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GETTY/PIC POSED BY MODELA lady curate told primary school children that Father Christmas was not real
“She would not like if we said there was no God”, said one outraged parent.
(I don’t know about that. Anglican clergy must be used to taking stick from nonbelievers).
But be that as it may it was not only mean but inaccurate.
The thing is, children, I don’t like to brag about this usually – and maybe keep it to yourselves – but Santa is an old family friend.
Oh yes he is.
Let me take you back to a children’s Christmas party long, long ago in a brightly lit church hall in Gloucestershire.
Snow was falling. Stars twinkled in the frosty sky.
Father Christmas has arrived and it is my turn to sit on his knee, tell him I have been a good girl and (the main point of the exercise) receive a present.
It is a strangely familiar knee.
I search Santa’s face beneath the cotton wool beard and eyebrows.
“Daddy?”
“Ssh”, said my father.
“The fact is that Santa has bronchitis and asked me to stand in for him.
"Don’t tell anyone. Ho ho ho.”
“You know Father Christmas?”
“Uh... he’s a friend of Biffy’s.”
This seemed reasonable.
Biffy was one of my father’s more eccentric playmates.
When he came to Sunday lunch he brought a longbow to demonstrate his archery skills in the garden, slurping Harvey’s Bristol Cream and squinting at his target through a plume of smoke from the cigarette drooping out of his mouth.
If it was raining he played his accordion. My mother couldn’t stand him.
“Do I still get a present?”
“Yes. It’s hairbands, bath cubes or dolls for the girls.”
”What do the boys get?”
“Racing car, yo-yo or Meerschaum pipe made out of chocolate”.
“Can’t I have a racing car?”
“There might not be enough to go round.
"Can you put up with a doll, old thing?”
“Oh alright. But can you remind Santa, when he’s feeling a bit better of course, that I’d like a chemistry set for my main present?”
I went back to eat my jelly and ice-cream and unwrapped a doll wearing some sort of Tyrolean national costume.
Yuk. A little boy was busy running his racing car over the paper tablecloth making vroom-ing noises.
Would he swap it for the doll? He shook his head importantly.
“Santa gave this to me”, he said in a pious lisp.
I said nothing.
My real concern was that Santa would be too ill to deliver my chemistry set.
I demanded constant health bulletins from my father and made him phone Biffy.
“Biffy old man. How’s tricks?” roared Daddy.
“Just wondering if Santa’s risen from his bed of pain yet? Splendid, splendid”.
He hung up and rubbed his hands.
For one moment I thought he’d been holding the receiver down but I must have been mistaken.
“All systems go for Christmas, toots”.
You see. Friends in high places.
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MOTHER is always in the wrong: Part 143 Daughter (with sore throat): Do you think I’ve got that flesh eating bug?
Me: No.
Daughter: What, are you saying I’m fat?
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OTHER people’s marriages are – as Churchill said of Russia, “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma”.
So who knows what’s going on in the Mel B/ Stephen Belafonte household which has been subject to much speculation?
There has been a lot of jetting about, absence of wedding rings, rows, general domestic meltdown, the apparent bruising on Mel B’s arms and the mysterious swelling of her fingers followed by his denials that he hit her.
He seems an unappealing person and it’s difficult to know how you could love a man who’d admitted to bashing a duck to death with a brick.
And then what does he say?
“I love my wife. I’d take a bullet for her”.
I don’t know about you but as protestations of undying affection go I find that one more than a little peculiar.
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GETTYBarbara Walters questioned Scarlett Johansson about her body image
IN a TV interview with the veteran Barbara Walters, Scarlett Johansson had to field the inevitable body-image question.
“It’s an OK body, I guess,” she answered.
“It functions. I wouldn’t say it’s particularly remarkable, though.”
She added: “I don’t like my thighs, my midsection.
"But I’m not complaining.”
Some have poured scorn on this regarding it as “humble bragging” by a spoilt star; or said that she’s doing a disservice to young women who are insecure about how they look.
Or some other spiteful put-down.
So what is the poor woman supposed to say without landing herself in it?
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CHRISTMAS Eve is my favourite part of Christmas because of that sense of quiet anticipation and I always try to listen to the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols broadcast from King’s College, Cambridge on Radio Four at 3pm.
It clears my head.
Two extra special reasons to listen: this year marks the 60th anniversary of the first TV broadcast (BBC2, 5,25pm on Christmas Eve) which will be followed by a chance to see the very first one from 1954 broadcast.
The film footage was found in a freezer and took a week to thaw.
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IN a survey nine per cent of Brits have admitted to having sex when viewing a property for sale while the estate agent was out of the room.
A little on the speedy side surely and not advisable if Kirstie and Phil plus camera crew are waiting impatiently for you in the garden hoping you will put in an offer.
It also reminds me of the notorious 1970s film Last Tango in Paris in which two strangers played by Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider meet in an empty apartment they are both interested in renting and are going at it like knives within minutes.
Meanwhile the remaining 91 per cent of us tap partition walls, jump up and down on joists, say “we’d have to rip this out for a start” and “it’s not worth the asking price”.
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IT was with sadness that I read about the library service being in crisis.
To survive, says a report, libraries must introduce coffee, sofas and wifi – almost anything in fact apart from books.
But like many who passionately support libraries in theory I don’t in practice.
I’m 100 yards from a public library and I’ve barely set foot in there in the past five years.
Coffee, sofas and wifi would pull me in either.
I’m afraid libraries are on the way out because of relatively cheap books on the internet.
Bookshops are in trouble for much the same reason.
It’s an awful pity but I doubt anything much can be done about it.
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I’M sure Karsten Kaltoft is delighted that European judges have ruled that obesity now counts as a disability.
Though as he weighs 25 stone I don’t suppose he’s jumping for joy.
He was sacked from his job as a childminder in Denmark and his weight seems to have been one of the reasons.
But who would employ someone of that size?
Talking about his work with children he said: “I can sit on the floor and play with them”.
If I were interviewing him I’d suggest that there’s a great deal more to the job than that.
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THE BBC drama series The Missing didn’t grab me as it seems to have done many viewers.
I’m sure James Nesbitt’s angry performance was outstanding but it was exhausting.
And as the plot became ever more complex I began to suspect that the ending would be a cop out – as it proved to be.
(I will say no more for those who haven’t seen it yet.)
Real life often doesn’t throw up full answers but you expect a drama to be put together in a more satisfying way.
There’s to be a second series of The Missing but it will tell a completely different story so that’s no help.
But I do suspect that the fashion for inconclusive endings merely gives TV execs the opening for a sequel.
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STUNNED by the horror of the Peshawar school massacre I kept looking at the pictures of the traumatised, injured children in their neat green uniforms.
These spoke of loving homes, shirts that were ironed, blazers with name tapes carefully sewn in, shoes that were polished and sons and daughters sent out to an ordinary day in the classroom that became unimaginable horror.
In their uniforms they became all of our children for all time.
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