Xmas: Bad Xmas: Good

Merry Christmas everyone. I’m back in my hometown, where the Great Recession seems to have sucked the life out of most people’s favorite holiday. I’ve never been a big Xmas person, but I do think it’s never a bad thing to take a moment to count your blessings and get your life right. To that end, I want to post up a beautiful, terrifying feature from the latest issue of the New Yorker. It’s a piece of short fiction called ‘Diary of an Interesting Year’ by the British writer Helen Simpson.

DIARY OF AN INTERESTING YEAR

February 12, 2040. My thirtieth birthday. G. gave me this little spiral-bound notebook and a Biro. It’s a good present, hardly any rust on the spiral and no water damage to the paper. I’m going to start a diary. I’ll keep my handwriting tiny to make the paper go further.

February 15th. G. is really getting me down. He’s in his element. They should carve it on his tombstone: “I Was Right.”

February 23rd. Glad we don’t live in London. The Hatchwells have got cousins staying with them—they trekked up from Peckham (three days). Went round this afternoon and the cousins were saying the thing that finally drove them out was the sewage system—when the drains backed up, it overflowed everywhere. They said the smell was unbelievable. The pavements were swimming in it, and of course the hospitals are down, so there’s nothing to be done about the cholera. Didn’t get too close to them in case they were carrying it. They lost their two sons like that last year.

“You see,” G. said to me on the way home, “capitalism cared more about its children as accessories and demonstrations of earning power than for their future.”

“Oh, shut up,” I said.

March 2nd. Can’t sleep. I’m writing this instead of staring at the ceiling. There’s a mosquito in the room, I can hear it whining close to my ear. Very humid, air like filthy soup, plus we’re supposed to wear our face masks in bed, too, but I was running with sweat, so I ripped mine off just now. Got up and looked at myself in the mirror on the landing—ribs like a fence, hair in greasy rats’ tails. Yesterday the rats in the kitchen were busy gnawing away at the bread bin, they didn’t even look up when I came in.

March 6th. Another quarrel with G. O.K., yes, he was right, but why crow about it? That’s what you get when you marry your tutor from Uni—wall-to-wall pontificating from an older man. “I saw it coming, any fool could see it coming, especially after the Big Melt,” he brags. “Thresholds crossed, cascade effect, hopelessly optimistic to assume we had till 2060, blahdy blahdy blah, the plutonomy as lemming, democracy’s massive own goal.” No wonder we haven’t got any friends.

He cheered when rationing came in. He’s the one who volunteered first as car-share warden for our road; one piddling little Peugeot for the entire road. He gets a real kick out of the camaraderie round the standpipe.

—I’ll swap my big tin of chickpeas for your little tin of sardines.

—No, no, my sardines are protein.

—Chickpeas are protein, too, plus they fill you up more. Anyway, I thought you still had some tuna.

—No, I swapped that with Violet Huggins for a tin of tomato soup.

Really sick of bartering, but hard to know how to earn money since the Internet went down. “Also, money’s no use unless you’ve got shedloads of it,” as I said to him in bed last night. “The top layer hanging on inside their plastic bubbles of filtered air while the rest of us shuffle about with goiters and tumors and bits of old sheet tied over our mouths. Plus, we’re soaking wet the whole time. We’ve given up on umbrellas, we just go round permanently drenched.” I stopped ranting only when I heard a snore and clocked that he was asleep.

April 8th. Boring morning washing out rags. No wood for hot water, so had to use ashes and lye again. Hands very sore, even though I put plastic bags over them. Did the face masks first, then the rags from my period. Took forever. At least I haven’t got to do nappies, like Lexi or Esmé—that would send me right over the edge.

April 27th. Just back from Maia’s. Seven months. She’s very frightened. I don’t blame her. She tried to make me promise I’d take care of the baby if anything happens to her. I havered (mostly at the thought of coming between her and that throwback Martin—she had a new black eye, I didn’t ask). I suppose there’s no harm in promising if it makes her feel better. After all, it wouldn’t exactly be taking on a responsibility—I give a new baby three months max in these conditions. Diarrhea, basically.

May 14th. Can’t sleep. Bites itching, trying not to scratch. Heavy thumps and squeaks just above, in the ceiling. Think of something nice. Soap and hot water. Fresh air. Condoms! Sick of being permanently on knife edge re pregnancy.

Start again. Wandering round a supermarket—warm, gorgeously lit—corridors of open fridges full of tiger prawns and fillet steak. Gliding off down the fast lane in a sports car, stopping to fill up with thirty litres of petrol. Online, booking tickets for “The Mousetrap,” click, ordering a crate of wine, click, a vacation home, click, a pair of patent-leather boots, click, a gap year, click. I go to iTunes and download “The Marriage of Figaro,” then I chat face to face in real time with G.’s parents in Sydney. No, don’t think about what happened to them. Horrible. Go to sleep.

Read the rest here.

But, despite its historically high suicide rate, we’re not meant to spend the holiday season on the dark side, current or future, so here’s a ray of sunshine that we at the McGetrick house have been basking in for the past few days. Bob Dylan’s ‘Must be Santa’: