The worst thing about Christmas is that next year it’ll happen again: the same toxic mix of superstition, greed and dislocation. It might be tolerable – might be - if it was a one off event like death, but year in, year out, the same old stuffing and shopping and the swimming pool’s closed for a fortnight and the cinemas are closed and let us send Christmas cards to those who send Christmas cards to us.

Yah boo sucks and stuff it.

I like the memory flashbacks though. Is it really fifteen years since the Camillagate tapes: and if the Queen ever dies, which she won’t, because she’s not biodegradable and she’s stuffed with polystyrene, will the next monarch’s Christmas address to his subjects be by a king who fantasised about reincarnation as a tampax:

CHARLES: I need you several times a week.

CAMILLA: Mm so do I. I need you all the week. All the time.

CHARLES: O God, I’ll just live inside your trousers or something.

CAMILLA: What are you going to turn into, a pair of knickers? You’re going to come back as a pair of knickers.

CHARLES: Or God forbid a tampax.

CAMILLA: Oh, what a wonderful idea.

CHARLES: My luck to be chucked down the lavatory and go on and on forever swirling round on the top, never going down.

CAMILLA: O darling…. I just want you now.

CHARLES: Do you?

CAMILLA: Mmmm

CHARLES: So do I!

CAMILLA: Desperately, desperately. O, I thought of you so much at Yarraby.

CHARLES: Did you?

CAMILLA: Simply mean we couldn’t be there together

CHARLES: Desperate…’

Isn’t it sweet. I think Yarraby’s north of Melbourne and the golf’s very good. The lips should be almost closed and the teeth lightly clenched as the dialogue’s uttered.

The quality of high class stuffing doesn’t improve much year on year. Perhaps there was an uncertain truthfulness or at least understandable conceptual confusion in President Clinton’s deposition ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman Ms Lewinsky.’ Is it really ten years since the Lewinskygate tapes. Well yes there was frotting and blow jobs, and he did put his hand in her knickers and on Sunday 31 March 1996 – was it that long ago – he put a cigar where you wouldn’t want to light it, and there was semen on her blue dress, and she did orgasm and ten times over they weren’t having sexual relations under the table, in the hall, in the bathroom of the Oval Office – but stuff it. There’s a difference between snogging and heavy petting and ‘vaginal intercourse’ as the prosecution put it. It can all get confusing when you’re trying to run a country like the US of A. Ann Widdecombe says the president shouldn’t have lied but what does she know about sexual relations and anyway who’d want to flick her bean, and who should take the moral high ground when it comes to hacking and lying, and cheating and judging.

Then there was the conservative MP for Eastleigh Stephen Milligan – is it really fourteen years since his secretary found him dead in the kitchen with a bin liner on his head, naked except for ladies’ stockings and suspenders and with an orange in his mouth and an electric flex round his neck. His death apparently was consistent with autoerotic practices but what self-respecting girl wore suspenders in those days. He was parliamentary private secretary to the defence minister Jonathan Aitken – he of the ‘simple sword of truth and trusty shield of British fair play’ fame.

And was it really thirteen years ago in Sunset Boulevard when Divine Brown furthered Hugh Grant’s multi-million pound career by attempting oral sex for him in a hire car. And ten years since the Welsh Secretary Ron Davies got robbed at knifepoint by rough trade on Clapham Common. And ten years since George Michael was arrested for coming on to an undercover police officer in a Los Angeles public toilet. And two months since the lesbian tennis coach Claire Lyte was jailed for two years for having sex with a thirteen-year-old pupil who was infatuated with her.

I know lots of lesbians who think back, with great fondness, to their gym teachers.

I wonder about the conceptual distinction between sexual relations and love. I think of the letters of Violet Trefusis to Vita Sackville-West: ‘I have crushed down the vision of life with you, but always it has remained at the back of my mind, so wide, so open, a life so free and so full of music and beauty’ or of the painter Gluck to her lover Nesta Obermeyer ‘O God, O God – there had never been such a thing as Us. We’re quite perfect I think, don’t you?’ or Gertrude Stein about Alice B. Toklas: ‘I have so much to make me happy. I know all that I am to happiness, it is to be happy and I am happy. I am so completely happy that I mention it.’

So much for Christmas. I’m off to a Boxing Day party. Boxing Day – the day to open the Christmas box and share the contents with the poor.

‘You find you can’t do things any more and then you stop wanting to do them, and I think that’s very kind of life.’

‘”A customer was sick over my wife in Carluccio’s.”
“Did they pay the dry cleaning bill?”’

tbc

‘I like a cold roast potato.’

‘After he won the Pullitzer Prize he became unbearable and I had to leave him.’

‘I’ve never seen one like that before.’

“‘I fell in love with her.’
‘You might as well slit your throat’”

‘They don’t love mother and they don’t love you.’

‘So I says to him, I says, “Hmm”.’

‘I like my old boilers.’

‘She couldn’t stick the way he ate tomatoes.’

‘They keep their cooker on the balcony.’

“‘He got knocked down by a bus on a zebra crossing.’
‘What number was it?’”

‘She won’t die wondering.’

‘It’s not her own hair.’

‘What it needs is a bit of bling.’

‘I’m very sensitive.’

tbc

We London Library wallahs have been sent a four-page letter from our President Sir Tom Stoppard. This letter tells us our annual subscription’s to go up from £210 to £375. It’s oddly prolix in style ‘In common with thousands of institutions and societies of all kinds the London Library is not constituted as an Athenian democracy…’, unapologetic in its apologies ‘I wish I had been alert enough to write to you in advance and not in arrears. Perhaps then we might have lost fewer of the 34 members who have resigned’ (34, that’s a piddling number), and grandiose in its self-deprecation - ‘I’m sorry that I was not present at the AGM nor the run-up to it. (I had a play opening in New York, which entails the duty of attending the previews and finding fault with anything except the script.)’

But its essence is firm: like it or lump it, pay it or go away, there will be an 80 per cent rise in membership subscription this year. Back of the envelope accounting shows that’s over a pound a day or a full shelf, for keeps, of almost anything you want or need, if you buy from AbeBooks. Subscribing is a reminder of the remorselessness of time. Copies of the LRB, the Literary Review, The Rambler, and Birds, clack through my letterbox are skimmed and recycled. Nor have I got my monies worth from the Tate Modern, the NFT, the ICA.But I want to keep some semblance of belonging, and what I love best about the London Library is we don’t pay fines. I hate fines not because of the money, but because they make me feel dreary, in the wrong, punished. I never manage to get books back to public libraries on the assigned day. Never have. I don’t know why because I’m a punctual person. Three weeks, six weeks pass as in a haze and I’ve read/used none or two of the books but never all six. For decades and all over England I’ve posted back library books (why do they wrap them in those slimy covers) and rescinded membership rights rather than face the demand for the paltry fines.

At the London Library you can keep books out as long as you like, provided they’re not wanted by another reader. If they are, you must return them within a fortnight or forfeit borrowing rights. It’s a manageable rule and suits me fine.Another pleasure is burrowing for yourself among the stacks of books and weird periodicals. And another, in prospect only for me as yet, is falling asleep in the comfy leather chairs in the reading room by, in winter, the real fire. So I’ll renew my far from cost-effective subscription, and hope the money’s not spent on too much refurbishing of the peeling paint and dusty shelves and quaint old-fashioned air. Our President writes ominously about ‘keeping up’ not ‘falling back’, though keeping up’s a bewildering business when it comes to the world of books.