Is It Just Me? (23 page)

Little Sis had begun edging towards to the door. ‘I’m going to read my new book in my room.’

‘You stay here,’ said Dad, in his firmest voice. ‘You know your mum doesn’t like separate activities at Christmas; we must all remain in this room.’

‘Don’t you like this room?’ Mum stood menacingly with her hands on her hips.

‘That’s not what I said!’

‘Has anyone even commented on the holly behind the pictures on the walls? Has anyone noticed?’

Dad manfully attempted to save the situation: ‘Look everyone! Everyone, look at my tinsel tie, look at my tinsel tie . . .’

He was ignored.

‘Who’s taken my drink?’ Mum stared around, accusingly.

I grabbed at the glass in front of me, ‘This is mine.’

‘No, it’s not, it’s mine,’ said Little Sis, grabbing it back.

‘It’s MINE!’ I repeated. This was not looking pretty.

‘MINE!’ yelled little Sis.

‘My glass should be obvious,’ said Mum, trying to regain her poise, ‘because I put a rubber band around it so that everyone knows it’s mine.’ Every year! The bloody rubber bands! ‘It’s an excellent system,’ Mum continued. ‘This year GAJ has a sticker on hers.’

‘What’s made of wicker?’ GAJ suddenly piped up.

I downed the contents of my glass. ‘Not wicker, STICKER.’

‘SUCH FUN!’ Mum had The Look again.

‘It’s not SUCH FUN,’ cried Little Sis.

‘Can we all just calm down?’ Dad mumbled.

‘Things are SUCH FUN. IT’S CHRISTMAS. And things would still be fun if
you
hadn’t ruined Chinese Whispers.’ Mum glares at me.

‘But SHE’S DEAF!’ I yelled, pointing at GAJ.

‘Who’s deaf, dear?’

By now furious, I attempted to dramatically storm out of the room again but was blocked by the 9’ inflatable Father Christmas. I kicked it out of the way only for it to bounce back with surprising force, knocking me clean to the floor.

Such fun!

This family is a bunch of square losers. They’re so square, they’re cuboid. And what about Triv? Triv Pursuits – when we just play it normally, not the sad family version of
Trivial Pursuopoly.
Every year, Little Sis insists the winning thing to put in the wheel is called a cheese, when she knows full well it’s a pie. Yet she always calls it a cheese. Drives me mad.

No, the main thing is a cheese, and the little things are pies: you’re trying to make a cheese pie.

Have you gone mad? That makes no sense. It’s a wheel, not a cheese, and we’re putting pies in the wheel.

You don’t put pies in a wheel! There is no such thing as wheel pie.

Well, if anything it’s a pie and we’re putting cheese in it . . .

No, it’s a pie and we’re . . . Hang on, this is stupid, now we’re arguing about it between OURSELF. I don’t care what they’re called.

This proves just how annoying Christmas is. At Christmas I suddenly care what they’re called, and want to punch Sis on the nose for calling them cheeses. They’re pies. So there.

I think we should probably let this one go. Honestly, we do start to accept all these Christmas shenanigans and grow rather fond of them. Even the cheese/pie debate.

Really? There’s nothing in all this monstrousness that you thoroughly dread?

A few things do grate a bit, I grant you. Doing Christmas cards, I hate.

But Mum and Dad do them.

Not when you’re an adult. When you’re an adult, you have to actually pay for them and send them yourself.

Can’t you just not send them?

You
should
be able to not send them. But it’s impossible because some time in the middle of December, a big glittery card will rock through your letterbox that reads, ‘Warmest wishes for a wonderful festive season, all our love, Minty and Speng.’ You’ll think for a moment ‘Who the hell are Minty and Speng?’, then realise that Minty and Speng are that peculiar couple you met on holiday and spent two weeks in Lanzarote desperately trying to shake off. Now you feel horribly guilty. You quickly send Minty and Speng a Christmas card back. A week later, you receive another card, this time from your tax accountant’s brother who you met at a drinks thing in 1994. You send him one, too. Cards pour in, you respond to them all in a costly, guilt-ridden frenzy. ‘This is madness,’ you think, ‘madness – now we’ll all be stuck in a Christmas card loop for the rest of our lives, bouncing not goodwill but fury back and forth at great expense, growing less and less fond of each other with every stamp we miserably lick.’

Do people still send those embarrassing round-robin newsletter things with their cards? They’re GRIM.

Afraid so. Utterly ghastly.

Is it just me who can’t stand those newsletters, MDRC? You know the ones. You open a Christmas card and a folded, typed sheet of A4 slides out. Your heart sinks, because you know it’s going to read something like:

Does Mum still set them on fire, weeping, ‘Why can’t you be more like Mara?’ Actually, I don’t want to know. Now,
what about presents? Do we still always get RUBBISH presents?

No, they have got a bit better. Though last year we did get an egg timer from GAJ.

Gross. Though nothing’s as bad as the ghetto blaster incident.

Oh, yes. Why don’t you tell that one?

Oh, all right then. Hello Reader. So, here’s the thing. Aged sixteen, I asked Mum for a ghetto blaster. Aren’t they the coolest things ever? Especially when you get the double tape players so you can play one tape and record it onto a blank one and make people tapes. And the ghetto blaster I asked for came with a CD player. (I don’t have any CDs but HOW COOL?) Anyway, I got a whiff from the Little Sis that the parentals might be getting me one. I was SO excited. I was going to go back to school in January and put Talking Heads on my ghetto blaster, and everyone was going to see that I was so trendy. I was so excited about present opening that year. And, by the way, present opening in our house is actually good. We open all the little ones from the pets first, then –

No need to share that. On with the story.

So I got to my main present. And the box was worryingly small. I opened it, and it was . . . wait for it . . . a Dictaphone. Mum and Dad thought a Dictaphone was a ghetto blaster. A DICTAPHONE. I completely panicked because I’d already told everyone at school that I was going to get a ghetto blaster. I couldn’t go back and tell them that I’d got a Dictaphone instead, could I? Bella would spread it around the whole school in minutes.

Quite. So how did you explain it?

Um . . . well . . . I MAY have told them that the reason I didn’t have a ghetto blaster was that my family had decided not to celebrate Christmas in the end, as we’d all recently converted to Islam. Trouble was, later in the term when we were in RE class studying all the faiths, Islam came up. And Podge told Miss Manning that I was a Muslim. I had to make a speech about it to the class, then spend the rest of term pretending to be Muslim. Which was all right actually, because I didn’t have to go to chapel. But in some ways it was a bit rubbish as it meant I couldn’t have sausages and bacon for tea, and I LOVE sausages and bacon. So I had to have a big conversion-back-to-Christianity moment two terms later to undo the lie. Which Miss Manning got excited about and I had my own chapel service for it. Embarrassamento!

So, basically, that all just shows what a huge disappointment the big day always ends up being. I could go on, but I think it’s now my turn – TO DO A LIST.

Oh, no, don’t worry: we have found a way around that one. It goes like this: