Those familiar January blues

Let’s talk (reheated) turkey: you don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be here. None of us wants to be here. We should be still in bed, eating reheated drumsticks, squeezing the last bit of content from the bumper issue of the Radio Times, and contemplating important issues such as Mrs Brown’s Boys: comedy or social realist drama with Brechtian undertones?

Frankly, this Christmas has been a disappointment. Not just a disappointment but a malignant abomination drizzled in a horrible mint sauce. Given that Christmas Day fell on a Monday, it meant that the entire holiday was crammed into a slightly extended week, giving us barely any time to wind down. Talk about “Bah humbug”? I’m still sucking mine.

This Christmas was simply too short. I even doubt if Adrian Chiles will be able to get a tight 300-word column out of it. No sooner had Granddad arrived for his Christmas stay than we were packing his pyjamas and bundling him back into the taxi with a promise to speak at Easter. This was a Christmas perfectly designed by the Tory Party for “hardworking people”. Even the tree hasn’t had time to shed. One day Sunak is chirping on about family and the Spirit of Christmas, and the next he’s in his Moncler Enfant duffle coat, waving off foreign spouses as they depart from Dover. 

It’s a matter that needs to be raised in parliament with a bill to ensure this doesn’t happen again. We need legislation to ensure that Christmas Day always falls on a Wednesday, completely bisecting the week and ensuring that we can take the entire week off without any guilt. Then New Year would fall on the next Wednesday, ruining another week for the workaholics. 

All I’m saying is that we didn’t kick Liz Truss out of Number 10 only to then cram Christmas into a suitcase and throw it off Westminster Bridge. Judging from a sample size of three people I vaguely know on Twitter, the rest of Europe is still on their holiday. Why aren’t we?

Myself, I still need time to recover. This Christmas was a particularly tough one. Becoming the victim of ultra-nationalist Twitter twerps on Christmas Day (it felt very festive) didn’t help my mood and January is always a bleak month. 

It’s statistically proven (I can’t be bothered sourcing this but it’s a fact) that it’s the month in which there are more articles published arguing that January is the most miserable month, no doubt because of all the articles telling us that it’s a miserable month. Black Monday is approaching fast, followed by Bleak Tuesday, Not-So-Great Wednesday, Atrocious Thursday and, finally, a moderately okay Friday.

January always feels like a return to normality after a period of high-pressure deceit. Big companies spent the weeks leading up to Christmas convincing us that we needed that expensive bit of tech hardware. We couldn’t live without it. Every day our inboxes were filled with reminders about how great that bit of tech is. 

Still not bought it yet? But It gleams. It cleans. It soothes your soul…

Yet only two days into the New Year and Amazon has already offered to let me trade in my gleaming doodah for half the price I paid, which is probably also the price it was worth back in November after you discounted the Christmas inflation.

Meanwhile, my phone has been burning through its battery, keeping me updated with all the bad news. I don’t know whether to turn off the vibration or stick it in my pocket and enjoy the ride. January has already been a succession of tsunamis, earthquakes, and wildfires, plus I’m sure (again, don’t make me fact-check) that Wayne Rooney has already been sacked from three jobs. And what have we got to look forward to? February? Don’t make me laugh. Easter Eggs are already in the shops, which is a shame since if they’d only got here two weeks earlier, they’d have made perfect Christmas gifts.

Then we have the not-so-pleasant matter of the Olympic Games, a probable General Election, and a US Presidential Election to “look forward to”, where “look forward to” is a euphemism for “much rather bury our heads in a bucket of lime”.

We know how it will go all: China will win everything with their army of muscular 13-year-olds, Sunak is toast, and so too is Biden if you believe the pundits paid to tell you that Biden is toast. But this is a perennial problem with US politics. We’ll have months of errant polls predicting that Trump is going to win with a landslide victory, followed by other polls revealing that Biden’s popularity has gone up. Nobody knows anything but everybody will claim to have an inside lane when the best way to measure it is going to be through the old logic of US politics: the economy and the mood of the nation. 

In the UK, Sunak is trapped by a public mood that will not be placated by a few measures in the budget. Years of perceived corruption, sick rivers, and exhaustion with the Tories will not change this year or next. Meanwhile, in the US, there’s no obvious way the Republicans bypass the roadblock of the abortion issue, which has been hurting them at every real-life election since the Supreme Court went crazy. If the Dems can mobilise their voters around that issue, it doesn’t matter too much who their candidate is this side of some wildcard. 

But let’s see. It’s January. We’re all dyspeptic and wondering what to do with the robot vacuum cleaners we stupidly bought as last-minute Christmas gifts.

I’ll take £50 for mine and a bottle of Gaviscon. Those spouts are still crippling me… 

@DavidWaywell

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