This for me is a time for mild pre-Christmas nausea, caused by the annual destruction of a persistent adult delusion, instilled during schooldays, that this is a time for gradually relaxing and then having literally nothing to do for the week leading up to Christmas Day.
In fact, the work just gets more and more stressful right up until the last moment. And I don’t think I have ever achieved that almost pastoral Christmas nirvana, always promoted in tinselly TV ads, of just sitting placidly around after Christmas lunch and then smilingly responding as one’s child shows you a present without complaining or demanding anything. Now my pre-Christmas nausea, or PCN, has been made worse by the news that Christmas jumpers are making a massive comeback, as popularised by Taylor Swift and Andy Murray.
Knitwear with big 3D-protruding comedy reindeer is going to be huge in 2015: £300m is expected to be spent this year on Christmas jumpers. They can look sweet on women, I suppose, in a self-conscious way, but it’s a tragically infantilising and desexing look for a man: like an infant’s romper suit. A horrible way to return to that self-deluding Christmas childhood.
1966 and all that
This week the film Doctor Zhivago is re-released on the big screen: a colossal aircraft carrier of a film, an epic of the Russian revolution starring Omar Sharif as the romantic doctor himself and Julie Christie as his true love, Lara.
I love this film. But I’m not too sure about its sucrose theme tune, which in the mid-60s was the earworm to end all earworms: Lara’s Theme, by Maurice Jarre. Daaa – daaa – da – DAAA! It’s set to invade your mind all over again: those four trilling balalaika notes, like four great big tablespoons of treacle ladled into your mind. With lyrics added, it was called Somewhere My Love and was actually No 1 for a month in 1966 in the Billboard Easy Listening Chart.
In his new book, 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded, Jon Savage gives a shrewd picture of how naffness gets edited out of cultural history. The Grammy for best song that year, for instance, was won not by the Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations or the Four Tops’ Reach Out I’ll Be There but by the New Vaudeville Band’s jaunty jazz age pastiche Winchester Cathedral.
So, what were people whistling and humming in 1966? The Beatles’ Paperback Writer? Percy Sledge’s When a Man Loves a Woman? The Supremes’ You Can’t Hurry Love? Nope. I reckon it was Daaa – daaa – da – DAAA.
Let’s get Physical
I have been reading Physical by Andrew McMillan, the poet who this week won the Guardian’s First Book award. The poems have been described as an evocation of (among other things) masculinity, physical beauty and gay sensibility. One judge, Emily Maitlis, said: “They are genuinely a celebration of the muscular male.”
As a non-muscular male, it was in a dubious spirit that I sat down to read The Men Are Weeping in the Gym: “The men are weeping in the gym/Using the hand dryer to cover/their sobs their hearts have grown too big/For their chests have grown too big/For their shirts they are dressed like kids/Who have forgotten their games kit …”
Actually, McMillan’s writing floored me. It is funny, frank and addictive. This poem reminded me in some ways of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming Pool Library. And his poem about a breakup, The Fact We Almost Killed a Badger is Incidental, is tremendous. I can’t wait to see hear him read his poems in person.
- This article was amended on 2 December 2015. The Grammy for best song in 1966 went to the New Vaudeville Band, not the Vaudeville Band. This has been corrected.
