Build-Up

We are well into the build-up to December's Festive Season, call it what you will... Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanzaa, Koliada, Laylat al-Raghaib, Saturnalia, Yalda, Yule. (I prefer the latter, it's in my pagan Viking blood).

Of course it's all about celebrating rebirth and redemption as we pass the shortest and darkest days of the old year and move into a new year, with light in the darkness symbolic of that cyclical seasonal transition to better times ahead (even if January and February may prove a little shit along the way).

play "spot the Christmas tree"

But it's all got too commercialised and drawn out for me. Call them what you will...Christmas trees, Festive firs, Seasonal spruce, Winter evergreens going up in living-room front windows ever since mid-November, what's that all about? We used to put ours up and decorate it on Christmas Eve, then place presents underneath it ready for the morrow. Then would come Christmas Day with its family gatherings, festive mood, food, fun, followed by the other eleven days of Christmas, playing with presents, reading our new books, experiencing inventive ways of serving up turkey leftovers.

Nowadays it seems to me there's just too much build-up, too much stress and I started becoming a bit contrary and bah-humbug about it all.  But then I thought maybe there's a reason for all the early trees and overdo of lights. Maybe we are desperately trying to cheer ourselves up as a nation.

Ever since the twin catastrophes of Brexit and Covid, the impact of war in Ukraine, the legacy of years of Tory mismanagement of everything except their own aggrandisement, the destabilising second coming of the odious Trump, that shameful genocide in Gaza, it feels like the spirit of the country has taken a knock, adopted a darker hue of anger and hopelessness fuelled by propaganda about Britain being 'broken'. It could be he case that they feel everything is coming crashing down and they just want a bit of light relief.

everything is coming crashing down

I've been way too busy with footballing stuff, poetry events, present buying, to write a new poem this week so instead I offer you two things.

One is a poem I wrote a few years ago in a blog about Space and Christmas: Above Us Only Sky

The other is a song by Scottish band TV21, the chorus of which runs "And all the time you build me up, and I'm waiting for the drop". The choice is pertinent, because the songs of TV21, dating from the early 1980s, chronicled the time when Britain really did start to go downhill. They were the Thatcher years when the vicious free-market ideology of that Conservative government began to decimate the best of British institutions and principles. We've never recovered. TV21 were punchy and post-punky. They foresaw what was coming, corruption, exploitation, hopelessness, selfishness, the alienation festering in the heart of the nation. We should be better than this. Maybe Labour can turn things around, rebuild community out of chaos, because Reform is certainly not the answer, it's Thatcherism by a harsher name.

Waiting For The Drop

And I laugh, and I get confused

And I cry, and I feel abused

In my dreams, in my nightmares too

In my mind I must get to you

And all the time you build me up

And I'm waiting for the drop

Crushed by three fingers I fall

Crushed by three fingers I fall

And I lie, and I bleed inside

And I cheat so I've got to hide

Behind books, behind magazines

Behind films and my teenage dreams

And all the time you build me up

And I'm waiting for the drop

Crushed by three fingers I fall

Crushed by three fingers I fall

Watch me falling down...

        I fall

                I fall

                        I fall

                                 I fall... 

You can listen along to the song performed by TV21 here: Waiting For The Drop

Thanks for reading, S ;-)