Two Chaps Talking

Dear Boy,

GO AWAY, DAMN YOU. AVAUNT. BEGONE. YES, I KNOW. NOW JUST FARK OFF!!!!!!

(Apologies. I've just done the computer equivalent of embracing Rome in latter years and bought a Macintosh. As I have yet to work out how to turn off the STUPID PAPERCLIP, it keeps popping up and telling me that it looks like I'm writing a letter. Do you reckon St Paul had this problem? No wonder he was so bloody snippy with the Corinthians if he had a helpful animated paperfastener trying to reformat his scroll every third line).

At any rate, Christmas is finally over and your perfectly timed missive finds me in an abominable mood.

Perhaps I'm getting old. In my youth, if I'd spent nine days doing appalling, tacky, demeaning things with strange people and bloating my body with meaningless excess I'd at least have had the amusing prospect of rashes and genital livestock. These days I just feel the like Herod did a few weeks after the birth of the LBJ. Unreasonable, liable to wax wrath and quite possibly capable of the slaughter of innocents.

In the spirit of avoiding it all next year, here are a few random observations. Please excuse me if I vent spleen. It's the only thing preventing me releasing a sack of starved rats into the sale department at John Lewis and picking off the fleeing provincials with a sniper rifle.

Carols:

Let's face it, carols are rubbish. Both of us have been known to carry a fair tune, one in a real choir and one in front of a splendid band and both of us love a good sing song, which makes it all the more galling that it's no longer possible to sing carols successfully at Christmas. There are several reasons...

1. They changed all the tunes. When we were at school, the tunes were designed to literally put the fear of God into children, the working classes and subjugate peoples. As a consequence, tunes tended to be bright, simple, memorable and have a faintly militaristic swing. They were designed to be sung when only a monsoon shattered harmonium or a lone bugler survived as accompaniment and could be carried aloft by a small band of singers inspired by enthusiasm, patriotism and sheer terror rather than any innate musicality. By around the fifth form, the dread hand of 'diversity' had crept over the music room and we had to suffer 'upbeat modern Christian musical praise' and, on one memorable occasion, the boy sopranos of New College Choir attempting Jamaican patois.

Most Children today can only recognise carols arranged by Phil Spector, out of date charity records and the sound of cash registers as seasonal music

2. Carols are always sung in the key of J Min. No matter how they're pitched, you find yourself sliding up and down the scale like a greased pole-dancer unable to get a grip anywhere. The only people in the congregation who are happy are the elderly Welshmen who bang out a beautiful, penetrating baritone in a key entirely of their own and the falsetto singing ladies who sound for all the world like amateurish transsexuals impersonating the Queen impersonating Aled Jones.

3. No one remembers the second verse. Well they don't do they? Mainly they hum or shuffle embarrassedly while the three regular churchgoers smugly belt out the interminable extra verses they've learned for the occasion including the four suppressed since the C16th which incite us to celebrate the festive season by 'Puttyng out the eyyes of a Frenchman and crufhing the rebellious Welsh'. This gets worse at New Year...

'Should auld acquaintance be forgot,

And never brought to mind... Um...

Tum tee tum tum tee tum tum...'

As far as carol singing is concerned, restrict yourself to the bath

Office Parties:

There is a swear word beloved of American rappers and teenagers which relies for its power to shock on the simple juxtaposition of an action and the single other human being with whom that act would be most taboo and distasteful.

If the word 'm0th3rfarker' makes you feel faintly queasy, consider this - 'Office Party'.

We are all for partying: jollity, drunkenness, fun and games. Any gathering involving drink and conviviality with charming people is to be lauded. Yet, and herein lies the knotty problem, why on earth would one risk one's job, dignity, reputation and sexual health by entering the lists with the people with whom one works?

We are not prudes. We are heartily pro the furtive bunk-up in the stationery cupboard, the magnificently pornographic public coupling with the Head of Personnel over the boardroom table and the photocopying of pudenda; just not with the R's Holes we have to spend every working day with.

With this in mind, the Chaps have decided to launch, in time for Christmas 2005, The Greatest Office Party Ever. A complex, web-based randomising engine will ensure that the staff of each participating company are separated by sexual preference and traded with members of another suitable organisation.

We, of course, are getting the female half of the Royal Ballet while you will probably receive the arse-end of Microsoft's accountancy software development division's helpdesk but... hey! - The privileges of power.

Presents:

When a man is within striking distance of his forties and of comfortable means, present buying becomes pointless. If I want something I've already bought it. I probably enjoyed the experience of finding it and buying it and now it's mine. Your attempt has been charming but, unless you can find a brand I aspire to but cannot afford or, indeed have located something I currently lack the discernment to desire, you can add nothing to my life but clutter. Give up. All those articles about 'What To Buy The Man Who Has Everything' will not help.

Just occasionally, the Two Chaps manage to momentarily gain enough of an edge to buy each other something unanticipated and special ­ but not often. Most of the time we don't bother. And, damn it, we're experts.

Christmas Cards:

Irrespective of the size of your circle of family, friends and acquaintances, if you have carefully failed to send them a Christmas card for the first 23 Christmases of your life then the chances of them sending you one become statistically irrelevant.

Most middle-class English people feel guilty if they don't send Christmas cards - Mummy/God/the Housemaster/Nanny will know and disapprove. They therefore draw up an agonisingly complete list of everyone who might possibly be offended and send them all cards because crossing anyone off would make them feel guilty.

Because children are starving in Africa, however, they feel guilty about spending money on something so utterly pointless so they buy really appalling cards, in bulk, from charity shops and send them second class ­ always guiltily worried that they might miss the last post because they have been so slack and left things to the last minute.

At Christmas, thousands of cards arrive from people that they can't remember knowing. If they receive a card from someone they didn't send one to they feel guilty.

If they receive a card more expensive than the one they sent they feel guilty.

If they receive a card more charitably poor than theirs they feel guilty.

If they receive a card from a more obscure or deserving charity shop they feel guilty.

As the cards have taken everybody so much begrudging effort, time and money, they scribble appallingly curt and formulaic greetings. Reading these en masse makes everyone feel guilty so they resolve never to send another card ­ until slightly too late next year.

This is a season of goodwill, fellowship and peace to all men. Save millions of middle class people from the dreadful burden of guilt by giving fifty quid to the next frozen bum you see and never, ever sending another Christmas card.

The Round Robin or Family Christmas Letter

Many families on both sides of the Atlantic send out a letter to update everyone on the family news of the year. An older family member who is heavily burdened with parental pride and usually a little light on contact with reality usually writes it. The result is an unreadably boastful and unintentionally hilarious list of the family's achievements, holidays, car and property acquisitions, births deaths and marriages. Imagine getting your Mother to write your resume ­ this is worse because she is also using it as the annual opportunity to stuff one to her pikey sister who was no better than she should be, dropped out of school and married that dreadful plumber.

Christmas Dinner

Occasionally, as I drive past the supermarket at Christmas, I catch sight of the legs of a poor person. The rest of the individual is concealed behind what appears to be the bleached, hairless, deep-frozen, shrink-wrapped scrotal sac of a 70' high amphibian. What on Earth can be the motivation behind the purchase of the annual monster bird? Is there a collective delusion of kindly Old Scrooge finally coming good with a superabundance of poultry for the starving Cratchitts? Or could it be just like the Doberman and the widescreen telly ­ steroid-pumped size is all that really matters.

Though I'm prepared to undertake all manner of festive foolishness in the name of tradition, I refuse to consume poultry more genetically modified than the Governor of California. I've no idea how Maria Shriver feels about sinking her teeth into his bronzed and succulent breast but I couldn't do it. Not even if they let me shove an onion up his Parson's nose and baste him in boiling fat.

Merry farking Kwanzaa

T