Putting a letter through the slot of a rubbish bin and pointing your car key at the front door of your house are fairly good indicators of stress, I think it is fair to say. I found myself doing both these things this week as I floundered around in the Christmas rush, trying to reorder every single aspect of my life in time for 25 December.
Why is this? Why do we have to ‘get everything done before Christmas’? I don’t mean buy a turkey and send some cards to friends and family, which would be a pleasure. I mean, do every single job we’ve been meaning to do all year in the space of two weeks.
A mini version of this happens when you go on holiday. What starts as a quick tidy round as you are waiting for the cab to the airport morphs into a massive deep clean. You Hoover nooks that have never before been Hoovered, rearrange furniture, turn the mattresses, empty the fridge, clean the oven, rewire all the plugs…My mother used to say it was so that the house looked nice for us to come back to. But there is no logic in that. If going round the edge of the floor tiles with a toothbrush is what it takes to make a house nice, shouldn’t we do that whether or not we are going to Spain?
The Christmas makeover is far worse and amounts to a sort of deep clean of our entire lives. I find myself redecorating, renovating, refurnishing and recarpeting with the zeal of the condemned. To watch me running around putting everything in my life in order, you would think Christmas Day was a sort of Logan’s Run, when we all got taken up into the sky and evaporated.
This year I have new curtains and bedspreads, I have had the drip on the boiler fixed and made inquiries about a new roof. I understand there must be a psychological urge to finish outstanding tasks before the end of the year but, really, this is going to finish me off. I draw the line at going to DFS and buying a leather sofa with retractable foot rests, but you get the idea. I am a festive basket case.
Until yesterday, I had for two weeks been walking around with a stamped-addressed letter to my accountant. I was so used to it being in my hand it had become like a glove. I no longer even registered it as something to deposit in a postbox. It was virtually an extension of my body. Every time I left the house I would say to myself ‘coat, phone, letter…’ and march off down the road with no intention of parting with it. That is, until I walked past a rubbish bin and absent-mindedly deposited it in there. I didn’t even realise what I had done until I got home, at which point I was standing swearing outside my house while clicking my car key at my front door in an attempt to get in. This is not good darts, as they say.
It would not be so bad if everything in Britain did not grind to a resounding halt when the calendar turns on to 1 December.At the very time when I am seized by the urge to do everything, the world gets all awkward and constipated on me. I rang a restaurant to get a table for dinner and the receptionist said, ‘We can’t take bookings over the phone right now. You will have to send an email to Tom.’
I explained that I don’t have time to send emails to Tom. It’s Christmas. I’m busy. I’ve got a kitchen to rip out and three kinds of luxury candied chestnuts to buy, including one which is almost impossible to track down outside the south of France.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s why you need to send an email. All bookings during Christmas are done by email.’ Hopeless.
Then there are all the extra social demands as friends ring to request I come round to their house to receive my present. Now, I don’t want to appear ungrateful, but, really, the best present you could give me would be not to buy me a present at all, so I don’t have to come and collect it. If you must buy me something, please make sure you factor in the time it will take you to come and deliver it. Because if you don’t do that it really isn’t a present at all. More an errand or a chore. And I have enough of those to be getting on with here, thank you very much. Which reminds me, I must go and dig that ornamental cascade pond into the back garden.
Melissa Kite is deputy political editor of the Sunday Telegraph.
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