December 2006

Dec 1. Strip 101.
Hoodies
The hoodie, a track suit or fleece with a hood attached, is the uniform of the semi-feral youth of today, if the Daily Express is to be believed. Actually, it’s a very useful item of clothing but it’s been adopted by the Chavs because it’s a useful way of avoiding the gaze of the ubiquitous CCTV cameras, especially when accompanied by a baseball cap. For this reason hoodies have now been banned by several malls in the UK, because, as we all know, most crime is caused by wearing the wrong sort of clothing. Embarrassingly, they decided on this at around the same time the DVD of Revenge of the Sith was released, thereby criminalising all the promotional Jedi.

Dec 4. Strip 103.
Do you know where your children are?
The Dangerous Book for Boys was the publishing sensation of the year - ‘Dangerous’ in this case meaning climbing trees and getting scraped knees and all the stuff kids tend not to be allowed to do nowadays in case they get eaten by an asylum seeker. Whether it was bought by parents for kids, or by parents to remind themselves of their own childhoods and then hidden on a top shelf is recorded.

Dec 6. Strip 105.
James Paterson.
He doesn’t so much write books as excrete them. And the really annoying this about them is they’re not bad. They’re not good either, but they’re very efficient page turners written in chapters the same length as the average bullet point. In the time it’s taken me to write this paragraph he will have published three books.

Dec 11. Strip 109.
Error!
I meant outdoors of course. Duh!

Dec 13. Strip 111.
Phone in quizzes.
With hindsight we can see how prescient this was, with most of the British media now admitting to rigging their premium rate phone in quizzes and the BBC taking the nuclear option of closing them down completely. But this was actually written in response to ITV and Five replacing their late night programming with these moronic swathes of cheap television. Now they’re going to have to start producing real shows again.

Dec 14. Strip 112.
Up yours.
The V sign in reverse, known as the ‘Harvey Smith’ after the jockey who was its finest ex-ponent - this is the UK’s equivalent to the US’s upstanding middle finger or ‘swivel’.

Dec 21. Strip 118.
Geography.
Britain is much further north than most people think - on the same latitude as Labrador and the frozen wastes of Canada. Therefore there’s a lot more of a difference in the amount of sun we get between the summer and the winter. Where I live in the south of England the summer sun will rise at 4 in the morning and set at 10 in the evening. Unfortunately, this evens out in the winter, with the sun setting at half past three in the afternoon and then not rising until past eight.

Dec 23. Strip 120.
Christmas day is just the start
We take Christmas seriously here. There are twelve days of Christmas, and Christmas Day is just the start. It’s not like the States where the decorations are taken down the day after - here they stay up until Twelfth Night. The country effectively closes down from Christmas Eve until the day after New Years Day, with the only things running at full strength being the shops. And even these are closed on Christmas Day and Boxing Day, leaving just the petrol stations open. I wouldn’t describe myself as religious but I can’t help feeling that something sacred has been violated when I see a Walgreen open on Christmas Day.
I don’t know why petrol stations major on barbeque supplies. It doesn’t strike me as a very good place to put lots of kindling.

Dec 28. Strip 124.
The first green shoots of spring.
It’s an annual tradition for letters to be sent to the Times announcing that the first cuckoo of spring has been heard. But spring starts even earlier in the retail trade - I’ve seen shops putting out their stock of Easter Eggs on Christmas Eve.