Further Under the Duvet by Marian Keyes

Author:Marian Keyes
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: Penguin Publishing
Published: 2005-10-26T16:00:00+00:00

We Really Must Get Together This Year

It’s not that I hate Christmas – as the season of unlimited chocolate, how could I? And, of course, the presents are nice. Not to mention the trifle on Christmas Day. And it’s always cheery to see over-refreshed businessmen wearing big, mad, red antlers, swaying on the train home, oblivious to their head gear.

But, as my mother (devout church-goer) often reminds me, Christmas isn’t just about selection boxes and shower gel/body lotion sets of Trésor. No indeed, she’s absolutely right; Christmas is about hard bloody work.

I’m not even talking about having to get up before dawn on the big day to stuff turkeys and peel eight thousand potatoes. (Due to an excellent arrangement I have with my mother, we are both in denial about me being an adult. She’s the mother, she does the cooking and she has never actually eaten something I’ve made. Never. Mind you, most people wouldn’t.)

No. What kills me about Christmas is having to send cards. What is it about this particular task that makes me want to end my life? Sadness that there are so many people I don’t see any more? To my shame, it’s more the sheer life-sapping tedium of it all. Especially when people have long addresses. (The worst offenders are those with house names: Traveller’s Rest, Formentera Revisited, etc. It’s just a waste! A waste of ink, a waste of space and a waste of an extra ten precious seconds of my time!)

I consider my list, an accumulation of dozens and dozens of people whom I think of fondly but haven’t seen for fifteen years and no longer have anything in common with, and a terrible lassitude overtakes me. I wish for a small but harmless domestic explosion, anything to get out of doing it. I could explain next year. ‘Sorry I sent no card last year but our clothes horse blew up. We were picking knickers off the hedges well into the new year!’

Then there’s the challenge of trying to remember the names of people’s partners. If they’re still with them, that is. Because although I might be dying to ask, Are you still with that weird bloke with the rabbit fixation and the beard that looks like pubic hair? I just can’t. I’m supposed to know. And what if they’d had children? A vague half-memory surfaces of being sent a photo of a squashed-looking newborn with a card saying, The world welcomes baby Agatha. Or was it baby Tariq? Or Christ!… Was it a dog this lot got? However, in such murky circumstances, I’ve found that a catch-all ‘Hope you and the gang are well’ usually suffices.

Far trickier is getting the tone right – to convey a message of warm-hearted goodwill so that they’ll smile when they open the card and say, ‘Aww look, one from Marian. Isn’t she lovely?’ BUT – and it’s a very big but – without being so pally that they’ll spontaneously lift the phone and arrange a night out after not having seen me for over a decade.

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