Training | 2010.01.03
Grouches of the season | Peter Preston
If there\'s one thing worse than a Christmas e-card, it\'s having the real ones delivered by a \'postie\'
Is your lifetime glass half empty or half brimming full? Does the cup of woe run over without Wogan , or fizz at the thought of a Chris Evans future? Are we crocked in Copenhagen, or travelling hopefully on to our next adventure? Count me in category two: but sometimes, just sometimes, the old geezer in me has to start spouting. Three times this Christmas, as it happens.
Here\'s my first gift of the season: Dear Granny Smith , a book by Roy Mayall – a "letter to you, me, to all of us, from a British postie". Sorry, a British what? Suddenly, the people we used to call postmen have transmuted into the indie, sarnie and luvvie class. A whole Panorama on Royal Mail \'s travails passes with Vivian White constantly mouthing the "ie" word. "Why are our posties so disaffected?" Creepy ridiculous.
Postie Pat seems affable to the point of nausea. Posties, in turn, are loyal, lovable servants of the community traduced by gradgrind managements. How can we be horrid to them? The postie always rings once, unless he doesn\'t bother to ring at all – and just shoves a collect slip through the door.
Meanwhile – second grouch – I\'m on an excruciatingly slow local train from St Pancras while a few snowflakes fall. "We\'re sorry for these delays," says a disembodied apologist as full carriages sit and shiver, doors open, at Elephant and Castle. "We are waiting for a relief driver so that we can move forward on our journey to Sutton." Move forward? Happy prospect! On yet another "journey"? X Factor crooners, like Strictly come prancers, go on "incredible journeys". Finish bottom, and they must find other ways of "moving forward" with their disappointed lives. But between despair and Loughborough Junction, none of the jargon quite fits. It\'s more marketing speak when they should be telling the relief guy to get a move on – or at least shut the bloody door.
It\'s the Christmas card catastrophe that really seals it, though. Once I could fill two home shelves and a sideboard with proper cards, true inheritors of the British tradition (circa 160 years old). Now one shelf and a coffee table covers the lot, some peremptorily signed (the we\'re-still-here message) and some holding pages of warm scrawl from old friends far away. Where have the rest gone, though? On to the internet every one, flashing tidings of electronic joy.
Here\'s Bob on behalf of Britain\'s editors and Rodney from that Brussels institute; here\'s Suzanne from the World Film Collective; here\'s Unicef; and the BBC Trust – "Light up your Christmas", it says – with a curious side message: "The BBC accepts no responsibility for this email." And that\'s the haul of a few short hours. Every day the pile of digital silt rises higher (along with an injunction to buy "Europe: the ideal gift from Eurostar").
Now of course it\'s nice to be remembered – or at least to be on a list where one press of a button reaches 10 or 20,000. It\'s better to be stored on some memory stick than stuck in a hole of forgetfulness. But what else can you say for fake cards delivered via a laptop screen? You can\'t put them on the sideboard. You can\'t thumb them and feel togetherness. You can\'t even find them 10 minutes later, sunk amid the ancestral ooze of non-seasonal, Viagra-charged spam.
Ah! A new PR reindeer-spattered effusion, just arrived, tells me they\'re sending this mock-up to save cash they can send to the Cinema and Television Benevolent Fund: so there\'s no real pretence that this is any sort of "card" at all. Just another device to keep posties moving forward on their fantastic journey into a land where their services aren\'t required at all; one where bankies don\'t accept checkies any longer in the wasteland of cyberspace.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]sties-christmas-cards-x-factor
