So here it is Merry Christmas, everybody’s
having fun. I attempted to get into the festive spirit by going to town at
lunchtime with Mandi for our traditional Christmas Eve drink and wander around.
The city centre was the usual cunt-fest of aggressive last minute shoppers so
luckily we didn’t have anything to buy that we needed. If people did their
Christmas shopping a bit earlier then they could enjoy the festivities at an
appropriate time. Christmas Eve is not the time for shopping; it is a time for
having a nice day out and a drink or two. My old gripe about the shop’s
attitude has not been rectified and they were still taking the decorations down
to make room for signs advertising the sales on Boxing Day. This is so fucking
wrong for two main reasons; first of all the shop workers presumably want to
enjoy some kind of seasonal celebration so why not close up at about two o’clock,
I know that Christmas Eve is a working day and as such the workers don’t get
any extra money but it’ll be a nice gesture to send them home early. Secondly,
why do we start the sales on Boxing Day anyway? Wouldn’t it be better to return
to having January sales so that the shops don’t have to open on the 26th?
Would you be able to relax properly on Christmas Day knowing that you had to be
up early to try and sell stuff to idiots the next day? I know the staff are
paid double for Boxing Day (in fact it might be more, I’m not sure) but isn’t
morale or family time more important? It would be nice if all the people who
work in shops simply refused to go in to work and told the boss to keep the
extra money.
The atmosphere in town did not scream out
Christmas Eve to me, there wasn’t a brass band or carol singer to be heard for
a start. Nobody (apart from the man who asked me for a light) wished me a Merry
Christmas, and nobody seemed to break out in song as they do in musicals. The
shops were half empty and the people miserable, so we went to the pub. I haven’t
been to the Malt Cross since they had a refurbishment and opened up the caves
underneath (and although the pub isn’t in Hockley they still managed to ignore
an idea I gave them in favour of doing it anyway without giving me any credit
or money), so I was looking forward to seeing the place. It is one of my
favourite places to watch live music due to its fantastic acoustics, (in
Victorian times entertainers had to make themselves heard with no microphones
and music halls were designed accordingly) and I’m sure I’ll attend gigs there
again. However, they seem to have taken something away from the place. My dad
(we had met him for a drink) commented that it doesn’t look anything like a
Victorian Music Hall anymore, and we could have been in a Yates’s Wine Lodge or
a Music Hall theme pub. It was too clean and santitised as if the designer had
done nothing more than rip the heart out. The people behind the venue do some
brilliant work within Nottingham, all the profits made go to charity, but they
should have left the pub area alone.
Order was restored once we arrived home and
had Mandi’s traditional Christmas Eve meal of boiled ham (boiled in Cherry
Coke) with jacket potatoes and sweet corn followed by Christmas cake with lumps
of cheese and a glass or two of sherry while watching The Snowman.
It might have felt like a normal run-of-the-mill Saturday outside,
but indoors with the fire on it felt like Christmas Eve.
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