Ever feel as though you’re teetering on the brink of madness but can’t pinpoint any evidence?
The doctors don’t take you seriously? The judge said your nightmares couldn’t possibly have anything to do with charismatic magician David Blaine since he was encased in ice when the so-called “abuse” took place?
Here’s a clue.
If you’ve begun incorporating Christmas decorations into your regular home decor, you’ve got a problem.
“I’m not sure if I’m going to take those down,” says my mum with reference to a festive display of artificial twigs and berries adorning part of her veranda.
Yes, yes. We have a veranda. Wanna fight about it?
In mum’s defense, the Christmas decorations she contemplated keeping up were not gaudy tinsel garlands festooned with glittery snowman penises. Instead, they had a kind of “Yule” aesthetic, the whole effect looking like something swiped from a department store cheese counter. But still, you don’t want to draw attention to the men in white coats so I advised her against it.
I once had a girlfriend whose mum did similar things. She decided that she liked her mechanical life-sized Santa which would periodically chime “Ho Ho Ho, Merry Christmas” and ring a bell so much that she would keep it up all year round.
She did weird things like that all the time though. I remember one of the first occasions I visited her house. She had scurried off to make me a cup of tea and while I sat politely in the doilied suburban living room, I noticed that among the porcelain ornaments of her mantle piece stood a twelve-inch plastic Shrek.
Sadly, I think this is a mania sweeping the nation. Why do so many girls have fairy lights in their bedrooms these days? The only possible purpose I can imagine is to delay the orgasms of their conquests. I know I find them offputting.
The real reason for global warming has nothing to do with leaving television sets on standby. It’s all to do with the fairy lights and Robo-Santas that have been invading the planet like something out of a Doctor Who Christmas Special and sucking all the juice out of the grid.
I’m wondering now whether the presence of out-of-season Christmas ornamentation is the effect of madness or the cause. I had a high school teacher who was a bit odd. All year round, there was a ruby Christmas Tree bauble collecting chalk dust on his desk. This wasn’t a deliberate fixture. It had just been found down the back of a radiator or something. I can’t help thinking that the bauble was the cause of his madness, akin to the unfortunate presence of a Plutonium Rod having something to do with one’s hair and teeth gradually falling out.
Perhaps we need some sort of Geiger Counter-style device to seek out unsolicited “Christmas Radiation” occurring before December 1st and after Twelfth Night – the period in which we are most susceptible to to its brain-rotting influence.
Once located, the offending ornament can either undergo a controlled explosion or can be put in a cardboard box in an attic where its harmful rays can’t penetrate our minds.
Sitting in the aforementioned veranda this afternoon, reading a book, I am suddenly disturbed a tinny robotic cackling akin to something from Child’s Play 5000: Chucky on Mars.
I realise that my mum has installed a plastic witch-on-a-broomstick in the veranda which for some chilling reason has ‘decided’ to activate. The cackling is accompanied by a vibrating of hips and the flashing of red L.E.D eyeballs.
I assume this is a Halloween decoration which somehow survived the taking-down process.
I’m going to put my mother in a home.