The week before Christmas.

 The week before Christmas.

So here we are a week before Christmas. The world is still in turmoil and anguish. There is nowhere to go and nobody to see. At this rate we may forget who we are if only because our identity has taken a bit of a battering, society has lost its way completely and the people who inhabited that society are still in a state of shock and mortification. It is time to reflect on the year but you'd be a brave soul to give an honest appraisal of 2020 since a vast majority would rather move onto 2021 if only because the general consensus is that it was probably the annus horribilis that Her Majesty the Queen experienced a couple of years ago. 

To say that the year was just a frightful cataclysm would be an understatement. Since the middle of March it has been an unrelenting stinker. In fact, let's be honest it is the year we'd rather bury away in the back garden, never ever remember again and hope never shows its face to any of us. It could be described as one incessant post mortem or maybe one of those years when everything that could have gone hellishly wrong did so with a vengeance. 

In any other ordinary year we might have been recalling a couple of hurricanes, typhoons, floods and the usual assortment of global wars in remote corners of the world. We may have been reflecting on the stunning incompetence of world leaders, silly confrontations between those politicians who should have known better and petty quarrels over Europe. And that was just a start. We would almost certainly be complaining about or praising the weather depending on the time of the year. Just another year in many ways. 

How we'd have settled for ordinariness, straightforward normality, stability and just the knowledge that things were moving at the usual pace without any unsavoury events in between. There would have been a contentment and acceptance of the status quo, an acknowledgement of the existence of human nature without being troubled by anything negative, unnerving or abhorrent happening. But, as the year progressed, we became aware of the fact that everything we were hoping for would just be trampled on and trodden into the ground like dust. 

We are now gearing up for the festive period in the traditional fashion but anything that resembles a conventional Christmas is just a rumour.  This will be a complete departure from the norm, a radical change from previous years when things ran like clockwork. This year the celebrations will be so muted that you may have to turn up the volume and the things you might have been looking forward to as a given have now been stolen from your grasp because a worldwide pandemic just gripped the universe and shattered everything like broken glass. 

But now we have reached the stage where the very arrival of Christmas seems like a consolation prize rather than the magnificent end- of year scoff up and alcohol party we've grown to love or detest according to your view on the subject. Christmas will now be regarded as some vital morale booster rather than the customary celebration it should be. The year has been a dreadful accident and emergency case, agonising poignancy, heartfelt sympathy, utter desperation and deeply sentimental moments when everybody thanked the NHS with oceans of clapping and so much more. 

This Christmas will be almost unbearably different. Suddenly Britain has been cut up into different tiers, a description so grammatically bonkers and beyond the comprehension of us at any level, that it is hard to know what stringent measures are about to be implemented without our permission. Both Southern and Northern England have been chopped up into small pieces and then told that they must shut down once again for the duration. Surely not. This is so infuriatingly disruptive that we may be tempted to hibernate in a dark room for how-ever long this virus takes to reach its logical conclusion.

Meanwhile, we try to imagine life in the Donald Trump home and hearth. The ex- President of the United States has finally vanished off the face of planet Earth. Or has he? Has Trump been kidnapped by aliens, got completely lost on a golf course or is he still insistent that the recent election was a set up and fixed? Has Trump got a temporary job as Santa Claus or will he just refuse to hand out presents to his children because he simply felt like sulking and not coming out to play? So there. 

The suspicion is that when Trump does leave the White House the assembled forces of a Washington police force will be ready with a fetching pair of handcuffs. It is hard to know how what may lie in wait for Trump next because the last four years or so have been reminiscent of an episode from Coronation Street where Len Fairclough started a punch up in the Rovers Return and Elsie Tanner came face to face with Ena Sharples. All very violent and unseemly but very real. 

Back at 10 Downing Street the tree soars into the air, a towering presence and perhaps a symbolic reminder to us all that life must go on even though it may look as if it may have stopped altogether. Boris Johnson is still wrapping up his presents, rehearsing another collection of Latin verbs to surprise us all with and then making very profound statements about Brexit and Britain's rosy complexioned future without those European interfering busybodies.

Somewhere on the premises of 10 Downing Street Johnson is searching for a glimmer of hope, a nugget of optimism amid the prevailing greyness. He may be hoping for clarity and confirmation or maybe just a bog-standard, everyday comb or brush, anything to declare peace on that tangled mop of blond hair. At the moment the said hair is at war with Johnson and after extensive negotiations with his barber and well-meaning friends, this could be the right time to get cracking on that beleagueared scalp. 

Anyway ladies and gentlemen. You'd like to be the first to wish you all a Merry Christmas even though it may just a week earlier than you were planning on doing so. Christmas 2020 will be alarmingly different in the history of civilisation. You're reminded of that famous scene in 'It's a Wonderful Life' where James Stewart runs down a street in the snow, longing to be with his wife and family and then discovering that nobody knows who he is anymore. It could be an apt metaphor for 2020 but nobody would believe you. But we will get there and we will make that connection so keep the faith and never give up.