Christmas Eve 2010

It’s too grey and cool to be Christmas. And it’s too quiet. Calm, even.

Panic shopping, customary 24 hours before a cyclone, Easter or Christmas, wasn’t apparent this morning. There were no fights over car parks, no tugs of war over the last tray of ripe mangoes and no unseemly jostling at the ice fridge.

After dropping off the easily won spoils – ice, hard liquor, lobster, champagne – it was time to commute on roads seemingly empty but for the prowling constabulary.

Yet, over the ANZAC Bridge it started to feel a bit more like the festive season, for, beneath it lies the fish market in all its foetid, piscine glory.

The traffic tail backs were enormous. Every ingress and egress was a car park. Was that the reassuring sound of tooting? And, yes, is that a head out a window screaming Yuletide invective? Is that a carload of grim faced children and red faced adults?

Only extreme heat, melting the bitumen and flaring the stench, could have enhanced the unpleasantness.

That’s more like it.

Happy Christmas!

English Overreach

The Simon Barnes award for journalistic hyperbole, this week goes to James Lawton of The Independent.

“This is not to devalue the scale of England's triumph in the exquisite Oval ground that was as silent as a mausoleum the morning after the most crushing of defeats, one that has provoked a burst of countrywide introspection so deep it might even be linked to a loss of national identity.”

Countrywide introspection? So deep? Loss of national identity?

Mate, wet your terry toweling hat to soothe that fevered brow. Or try cooling off in an art gallery or concert hall.

What an excitable tosser.