I don’t have a three-year-old-nephew, I am not depressed, I love Christmas, my mother is a great chef, Iran doesn’t make two-faced Orcs (I guess), Christmas dinner is still due, I love my London attic, columnists are full of shit and this is a column I needed to write for my Journalism Studies.
Sitting down for Christmas dinner with my family, I find myself asking the same question every single year: will next year be the same? Will I still be living on the same crappy old London attic? Will I be richer, healthier, prettier, smarter, stronger, braver? Will any of us be dead? Quite a depressing thing to wonder, but hell: that’s Christmas!
My mother cooked. Although my sister and I two months ago quite bravely decided we would work ourselves to the bone this year to come up with a Christmas dinner that just slightly resembles something edible, my mother insisted on Christmas day itself that she would serve just what we had in mind to cook, ready-made probably by some Iranian factory where, I can only assume, they also produce radio-active, self-destructive, one-eyed, two-faced Orcs.
“Viola”, she said. “Bon Appetit”.
It was after second course, I grew a third nose. (SORRY, I mean:) I started wondering about next year just as I did the year before. Plotting my every step I need to take as if I was trying to chase back my footsteps forward in time. What to study to be happy, what to eat to be rich, where to live to be healthier and, most importantly, how to find an absolutely exotic girlfriend that would make my brother absolutely exotically jealous.
It is what would make me a very successful politician: (apart from being a morally corrupted, secretly xenophobic, self-important liar) always unashamedly promising an impossible great future. Only to myself this time. And it’s what makes me human – on this annual milestone of genuine annual disappointment we celebrate by giving each other 1980-sweaters, cheap perfume, wrong-colour-ties and if you have an exotic girlfriend, far too expensive but necessary annual jewellery – not having what I wanted to have, not being where I wanted to be.
My three-year-old nephew and his new transformer doll from which he since this Christmas morning is inseparable, sit beside me. He asks: “Uncle Willem? Do transformers have Christmas dinner?” “Yes. Together with the Power Rangers and 2Pac.” He seemed delighted trying to stick the head of the doll in the gravy to share in the joy of Christmas dinner.” “DON’T!” I say “It’ll probably dissolve”. “Uncle Willem? Why are you not a transformer?” “Because I am human”.
