVASTATED!!!! I said but why? Why had I done? Was I too tall? Too possessive? Did it really gross him that I like Marmite? He said I hadn't done anything wrong. He said it wasn't me, it was him. He just changed his mind. 'You can't just throw away all we've had together without telling me why!" I sobbed. He said he could, and hung up. It's been eight months and even though my girlfriends all say I should get over him, I can't. I keep remembering all the good times we had together. Like once I twisted my ankle at that Alien Flight Attendants gig and he carried me home on his back because it was absolutely pissing down and there weren't any cabs or buses around. He sang, "She ain't heavy, she's my girlfriend,' all the way, so I couldn't stop laughing even though I was really in pain. Am I doomed to spend the rest of my life longing for someone who doesn't want me? Is there something I can do to get him out of my mind? (You know, besides a lobotomy.)
Still in Love
Dear Still:
You have to GET A GRIP ON YOURSELF. To begin with, how could you be pining away for someone who treated you like that? He RANG YOU ON THE PHONE? Let me tell you, in situations like this the telephone is the penultimate refuge of the COWARD. [The LAST refuge of the coward would be the e-mail. That is really so trash.] If you ask me, anyone who had more feelings than a paving stone would at least look you in the eyes when he broke up with you. I know blokes don't like all the tears and screaming and emotional upheaval, but that's just too bad. If you want the kisses and the hugs and all, then you have to take the tears etc as well. Second thing: you have got to stop with the happy memories lark. That's what the experts call being tres Counter Productive. How are you ever going to get over this dweeble if you sit round thinking about all the good times you had together? Answer: You're NOT. What you have to do is Concentrate on the bad times. Remember when you stood outside the tube station in your miniskirt and six-inch heels in a monsoon for two hours because there was a match on the telly and he completely forgot about you. Remember not the time he carried you home on his back, but the time you had the flu and he never once stopped by to see how you were because he didn't want to catch it. Don't think about all the times you PATCHED IT UP after a fight - remember the fights. How thick he was. How stubborn. How he said he'd rather listen to pigs being slaughtered than you singing along with the radio. Remember the forty-five minutes you spent telling him about the insane woman on the bus with the miniature Chihuahuas and how when you were through all he had to say was, "You got anything to eat?"
[to be continued!!!]
(Note to You: For those of you trying to find my old Diary it is here... )
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Sunday 2nd December 2007