December birthdays

Pretty twinkly lights

December birthdays have the potential for a great deal of suckage. It begins when one is little, and elderly batty old ladies¹ say “Oooh, it must be lovely having a birthday near Christmas! You must get lots more presents!”

Now, any child with a rudimentary grasp of mathematics² knows that receiving birthday presents in the same month as Christmas presents does not mean that the birthday presents have magically multiplied. There is the same number of birthday presents, and now you’ll have to wait a whole year before receiving any more presents, unlike all those smug summer babies who’ll get a second chance to get the much-longed-for My Little Pony^TM Dream Castle^TM in a few months’ time.³ In fact, one is frequently worse-off, as the lazier of one’s relatives will pass over two identical gifts, saying “here is a Christmas present for Michael, and a joint Christmas-and-birthday present for Kathy”, and assume that just because Kathy is only five years old, she will not have remembered that Michael also got a birthday present in November.⁴ Still, it’s hard to blame the grown-ups sometimes – just because it’s December, that lump of plastic tat in the Argos catalogue for which you have yearned all year, and been counting down the days until you can unwrap the box and unleash the Sylvanian Families Caravan With Detachable Horse, will have gone up in price by at least 20%. Thanks, shops. And that’s before I even mention the problems people have with finding wrapping paper which doesn’t have holly or robins on it!

It’s not just the presents that have the potential to suck though. Not by a long shot. Y’see, the really really irritating thing about a birthday in December is Christmas. Christmas is, according to my calendar, the 25^th of December. You’d think therefore I ought to be able to have a nice pleasant birthday, doing birthday things, and worry about Christmas afterwards, wouldn't you?

Nope.

My local Wetherspoons’ has had Christmas decorations up since the 20^th of November. Bloody Chris Bloody Evans on the radio was shouting about it being “the fifth day of Christmas!” No, you twat, it’s the fifth day of December, there is a difference. The DJ on Capital Radio (who I turned to to avoid the Radio Two twattiness, and is marginally less annoying than Chris Evans, despite claiming to like home-made gifts “because I’m an aquarium”⁵) was blathering on about it being “nearly Christmas” on the 7^th of December. The high-street supermarket was blaring out naff Christmas songs on the 3^rd of December,⁶ as if the place wasn’t noisy and unpleasant enough on a Saturday. Spontaneity is impossible - Tim arranged a little surprise get-together-with-friends for me, but the pub was packed with Office-Xmas-Let’s-Get-Slaughtereds, and it took a while to find a restaurant which was able to fit a group of seven in without pre-booking.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this little diatribe. Our family custom is to put the tree up on my birthday – two weeks before Christmas – but I know several December babies whose families wait until Christmas Eve before decorating the house, as is more traditional. This gives me a fairly definite “Christmas is permitted to start now” date, which means that I’ve noticed that Christmas genuinely is getting celebrated earlier and earlier each year, and this year feels especially bad.

Moonrise over Oxford Street

I like Christmas, I genuinely do. I’m not like my brother, who goes to pieces over Christmas shopping, and has one of those black “Bah Humbug” Santa hats. I love the twinkly lights and the tinsel and the dark starry nights with Orion in the sky. I love the fact that I get to do exciting things on my birthday – this year I went ice-skating in Somerset House, which I wouldn’t have been able to do if I was a summer baby. I love the time off work, and visiting Tim’s family, and open fires, and good food, and mulled wine and Midnight Mass, and yes, I love the presents. It’s just that I love it all at Christmas time, not on the first of December! Please, on behalf of December babies, give us a chance to celebrate our birthdays without drowning in Christmas!

1 You know, the type who scream when they see a slug, and think that girls should wear pink frills and play with dollies. They say things like “Does oo want to be a nursey-wursey when oo gwows up, and take care of people?” and look a bit nonplussed when you respond with something like “Actually, I can’t decide. I’m contemplating forensic toxicology, but oceanography looks fun too. Want to see the slug I just found?”

2 Which is any child over the age of three. That’s why birthdays and birthday presents exist – it’s to teach children how to count: “Hooray! I have seventeen presents this year! That’s three more than last year!”

3 In my family we have a half-birthday tradition, where one receives a bar of chocolate or a book six months after one’s actual birthday. It goes a little way towards offsetting this problem.

4 That’s the other thing children learn from birthdays: life is essentially unfair.

5 Honestly, I swear she said that!

6 I do appreciate the recent xkcd on this.

No more electrons any more!

It has been a bad time for electrical MacGubbins in our house. The food processor died last weekend - at least, I doubt it still works after the amount of smoke that came out of it - and it has gone to join the kettle and the landline phone in the pile-of-WEEE-stuff. On top of that, the damp (and therefore not-laundry) weather lately reminded me that I need to try and open up the motor STUFFS of the tumble-dryer and work out why it merely huffs but no longer tumbles. And to cap it all, the charger for my laptop which has been slowly disintegrating entirely-of-its-own-accord-and-the-ferrets-deny-everything finally came entirely to pieces and I no longer had any method of reading the internets other than my phone. Woe!

Hurrah for online shopping! Today I acquired a replacement cable and it is busy sucking surplus electrons out of my laptop, or whatever the SCIENCE says it does. I can once again look at pictures of cats with humorous captions, and read TV Tropes as God intended. All praise the power of the electron-sucky cable! Harrumble!

Lord Mayor's Parade

London!

 The Lord Mayor of Londonton is a very nice fellow who threw together a parade to celebrate my friend Sarah’s birthday. So we went along to Puddledock and watched it with a thermos of mulled wine.

 

 

Yay for Viking pillagers!

Those with tanks sneer at traffic lights

Everything is better with pirates. Especially steel bands

Then we went to the London Eye and watched the fireworks.

 

 

There's no arguing with that logic!

Cycling home from Epsom, we stopped at a red traffic light. Cue pedestrian waiting to cross the road launching into tirade:

“Yeah, tha’s right! Yew bedder fuggin’ stop!”

Us: “Yes, the light is red, that is why we have stopped.”

“Yeah, but, but, I betchoo wouldn’t of! Fuggin’ cyclists! CHAV!”

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*Le sigh*

Splortch: a public service announcement

I don’t play many computer games. I find modern soldiery shooty ones either too dull or too disturbingly real, and racing bores me unless I can be armed with banana skins and red shells. But every so often a game comes along and I become obsessed with it, and live and breathe it until it is finished. In terms of two-player co-operative games (and there are lamentably few good ones out there) this was Halo, and more recently Borderlands. It seems I do like shooting things up if there is an element of unreality in the scenario and I can do it in company. Spending an evening with one’s husband clearing an alien environment of evil bitey critters is a Good Thing.

As for single-player games, there was only one franchise I could ever get into: Grand Theft Auto. The universe is surreal enough that the (almost cartoon-like) violence doesn’t bother me, and the driving isn’t integral to the game. But most of all, the aspect I like is the free-roaming: there’s a beautifully crafted city that I can just wander around and admire, and I can choose which mission I want to do next. In the case of Vice City, I spent so much time playing that I began having dreams set there. Seriously. But by the time of GTA IV, I began to get tired of it. The city was a little too big for me to remember my way around, and there was a disappointing lack of interesting non-plot stuff (one hundred pigeons to shoot? That’s all? No taxi missions?).

And then one day last year we were in a shop rummaging through the second-hand bin for any two-player co-op games, and Tim picked up Assassin’s Creed II.

“It has really good reviews.”

“Yeah, but it’s not two-player, is it? Still, if you want it, you can get it, but I probably won’t play it. It doesn’t sound like my sort of thing.”

So we bought it and went home. Tim fired up the game, and I bimbled around the house. After a while, I stopped bimbling, and sat down next to him.

“What are you hitting him for?”

“Who’s he?”

“How did you do that?”

“You mean you can just go anywhere?!”

Tim let me have a go. This go lasted approximately three weeks. As he said, it’s Grand Theft Renaissance, and I fell in love with the world. OK, so the plot is like something Dan Brown would have rejected as too implausible, but I can go anywhere, do anything, deliver splortchy death from on high to any who incur my wrath (or whose death would simply amuse me – I’m not a complicated person).

When Brotherhood came out, I spent my Christmas money on it, and completed the game before Tim did (I think this is the first and only time this has ever happened). And today, Revelations is released.

I may be gone some time. Just as soon as Amazon deliver.

Splortch.

Indispensible accessories

Glove puppets: they're fabulous, aren't they? They can be used to entertain small children, create personal space on public transport, derail team meetings, and exercise pets.

I think everyone should have one!

Wish List

My birthday and Christmas are rapidly approaching, and family and friends (but mostly the former,¹ since I don’t have many of the latter who care enough to give me gifts) are asking what I would like. Setting aside such futilities as world peace and a pygmy goat and my very own lemur-infested island, here is my wish list:

A flash for my camera. Preferably one of those really nifty ones which I can detonate remotely without it having to be attached to the camera.

A small portable diffuser for said flash.

Some shades for my camera lenses.

Some clear filters to protect my lenses (miraculously they got around Madagascar unharmed, but I really ought to protect them more).

A backpack for lugging the above camera gear around.

A new mattress, ‘cos the current one is nearly ten years old and very lumpy.

Lady with an Ermine. Conveniently, it’s in the National Gallery in London this Christmas, so you won’t have to go all the way to Vienna to perform the heist.

A new hot water bottle – I have plenty of novelty-shaped cases, but only one bottle, and I think that’s going to start leaking soon.

The latest OOTS book, which is quite fortuitous since I found it under the bed the other day when I was looking for something else.

A ferret-proof kitchen bin (but small, since our kitchen is tiny).

A holiday somewhere with interesting wildlife – I hear Costa Rica is pretty nifty, and not far off the track from the Galapagos Islands.

A plain dark tailored jacket for the office.

A new bit of silicone tubing to repair my swimming paddle.

A sticky-roller for removing cat (and ferret) fur from clothing.

A slow-cooker (and a kitchen big enough for it).

A couple of saucepan lids with handles to replace the broken ones (the saucepans are fine). 

Some more Big Gay Musicals for rainy hungover Sundays. Classic stuff, like Calamity Jane, only I already own that. Oh, and Some Like It Hot - I don't have that in my Monroe collection.

Um…

I think that’s all. The problem comes when one is an adult and earning money and in (theoretical) control of one’s life. If one wants something, one buys it. I just ordered the forthcoming Assassin’s Creed game – Tim said “Bugger. There goes that plan for your birthday.” (Yebbut I want to play it now, not later!).

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child, and all I ever wanted was a pet cat. Now I’m grown up (ha!), I have two cats, not to mention three ferrets.

I am Living The Dream. 

Smug. I haz it.

1 Who feel obliged to do so.