Tag: Disappointment

Guest Post: 7 Reasons Christmas Eve Is Better Than Christmas Day

If you were in the 7 Reasons club this time last year, no doubt you’ll be rushing down to the butchers today to celebrate The Day Of The Sausage. The rest of you, no doubt, will be eagerly awaiting tomorrow. Christmas Day. Arguably the best day of the year. Well, certainly in the top 365 anyway. Here at 7 Reasons we are not adverse to handing out gifts and this year you get yours a day early. It’s a special Christmas post from the undisputed King of Guest Posts, Richard O’Hagan. PS: When he’s not writing rude words in the snow he’s adding to his Memory Blog. Well worth a RSS Feed Subscription.

1. Anticipation. One of the best things about Christmas Eve is that it isn’t Christmas Day. Obviously. This means that it is the day when you reach the height of anticipation about the day to come. You can’t do anything more. The shops are shut and Amazon haven’t been able to piece together a next day delivery service for December 25th*, so you just have to kick back, relax and resign yourself to the fact that you can’t do anything to make Christmas any better, so you just have to look forward to the day to come. And you also get to build large toys whilst drunk. No-one who has ever tried to put together a tricycle at five to midnight ever forgets that experience, no matter how much Baileys they’ve downed beforehand (and no matter how hard they try to)

2. Food Choice. It’s only Christmas Eve, so you can eat what you damn well like. The mandatory turkey-fest is another day away and all dining options remain open to you. Which means that if you fancy getting a huge takeaway so that you can have the leftovers for breakfast on Christmas morning, you can do. Or you could have sausages.

3. TV. For all of the build up that the television companies give to the 25th, Christmas Eve television is infinitely better than Christmas Day’s offering. Aside from anything else, it tends not to be clogged up with octogenarians reading you their Christmas letter and Channel 4 trying far too hard to be trendy, not to mention the tired old sitcoms that weren’t that funny anyway being even less funny as they try to shoehorn a festive storyline into their archaic format.

4. Shopping. The shops being closed on Christmas Day isn’t a bad thing in general, but at least on Christmas Eve you can pop to Sainsbury’s if you run out of milk or, heaven forbid, booze.

5. Work. Admittedly this doesn’t apply to so many people this year, but over seventy percent of the time Christmas Eve is a work day. It is a great day to go to work for most, because almost nothing gets done, you get to go home early and someone pays you for working the full day. And if you do have to work properly, you get to feel all virtuous and Christmassy anyway because you are the only people working properly, so it is a win-win whichever way you look at it.

6. Lie-Ins. Whether you are working or not, you can be sure of one thing – you will get to sleep in longer on Christmas Eve than you will on Christmas Day. If you have small children, they will be up and wanting to open presents practically as soon as the clock passes midnight. If you have older children, you’re probably going to be woken up by your grandchildren instead. If you have no children, your partner will get over-excited and still wake you up early. And if you live alone, don’t worry, there will be a child wailing somewhere long before 7am to rouse you from your slumber. Get all the sleep you can on the 24th, because the 25th is going to hurt. Which is why you should make sure that you don’t run out of booze on the 24th.

7. Disappointment. Inevitably, Christmas Day cannot live up to all of the expectations. We build it up to be the perfect day of all days, so something has to go wrong – the turkey taking too long to cook, the neighbours calling in unexpectedly, Santa not bringing you the moon on a stick that you asked for. Christmas Day cannot help but be a disappointment. Christmas Eve never is, because at the end of it a fat bloke is going to give you a load of presents. And nothing is better than free presents, is it?

*In truth, they’ve not really worked out a delivery service for most of December, preferring the ‘give it to Yodel or City Link and hope the customer forgets ever ordering it’ option. One the things I ordered is presumably still in a locked empty flat where Yodel apparently delivered it a fortnight ago.

December 24, 2011
7 Reasons That Staying in for Halloween was Disappointing

We never stay in on Halloween and this year we were due to go out for a meal and to see a film. But my wife decided at the last-minute that she didn’t want to go out; she wanted to stay in and watch Downton Abbey. So, we braced ourselves for the inevitable throng of trick-or-treaters and settled in for the night. But none came. And, though by any normal measure, I should be pleased about that. It was disappointing. Here are seven reasons why.

We don’t really live in a spooky mansion, this is just for illustration. We live in a spooky town-house.

1. Ouch. Evening came and it became dark. We had decided on the timeless strategy of pretending-to-be-out, so we didn’t put the lights on. And, after several minutes of darkness, I fell over the cat in the hallway. This clearly wasn’t going to work, so we had to limp to the shops.

2. Money. In order to stay in – in our own home – we spent £4 on sweets. To give to the children that would surely be round coming round in droves demanding them. Because trick-or-treating isn’t nice. It’s an old-fashioned mafia style shakedown. But unlike the mafia, they often come round with their parents, so you can’t tell them to sod off. Because that would make them cry (the children that is, the parents probably have their own reasons for crying). So we spent money on sweets for them so that we didn’t have to sit in the dark and pretend to be out. But they didn’t come. And that’s £4 wasted. We could have bought over twenty-four litres of sparkling mineral water for that. Or two-thirds of a sandwich at a petrol station.

3. Money. But then I realised that it isn’t just £4 that we’ve wasted. Because we go out every year to avoid the inevitable plague of trick-or-treaters. But this is expensive and, over the years, we must have spent many hundreds of pounds avoiding trick-or-treaters. Obviously we’ve had lots of fun, consumed many nice meals and enjoyable beers, and seen many good films; but that isn’t the point. We were there for Halloween avoidance. What if the children haven’t come every year? We’ve spent all that money needlessly, and had all that pointless fun. For nothing.

4. Argument. We’ve never argued on Halloween before, but this time we did. We argued about who would go out and give sweets to the trick-or-treaters when they came to the door. “It’s Halloween”, my wife said, “you could go out there and scare the children with your mask”.

“Yes, but you could go out there and scare them with your dressing gown”, I replied. And I seem to have won the argument, because she didn’t argue with me further or, in fact, say anything much at all after that. But the argument was moot, because of the absence of trick-or-treaters.

5. Sweets. Because no children came to our house, we now have a huge bowl of sweets and no children to give it to. This means that we’ll have to eat them. But we’re grown-ups, and when grown-ups eat sweets they don’t run around in a sugar-frenzy, they sit still. And get fat. And we don’t want to become hideously fat. We want the neighbour’s children to become hideously fat. And then they won’t run around playing football in the alley behind our house. Our plan’s in tatters.

6. Rejection. As we’re usually out for Halloween, we have no idea of how it works. We sat waiting for trick-or-treaters until gone midnight. But surely they’ll come, we thought. Where are they? We felt unloved and rejected. We checked our armpits and speculated on why no children had come. And then, the only possible explanation occurred to us.

7. Spooky. I don’t believe in the supernatural or the sort of strange phenomena that is celebrated on Halloween because frankly, it’s a big load of guff. But I’m quite happy being a sneering sceptic; in fact, I’m quite well suited to it. But the non-arrival of the children was a genuinely spooky event. Because the last time we’d been in on Halloween – six years ago – we’d forgotten about it, didn’t have any sweets in the house, and had resorted to giving the children fruit and telling them that it was much better for them. And somehow, despite six years having elapsed and despite many children having come and gone from our street, the children somehow knew that we were the house of the fruit and they avoided us. The children knew. Creepy.

November 1, 2010
7 Reasons Blue Peter 2010 Let Me Down

Hello, it’s me again. I’m still reliving my youth. I am sure it won’t come as much surprise to you, but instead of Grange Hill and Byker Grove, my childhood programme of choice was Blue Peter. Yesterday, I decided to watch it for the first time in twenty years.* I wish I hadn’t. What has happened to it?

Blue Peter Presenters: Joel (muppet), Andy (made to look a muppet) & Helen (female muppet)

1. The Opening Credits. What the bloody hell has happened to the Blue Peter theme? It sounds like the 1988 version has been put through a blender, drowned in the bath, driven over by a monster truck and spent a night in Jo Brand’s bed. Something like that. It isn’t good anyway.

2. The Presenters. I grew up with Caron Keating, Mark Curry and Yvette Fielding. Yesterday, I grew old with Helen, Andy and Joel. Muppets. All three of them. I remember Caron, Mark and Yvette being informative. The only thing Helen, Andy and Joel informed me was that they were idiots and that once upon a time some git had told them they were funny**.

3. Pronunciation. Within five minutes, Helen, has already baffled me with unfathomable English. “No rords with cors,” she said. If she hadn’t been reporting about a recent trip to Venice I will no doubt have been wondering why she felt it necessary to tell us that cows do not roar. As for telling me that there are no cars in Venice due to the lack of roads, yes, thanks for that.

4. Pets. In the good old days, a holiday for the tortoise was being put in a box with a load of straw and placed on a very high shelf. These days though, apparently she goes off to India, Paris and Egypt to get away from it all. Photoshop has a lot to answer for. I suspect when the tortoise finally snuffs it, instead of having Yvette solemnly breaking the news to us, Joel will try and convince us that he has gone on a round-the-world trip. The tortoise I mean, not Joel. Though that would be preferable.

5. Practical Demonstrations. What a shame that Helen has never heard of a ruler, that way she may have been able to demonstrate how high a three metre diving board is. Instead, she decided to use a balloon on a string. Outside. Where there’s quite a lot of wind. “Imagine if it was straight up,” she says, desperately trying to get the balloon above a 45 degree angle. Yes, Helen, I could have done that without the poxy balloons. Next time, why not just show us a picture of a diving board?

6. Vogue Bambini. Helen is in Milan. Which, while good news for us, isn’t good for the children of Italy. Especially as she has just encouraged everyone to pick up a copy of Vogue Bambini to look for the supermodels of the future. This I wouldn’t be so alarmed about, if Vogue Bambini wasn’t devoted to fashion for very young children. Unfortunately, it gets worse. Helen, Andy and Joel are going to photograph children. And, under the instruction of Vogue Bambini editor, Giuliana Parabiago, they have to be funny with the children. Joel’s face lights up. I don’t think I can bear to watch. Where are you Mark Curry?!

7. Joel. Yes, I know I have already talked about the presenters, but this clown needs a reason all to himself. Apart from annoying me with his unnecessarily silly antics throughout the show, he is now interviewing an eleven year-old male model. “I always thought modeling would be well hard.” No you didn’t Joel. You thought, ‘Modeling could be difficult at times’. “Come on Andy! Bring it like your mama gave it!” I despair. I really despair.

*Alright, fifteen.

**I have decided that Andy is actually quite good. He has just been brought down to the Joel/Helen level. My advice would be to get out before it’s too late.

September 15, 2010
7 Reasons International Cricket Captain 2010 Let Me Down

This week, one half of the 7 Reasons team will be revisiting their childhood. (The other half may or may not join in. We like living on the edge). Today we start off by looking back to the summer of 1998. As a 15 year-old, I spent much of my summer holiday playing, watching and indulging in cricket. Part of this indulging was many hours spent on International Cricket Captain. A PC game that does for cricket what Championship Manager does for football. Except that Championship Manager was good. Anyway, International Cricket Captain 2010 is out these days. It’s bound to have got better. At least that’s what I thought.

1. Run The Bat In! As a young cricketer you are told to run the bat in. Usually, this involves running the bat along the ground. Whoever designed this game obviously thinks it’s okay to run the bat in, in mid-air. And because of that, Ricky Ponting was given not out on 23, 54, 73, 75, 89, 101, 108, 11o, 118 and 122. He went on to score a match-winning 133 and the Ashes were gone. Despite Andrew Strauss’ 13* in England’s second innings. The one where we were bowled out for 46. Chasing 467.

2. Slip Positions. I don’t know about you, but I like my slips close together. If the ball goes wide of third slip, well so be it. It’s better than it flying between first and second. International Cricket Captain 2010 evidently likes a slightly more spread field. So spread in fact that I could probably drive a combine harvester between keeper and slip. If only the game had that option.

3. Aggers. I would say Jonathan Agnew is back for another stint as commentator, but I actually think it’s exactly the same utterances as he recorded 12 years ago. The only reason I hesitate in stating this as fact is because he sounds slightly more bored than I remember. I didn’t even think that was possible at the time.

4. Geoffrey Boycott’s Grandmother. If anyone has ever wondered just how good she is, I can’t help you. If anyone has ever wondered what her stance looks like, buy International Cricket Captain 2010. The batsmen – and they all have exactly the same set up – are clearly based on little old ladies.

5. Lord’s Media Centre. It looks like a hedge. Probably because it is.

6. Training. One of the things that really annoyed me about the original International Cricket Captain was that you could only train eight players at anyone time. Supposedly the rest of the squad just arsed around in the changing room playing poker and watching Trisha. I would have hoped that in the twelve years that have passed, this would have changed to accurately portray the professional era. Has it? No. I am still only allowed to coach eight players. And quite frankly, I don’t think Ian Bell listened to a word I said.

7. Attack! When a batsmen is at the crease you are supposed to be able to influence his attacking mentality. Unfortunately, some of the players seem to have a mind of their own and do whatever they bloody well like. An uninjured Flintoff deciding to block out the 19th over of a T20 against Australia for instance. I initially thought this was because I hadn’t earned his respect. That would be a nice little addition to the game and give it a sense of realism. Ten minutes after trying to work out whether this was the case, I exited the game without saving. Why did I think it would be a good idea to relive my childhood again?

September 13, 2010