Tag: lights

Guest Post: 7 Reasons The Holiday Season Sucks

If you’re feeling really festive, we mean really festive, then today’s guest post from Louise Tillotson probably isn’t the kind of thing you wanted to read over your lunch break. On the other hand, though, if you bat for Team Scrooge this is the kind of thing you’ll want to read and share and read and share and read and share… (repeat to fade).

I like Christmas as much as the next person. Provided that person is, in fact, Scrooge. Bah humbug and all that…

But honestly, I do enjoy the festive period to an extent. The act of going out in the cold, wrapped up warmly, spending my hard-earned savings on things I don’t have to find space for in my already cluttered home is, to me, one of the joys of Christmas.

When you’re a grown-up, Christmas does kind of lose its appeal. But when you have kids of your own and see it through their eyes, it seems magical all over again.

Sadly, what those little eyes don’t see are the niggly little annoyances that now seem to ruin the season just that little bit more each year. I’m talking about…

1. Christmas Cards. Every year we send flimsy bits of cardboard with awful pictures on them to people we never see or speak to throughout the year. And every year we get flimsy bits of cardboard with awful pictures on them given to us which we then have to display in our homes in case the giver happens to drop by. Which is unlikely seeing as we haven’t seen or spoken to them all year…

2. The Weather. Do a Google image search for ‘Christmas’ and you immediately get thousands of pictures containing snow-covered cottages, trees festooned with lights, and jolly-looking snowmen made out of the purest white snow. Now look out of your window. See the grey slush laying forlornly in the gutter, the crumpled lump of grey and yellow matter with a single carrot poking out at an odd angle, the few dimly lit bulbs hanging on for dear life to a wilting bush…Doesn’t the sight just fill your heart with winter joy? No, I didn’t think so.

3. Strange Bearded Men. I am of course referring to Santa Claus, Father Christmas or whatever you call him in your family. There’s just something vaguely creepy about taking your beloved little one to sit on the knee of a strange man and confide in him all their secret wishes for the season. Or more realistically; start to cry hysterically, scream for mummy and wet themselves.

4. Cold Food. Maybe it was just the way my mother cooked it, but I always think of Christmas dinner as being a lot of cold stuff covered with thick gravy. There’s obviously an art to getting four types of vegetable, three types of potato, turkey and stuffing to the same hot temperature at the same time…and my mother never mastered it. Our turkey dinners always consisted of freezing cold meat, red hot gravy and tepid everything else. Which probably wouldn’t be so bad but the turkey is always far too large and you end up having it with every meal for a week afterwards.

5. Mandatory Alcohol. And when I say alcohol I don’t mean the tasty stuff that you’d choose to drink if you were at the pub. I’m talking about stuff like Babycham, the “wine” parents buy when they want to get their offspring amusingly drunk; and Advocaat, which looks like runny custard and smells like it’s been drunk already. And woe betide you if you don’t want to drink – you’ll have a glass of this cheap plonk out of a box and damn well enjoy it!

6. Decorations. I don’t mind what people have inside their homes, as I don’t have to look at it. I’m talking about the stuff people decorate the outside of their homes with. As far as I can tell, there are two rules every outside decorator thinks they must obey: the lights must be the brightest you can find, and if they don’t flash and/or cause a hazardous distraction to drivers, you’ve not used enough. For preference, you should also create your own Nativity/Farm/North Pole with brightly lit animal structures too, for that added tackiness.

7. Presents. Last but not least, we come to the gifts. Your granny is probably delegated to trot out the old adage “giving is better than receiving” but honestly, I think it’s true. Only by not receiving gifts can we avoid having to pretend to love the hideous pair of socks a lazy uncle has bought you, or the bath salts which you just know will make you smell like the inside of a pensioner’s handbag. There’s only so long you can wear a fake smile and feign delightedness so as not to offend your well-meaning but utterly clueless relatives.

December 13, 2011
Guest Post: 7 Reasons That Christmas ALWAYS Gets Me in the End

It’s Saturday, and the 7 Reasons team have abandoned the sofa in order to rush, blinking out into the sunlight like pit-ponies escaping from their daily labour. But, fear not, for the sofa is in safe hands. Guest hosting this week is the lovely Liz Gregory – that’s right, her of Things to do in Manchester fame – who despite being from Manchester, isn’t going to prattle on about Coronation Street, she’s going to talk about Christmas. Now settle down, children, and she’ll begin.

Every year it’s the same. I roll my eyes at those poor souls who have done all their present shopping by August; I can tut as cynically as anyone at the Christmas songs repeated on an endless, hideous loop in certain shops from the beginning of November. I am a grown woman with a full time job, and the shameless commercial enterprise that is Christmas has no place in my busy and important lifestyle. But by December, I’m hooked, brimming with festive excitement. Again. Here’s why….

1. The weather. Surely even the most hardened and wizened of souls must admit that nothing looks more enticingly festive than a fresh coating of snow, with the power to wipe out an ugly urban landscape of wheelie bins and cat poo, and replace it with pristine perfection. And I say this despite the fact that I am seemingly the only teacher in the UK not to have received a single snow day in the recent bad weather – I have had to go to work and perform the job for which I am paid EVERY SINGLE DAY.

2. Rosy-cheeked children. No, not the bratty whiny ones running amok in the supermarket trying to grab everything in sight – they are the ones to avoid if you’re trying to be misty-eyed and non-cynical about Christmas. I mean the angelic ones who assemble at Christmas lights switch-ons, warbling traditional festive songs and obligingly going “ooohhh” when the lights are turned on.

3. The Christmas Radio Times. I take enormous comfort in the fact that even though we live in a high-tech, culturally diverse society where we celebrate individuality and cutting-edge modernity, at least fifty percent of the UK will have spent the last week leafing through the Christmas Radio Times, armed with a marker pen, drawing wonky circles around the plethora of bad television they wish to watch this Yuletide. The fact that you will only actually watch three of these programmes is entirely besides the point – the pleasure lies in the selection, not the viewing.

4. Alcohol. One of the overwhelming perks of December is that it becomes socially acceptable to consume alcohol at virtually any time of day without anyone raising their eyebrows and calling you an alky. So that means sherry at elevenses is fine, as is bucks fizz at breakfast and Amaretto Sours at lunch. I do not, of course, live like this at other times of the year.

5. Decorations. Yes, Nigella is annoying, but I do admire the fact that her house (or her studio-masquerading-as-house, one is never quite sure) appears to be permanently bedecked with fairy lights. I am not brave enough to try to convince my husband that this is acceptable all year round, which means I must make the most of the carte blanche that Christmas brings. Turn the big light off, switch the fairy lights on, and hey presto! Your house instantly looks clean and tidy in the murky pixie gloom.

6. Food. I am by nature a most abstemious person, unlikely to over-indulge in any way, but the range of tasty morsels positively flung one’s way at this time of year makes it impossible to refuse. As with the alcohol, it is de rigueur to adjust one’s notions of what acceptably constitutes a balanced meal – as long as you select items from both the savoury AND the sweet party food ranges, you should be absolutely fine.

7. Two weeks off. I enjoy my job, and by anyone’s standards, working in a college in the run up to Christmas must surely be as good a place to be as any. Giant tins of Quality Street lurk at every turn, and teaching English means that the final week offers plenty of chances to watch Wuthering Heights and eat popcorn. And yet, the prospect of two weeks off, spent lolling on the sofa, opening the odd present and reverting to a lifestyle where your mum brings you a cup of tea in bed in the morning, is surely something to be cherished.

So, if anyone fancies a mince pie or three in the semi-gloom of my Nigella kitchen I’ll see you shortly; only visitors bearing sherry will be admitted, mind.

December 11, 2010
7 Reasons That Lampshades Are Stupid

1. Dimness. Lampshades dim the light in a room. You knew that already, but no one ever asks why we want to dim the light in a room. Why do we go to the trouble of installing a light and then surround it with a device that hampers its efficacy? We don’t put semi-transparent curtains in front of our televisions or our fingers in our ears when listening to the radio (except for Talksport listeners) so why do we cock up our lighting? Stupid.

2. Heads. Short people are left in charge of putting lampshades up in their own homes. There should be a law against this. I can’t count the number of times that I’ve banged my head on lampshades in the homes of short people, which is probably a good thing as having the number to hand would make me appear weird. However many times it is though, it is too many. I don’t need another hazard to worry about when I’m concentrating on not falling over their child or treading on their dog.

3. Walls. You go to the trouble of selecting a colour scheme for your living room and then, once it is complete you go and hang a lampshade up: A device which changes the colour of everything in the room, turning your white walls rosy, your blue walls turquoise, your yellow walls brown, and your orange walls red (I am using four different lampshades and rooms in that example, not one. There is no need to panic.) The only wall colour that’s impervious to light filtered through a lampshade is black, which means that only the bedrooms of teenage boys and serial killers are safe from their effects.

4. Art. While we’re on the subject of colour, the damned things change the colour of art too. Try appreciating the subtle use of colour in a print of Manet’s Olympia when it’s bathed in a ghastly light filtered through a green paisley lampshade. Ever seen a lampshade in an art gallery? No, of course you haven’t. Well, unless you’re reading this next year, that is, after I have won the Turner Prize with my latest work entitled Stupid Stupid Stupid, which is a photo-montage of a hairless cat wearing a pair of Crocs balancing atop a green lampshade. (I was being deliberately fanciful when I concocted that artwork, but it actually sounds better than Tracey Emin’s Bed).

5. The Planet. Lampshades are killing our planet. If we had no lampshades then we could use lower wattage light bulbs which consume less power. This means that we’d need to produce less electricity, which would be better for the environment. Think about it: lampshades are actually causing us to use more of the planet’s resources than we otherwise would. For what? If we didn’t have lampshades we could probably use the energy we saved to put electrical lights on trees for a couple of weeks every year. Or perhaps not. That would be ridiculous.

6. Cleanliness. While it is oft said that cleanliness is next to godliness (which seems fair enough), it is never said – until now – that cleanliness is next to lampshades. This is for good reason, as one of the things I have observed when banging my head on many of the things is that copious amounts of dust fall from them when I do so. This is because people don’t clean them. They don’t dust them and they don’t hoover them, which means that the lampshade in the dining room – above your dinner – is covered in lots and lots of bits of dead skin. Yum. Now imagine how much you’ll enjoy your meal if a tall person should accidentally bump the lampshade when sitting down to dine, causing dust to fall on your food. Eating it would not only be unhygienic, it would probably be cannibalism. So there you have it: Lampshades cause cannibalism. I bet you weren’t expecting to learn that today.

7. Stupidity. Lampshades are not merely stupid, they also cause stupidity. Here I am wearing mine.

********************UPDATE********************

I have finished my masterpiece. The 2011 Turner Prize will be mine!

August 26, 2010