A Christmas to Remember and other stories

 Things could be worse, as Harry Worth used to say.

But the telly decided to switch itself off last night once I'd seen Simon Russell Beale playing Gustav Holst's piano and it didn't come on again. Virgin will be out to me on 29th to provide a new box which will be a bit late for Kempton and the Welsh National but rather than bemoan my lot I remain grateful that I'm not a lorry driver stuck at Dover, a doctor who's been under severe pressure since March and then it got worse and that I'm not one of the Royle family whose lives revolve around the television. It's some years since one went through the Christmas telly highlighting things one must see and it's even longer than that since the Dick Emery Christmas Special was part of the zeitgeist. 

I can see what I want to see of Kempton, Chepstow and Wincanton via Paddy Power. I will still hear the last-ditch result of our relations with Europe on Times Radio without having to suffer seeing that gormless buffoon doing his inevitable vainglorious speech as if he'd delivered us to the promised land when actually what he said was that no deal offered a glorious future full of opportunity. 

It'll be just fine. Wise words advise that in such minor difficulties it is worth thinking how things will look in a couple of weeks' time. I'm sure I'll be in line for huge compensation from Virgin Media because I know they care about me and I know that is how their mind works. It would be unwise of me to let them know that, in Tier 4, my plans were to listen to Telemann, Bach and then, as is routine while reading Solzhenitsyn, Shostakovich.

It is 1975 revisited here, without Bowie's Station to Station. I wondered then if I could change my name to Dmitri. And I had entirely forgotten, if I had ever realized when I read it all then, how good Solzhenitsyn was.

But by all means put on Leona Lewis, One More Sleep, if that wasn't Christmassy enough for you.