August betrays us again

April is the cruellest month, said TS Eliot in “The Wasteland”, but surely August has a good claim to being the most perennially disappointing.

Conditioned by the school calendar, we tend to think of the eighth month as the height of summer. And yet just look out of the window. It’s AUTUMN.

We’re in that weird little intermezzo when a brief glance at the populace reveals people clad in flip-flops and vests co-existing alongside people in coats and scarves. When people are kidding themselves that it’s still summer by reference to the date.

It’s rare that my blogs are inspired by other people, and even rarer for me to give credit when they are – but this one came from my wife, Elvira of Castille, who pointed out August’s treacherous qualities to me last week.

Like Steven Gerrard/Frank Lampard/Wayne Rooney in an England shirt, August lets you down every time. You know in your heart that it won’t deliver on its promise, but you can’t help but hope it’ll be different this time. Gradually, that hope turns into belief just in time to let you down painfully. 

Also, it never snows at Christmas. 

The True Meaning of Christmas

I’ve been helping my eldest with his homework: a project on Christmas around the world.

Now, there are no doubt people out there – not ODHSNM readers, of course – who would find this outrageous.

Not me helping my son with his homework. The “around the world” bit. The true meaning of Christmas, they declare, can’t be reduced to some multicultural, relativistic blah blah blah...  - a line of argument which you know full well will inevitably end in someone blurting out the word “Immigrants!”

The true meaning of Christmas, they will say, is...erm...

Well, dear readers, let me put this to you. Christmas is just a celebration of good stuff at a crappy time of year. It has had all sorts of stuff superimposed on it over the centuries, but at the end of the day that’s what it started out as and that’s what it still is.

Don’t give me all that “it’s the birth of Jesus” malarkey. Christ is a late addition to Christmas.

He’s been stuck on top of at least two sets of pre-Christian traditions.

Pagan dessert

Firstly, the Northern European pagan Yule celebrations around the winter solstice. That’s where you get your holly and ivy, your Druidic mistletoe, your Christmas trees, your Yule log (chocolate or otherwise) and all those other Germano-Celto-Scandinavian accessories.

Not one of those things – except perhaps a log – would have been found in the Iron Age Middle East, so have clearly come from somewhere other than the Jesus story.

The second source is Greco-Roman paganism, specifically the festival of Saturnalia.

Saturnalia (Kronoia for the Greeks among us) was a month long celebration of the good old days before that bastard Zeus cursed mankind with the need to work for a living. It involved:

• Gift giving
• Eating and drinking to excess
• A general end-of-term, office party kind of vibe all round, when slaves were afforded freedoms usually denied them and the bosses made fools of themselves

Sounds Christmassy, doesn’t it?

There are loads of other hypotheses kicking about saying that the Christian myth is based on other bits of

Not real

ancient lore, but why get into all that? It’s like arguing about whether Tolkien’s orcs were green or grey. Even if there’s a right answer, it doesn’t matter what it is because it’s ALL MADE UP.

The point is – and I’ll go out on a limb here – it is completely impossible to extract a “true” Christian core or indeed a “true” pagan core. It’s a big syncretic mess of bits and bobs appropriated from here, there and everywhere.

Look at Santa Claus. Where does he fit in? Don’t try to tell me that he’s “really” Saint Nicholas, the fourth century Turkish bishop and early Christian martyr. What the hell would he be doing with reindeer and elves? He’s as obviously mashed up as Baron Samedi.

Balls

Why do you think the Puritans banned Christmas in 1647 as “a popish festival with no biblical justification”? Precisely because they could see how pagan it all was. At least Oliver Cromwell had the balls to recognise it for what it was instead of whinging about the corruption of the “real” meaning on Radio Four.

You can’t select certain bits and say that’s the “real” Christmas and the rest of it isn’t – the Christian bits, the non-Christian bits, whatever. Every step along the way contributed to getting us where we are today. Who can say where taking any of them out would have taken us? There is no distinction between the signal and the noise.

The materialistic aspects of Christmas are just as ancient as the spiritual aspects.

And if we accept that consumerism is our current religion (or substitute for it), then a 50 year tradition of buy-buy-buy from Black Thursday to the January Sales is getting on for half the age of all “ye olde traditions” the Victorians bequeathed us.

It’s as silly to worship a tree or indeed money as it is to worship a big old beardy sky-fairy.  If you pick away rationally at every part of the Christmas myth, eventually you’re left with nothing but a bloody long winter ahead of us.

Maybe we don’t need to have a justification for having a party. The weather’s shit, it’s dark all the time – don’t we have a right to cheer ourselves up?

Perhaps THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is the true meaning of Christmas. 

What's another year?

T-4: I see that many other media outlets are picking up on the Mayan apocalypse pencilled in for this Friday. Well, here at ODHSNM we have been on it for the whole damn year.

“What’s another year?” quoth Johnny Logan in 1980’s Eurovision winner.

Well, Johnny, a “year” is a bloody awkward rough approximation of the duration of the earth's orbit around the sun. And a proper pain in the arse it is too.

("Another year" refers to the second or subsequent instance in a series of years. And that is what another year is.)

I am attempting to plan my evil capitalist schemes for 2013 (it’s best to be prepared, in case we’re still here) and I am faced with the following absurdities:

• A year, in the Gregorian scheme, is 365 97/400 days (5 hours, 49 minutes) – that is the time between vernal equinoxes. Hence we have leap years every four years unless....eeeurgh it’s too hard, read it yourself.
• Quite independently of years, we have weeks comprised of seven days each – five of which we work and two of which we don’t.
• You do not have a whole number of weeks in year whether it’s a normal 365 day year or a leap 366 day year. Months have between 28 and 31 days, or between 18 and 23 working days depending on where the weekends and bank holidays fall.
• This makes it very hard to project ANYTHING month on month or indeed year on year with any degree of accuracy - because you are hardly ever comparing like and like. 

Now, I realise that calendar reform has got in with a bad crowd – it immediately suggests Year Zero and Pol Pot. And I think it’s fair to say that no one really wants to be associated with that.

I recently read “The World Set Free” by HG Wells.

Now, I know what many of you are thinking.

The Ogilvy Theatre

Most of you are thinking “that’s a conference centre in Woking”.

And, yes, it is – but I am talking about the writer, after whom the conference centre is named.

Some of the rest of you are thinking “hold on... apart from all the Good science fiction stuff, wasn’t all of HG Wells’ political and social thought Bad?”

Well, old Wellsy certainly doesn't make too many bones about how much better his future utopia would be without the poor, the stupid, the uncivilised and the uncultured in it – and he is not in favour of what we in the business world would call “achieving cuts by natural wastage”.

Nevertheless, almost in passing, he suggests that the year should be split in 13 months of four weeks each – with Easter as an annual intercalary day and leap years as specified by Pope Gregory XIII.  

Gregory would have approved. Probably. 

I think this is a tremendous idea and one not necessarily dependent on any kind of genocide or mass slaughter. 

It would make us all marginally younger and it would make the whole maths of time a lot easier. 

Who will join me in my quest for a rational year?