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Last Christmas but two I gave you my heart,
About seven months later you gave it away;
This year, to save me from tears,
I’m drinking mulled wine until I pass out.

Christmas shopping in Piccadilly last Friday I passed not one but two people openly crying in the street. The second had (I assume) her boyfriend walking her along, arm round her shoulders, with what I felt was a slightly smug smile on his face – and I wondered if I should point out to him that his other half was sobbing loudly.

It seemed to me a positive indication that Christmas is frankly a miserable time. Possibly, the latter example suggests, even if you do have a boyfriend. I certainly haven’t passed people openly wailing without cause on the street at any other point this year.

A few ideas to stop you from going the same way:

1. Buy your Granny some nice biscuits from Fortnum & Masons, then put all the rest of your Christmas shopping in the same carrier bag – it’ll make you look classy.

2. If you listen to the soundtrack to Mary Poppins as you fight your way around the city it makes it feel even more like London. Even, I suspect, if it is actually Royston.

3. Make a point of noisily exiting any shop that starts playing Wham!. Nobody will notice, but you’ll feel like you’ve made a difference in some small way.

…where I can buy a cigarette lighter in the shape of Jesus?

Googling for “Jesus lighter” just brings up a load of discussions about whether Jesus would drive an SUV.

Since getting back to “normality” after a mental summer of Edinburgh Fringe and touring Australia in a pair of shoes that let in water, I’ve been hoping for some kind of – well – rest.

It hasn’t quite worked out like that. Firstly because I was thrown into the necessary but stressful experience of moving house, then because no sooner had I assembled my bed when I was thrown into teaching forty-six Cambridge undergraduates in a variety of musical skills. And of course, being my own worst enemy, I have continued to impose an impossible schedule upon myself as far as my “free time” is concerned; keen followers of my activites will already know that I’ve been writing a musical, and amazingly in two months have managed to assemble about half of the words and music for it.

I’m not complaining, I’m just saying things have been generally quite demanding. And what with the approach of Christmas (always a taxing time if you work for the church) there hasn’t been much of a let-up.

All of which has culminated in this week.

We’ve been having a few issues with our plumbing. Essentially the problem appears to be that our toilet was installed in such a way that it was pumping sewage underneath the lino on the floor of the bathroom; it had also started to occasionally flood the bathroom. Naturally we haven’t been altogether delighted with this arrangement, but letting agencies being what they are, we’ve generally been told that something will be done about it next week.

This week, I was having my lunch in front of “A Magical Musical Reunion” with Julie Andrews, Dick Van Dyke and Richard Sherman (and rather enjoying it), when I heard a steady dripping in the hallway. My investigations revealed that half of the bathroom seemed to be on the verge of crashing through into the hallway.

And this was indeed the case. Essentially, owing to the eccentric arrangement of our plumbing, we had shit dripping through the hallway ceiling. And whenever we flushed the toilet or took a shower, the shit would not so much drip through the ceiling as sluice through the ceiling.

If you think I might be exaggerating for the sake of an interesting story, I can assure you that it was every bit as hideous as it sounds.

Chris and myself have mostly laid the blame on Alastair; bad things happen to him, as demonstrated every time he sings with my church choir and God strikes down an old lady in full view of the congregation. (Alastair’s theory is that the thunderbolts are aimed at him, he just moves out of the way at the wrong moment.)

So this week we have been forced to go swimming in order to take showers, and to go to Starbucks if we want to take a leak, as we listen to the steady drip of raw human excrement in our hallway. You’d be surprised how many phone calls you have to make to a letting agency before they realise the urgency of such a situation.

Last night we tried to forget our troubles and relax for an evening by going to the Selwyn Snowball. Except that this turned out to be less relaxing than we’d hoped. It would make fine dramatic sense to say at this point “I’d forgotten how stressful Cambridge balls can be,” only it would be a lie – I’ve been to very few balls where I haven’t felt obliged to squeeze as much fun into the night as possible to get my money’s worth, constantly rushing around because of the nagging suspicion that something much better is happening in a different part of the ball. Selwyn had successfully exacerbated this feeling by ensuring that there was pretty much nothing to do at their ball except hunt for things that might be happening – a kind of night-long impossible quest in the manner of The Crysal Maze. Central to this effect was a distressing one way system whereby if you actually managed to find a door you were allowed to go through, there would be somebody there to ensure that on no account you went back through it the other way. A simple trip to the toilet necessitated a circuit of the entire ball to get back to your friends, who would inevitably have moved on by the time you made it back to the spot where you’d left them.

I whiled away an hour by queueing for a massage, which was an anticlimactic hand massage because I was told men weren’t allowed to have shoulders done (apparently the sight of my naked torso was liable to make the female guests faint); towards the end of the evening I got so bored I offered to help carry some boxes of empty bottles, but even there the system contrived to get the better of me, and I was halted at the last moment by a burly security man who said I couldn’t lift things because I’d been drinking. The ball organisers smiled at me and said “well, thank you for offering,” which was also a let down because they clearly hadn’t noticed that offering to carry things was the ultimate insult towards the ball they had put together.

The theme of the ball was “The Beauty of the Orient”, but if they’d called it “Red Tape and Bureaucracy” I might have seen the point. As it was, it just fuelled an immensely frustrating evening, where the best thing to do was enjoy the atmosphere of Selwyn College and chat to friends. Something, need I point out, you can usually do without paying £52 for the privilege.

Thanks to Graham Pond for pointing this out.

Ruined my week.

The phone rings.

Me: Hello, this is BBC Radio Cambridgeshire.

Caller: Is Robbie Williams ill?

Me: Erm…well, quite possibly.

Caller: I hope he gets better soon.

Me: Mmm, yes, me too.

Caller: Do tell him to get well soon.

Me: Yes, yes, I’ll pass that on to him.

Caller: It’s Helen.

Me: Okay, thanks Helen.

Caller: Saint Helen.

Me: Really?

Caller: God bless you.

Saint Helen hangs up, leaving me bemused and blessed.

…a youthful, scruffy plumber takes one look at your bathroom and says “I wouldn’t live here, mate.”

What is worse than reaching the end of the day and realising that you’ve wasted it all watching The West Wing, is reaching the end of the day and realising that you might as well have spent it watching The West Wing because all you’ve produced in the hours you’ve worked is a load of uninspired shite.

Imagine reaching the end of your life and realising the same.

Thanks for the wild turkey and
the passenger pigeons, destined
to be shit out through wholesome
American guts.

Thanks for a continent to despoil
and poison.

Thanks for Indians to provide a
modicum of challenge and
danger.

Thanks for vast herds of bison to
kill and skin leaving the
carcasses to rot.

Thanks for bounties on wolves
and coyotes.

Thanks for the American dream,
To vulgarize and to falsify until
the bare lies shine through.

Thanks for the KKK.

For nigger-killin’ lawmen,
feelin’ their notches.

For decent church-goin’ women,
with their mean, pinched, bitter,
evil faces.

Thanks for “Kill a Queer for
Christ” stickers.

Thanks for laboratory AIDS.

Thanks for Prohibition and the
war against drugs.

Thanks for a country where
nobody’s allowed to mind the
own business.

Thanks for a nation of finks.

Yes, thanks for all the
memories – all right let’s see
your arms!

You always were a headache and
you always were a bore.

Thanks for the last and greatest
betrayal of the last and greatest
of human dreams.

William S. Burroughs

We have recently been sent a Cambridge City Centre Evacuation Map. The suggestion is that, being a historic and iconic city, Cambridge is an obvious target for any terrorists wanting to build up to an attack on a bigger, better protected city. Like Brentwood.

The terrorists might also be tempted to take out the University in the hope of depriving the country of a whole generation of future politicians, lawyers, bankers and well-spoken comedians, thus throwing the country into chaos. It’s a pity, then, that the City Council’s evacuation plan seems designed to help everybody except the above escape.

Under the heading “How will I know that an evacuation is required?” we are informed that the message will be circulated in the following ways:

Local radio stations will be informed of the evacuation and used to broadcast messages.

Requests to evacuate will be broadcast using public address systems in shopping centres.

Roadside message boards will display information about the evacuation.

Which means that the people rescued will be, respectively, the mad old people who phone in to Radio Cambridgeshire, the chavs who use the Grafton shopping centre, and the twats who try to knock me off my bike every day.

I, on the other hand, will remain blissfully ignorant of the evacuation and will no doubt be bombed or gassed according to the method in which the terrorists have decided to take out those members of the public who aren’t mad, chavs or thoroughly repulsive in every way.

It doesn’t exactly bode well for the future of the country…

I’m halfway through an excruciating pile of undergraduate essays on the topic of neoclassicism. Housemate Chris Law just dropped by and commented on them.

“Are these the essays you’ve got to mark?” he asked. “That’s a big pile”.

“Yes,” I said irritably, “and if I was marking that comment I would cross it out and write in red ink ‘don’t state the obvious, get to the point’.”

“Yes,” argued Chris, trying to be clever, “but you’ve missed a key point in the question I asked, which was that in the pile on your desk there’s more than just essays, there’s composition that you’re doing and two copies of Carols For Choirs, so your answer was wrong because those aren’t all essays you have to write.”

“Not at all,” I countered, “I was questioning the parameters of your question, which is an entirely valid way of attacking it since it was vague and ambiguous and therefore best answered by pointing out its weaknesses. The failure to specify what you were actually talking about lies in the question and not my answer, and in any case these are not essays I have to write they’re essays I have to mark.”

“Yes, but…but…” Chris attempted, then gave up, saying “I can’t win arguments with you James, you know more words than me,” and left the room.

…when a simple “yes” would have sufficed.