A Christmas Apologia

Right, let's get a few apologies out of the way

• I didn't get around to writing any Christmas cards - for this I am sorry. This is on account of my uselessness. Merry Xmas anyway.
  
• I haven't done a Christmas CD this year - this is on account partly of my uselessness, but partly on the fact that I'm now a father in my thirties and consequently haven't listened to any new music at all. I could probably do you a CD containing all the new music I've listened to this year, in total, regardless of whether I liked it or not, but I suspect this would just be rubbish. By way of a replacement, I'm just going to point out that the Stooges' I Wanna Be Your Dog is chock-full of sleigh bells, but isn't in the slightest bit Christmassy. I think the fact that one of my cultural references is a song from 1969 is proof that I am now too old to listen to anything new. The other thing I was going to say was that I really liked the Dirty Projector's cover of "As I Went Out One Morning", but I don't think vicariously liking a 1967 Bob Dylan song really counts as the most 2010 thing in the world either. Ah well.
  

I will leave you with two seasonal thoughts:

• All these strikes and the snow reminds me of 1978, The Winter of Discontent, when the binmen and gravediggers went on strike. What a sad state the country was in: we couldn't even bury our rubbish, and the dead bodies were piling up on the streets uncollected.
• Why would anyone refer to "bigfoot" or "sasquatch" when you can call him the abominable snowman. Honestly people, how often do you get to say abominable, let alone in relation to a snowman? The English language, great and varied as it is, has given us no more beautiful term.