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Saturday 24th December 2022

Teetering even more on the brink in this season – will one be struck down? Will outfits be right? Will food be right? Will one meet present and card deadlines? Will one be joyful and glorious? Will the home be sparkling for Christmas?

Functions have been numerous and behind closed doors. At one, some arrivals from America caused love to break out amongst the native guests, helped by the minimal dress and massive gym build of one of them.

I took back to back Carol Services, so Once in Royal…, Oh Come All Ye… and ‘Hark…’ twice in a matter of hours. At St Bartholomew the Great, the Vicar announced that they’d switched on the boiler but it said, ‘No’. So conditions were polar. Not even the warmth of the manger could warm up that church.

But this is Christmas. I’ve said it before – there’s nothing joyous about Christmas and never has been. It isn’t just the Victorian sentimentality of Once in Royal or the melancholy cadences of almost all the carols, the whole thing is more a huddle around a tiny candle in a snowstorm, a glimmer of light seen far off in winter’s depths, a new beginning, but what will begin? As yet unknown…

Cars had been organised by Ed Jasper, the bedlinen expert, to convey the Gays to the North London restaurant from the Church, where the dinner was funded by him and Roland Mainflower. Ed is renovating and scheduled for the Greek house in January.  All the talk was of £1000s on restaurants, suits and holidays. Unbelievable. As if the 80s had never ended, as if Margaret still lived. I was thinking: the cold snap is ferocious, all the waiting staff are ill or dead, it’s impossible to get hot food to the table in one’s own home, let alone in a commercial setting. But Ed was having none of it. ‘I’m very disappointed,’ he barked at the waitress. ‘Stone-cold, the whole lot. It’s not good enough.’ Marvellous. This is the spirit that will save Our Nation if nothing else will.

Posted Saturday, December 24, 2022 under Adrian Edge day by day.

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