Back. By popular demand?

Hello everybody. How were your Christmases (those of you who mark Christmas at all)? I've had a long break from blogging by my standards - over ten days, and I'm not going to resume normal service until next week probably. It's not that I've weaned myself off getting angry and opinionated over the holiday: more that I've had the computer switched off. I've quite enjoyed being almost entirely unsociable too. I've virtually no friends in the area (or indeed anywhere else, I hear you cry) so there's little pressure to engage in social bonding rituals.

Instead, I've been working on a couple of book chapters every day, though possibly not quite hard enough. We shall find out in a week or so on the deadline.

One of the books I'm writing about is George Borrow's 1862 Wild Wales, an account of his 1854 journey round that country, mostly on foot. He can sometimes be quite funny and he's interested in other people's quirks, but on the whole I think he'd be a massive pain in the arse. The purpose of the journey seems to be to demonstrate to everybody in Wales exactly how much more he knows – about everything, but particularly the Welsh language – than everyone in Wales. He doesn't like English people unless they are (as he fondly imagines he is) 'Saxons': he reckons it all went wrong for England when the Normans turned up. He likes the Welsh for still speaking their language, but every meeting he has with anyone is an opportunity to demonstrate his superiority. It gets very wearing. Other obsessions are religious sectarianism: he hates Methodists, Baptists, Independents, Calvinists, Lutherans and anybody who isn't C of E. But he hates Catholics and the Pope more than anybody. Irish Catholics are the lowest of the low – Borrow takes every opportunity to mock and trick the 'wild' Irish. Particularly tasteful episodes are those in which he tells freed slaves that they'd be better off in chains, the time he blackmails an Irish fiddler into playing the offensive supremacist song 'Croppies Lie Down', and the occasion on which he poses as a priest and makes some devout Irish travellers grovel to him.

Still, he's very learned and he knows exactly what people from The Dark Place are like:

'He is what they call a Wolverhampton gent... a person of little or no literature'.

A sentiment with which I find it hard to disagree. Have I missed the Black Country this Christmas? In a word, no. I've barely left the house, but have eaten eggs from my mum's hens (two of whom were murdered by my sister's cat, also here for a holiday, a safari in its case), read Goethe, Arthur Ransome and Alastair Gray's astonishingly brilliant 1982, Janine. I'll be posting some gloriously bilious quotes from that book sometime next week.

About the only time I left the house, I took some decent sunset photos from Mow Cop, the folly castle on a crag which famously became the birthplace of Primitive Methodism. Some pictures here. I've been on Twitter quite a lot thanks to my mother's wi-fi but kept the laptop off until tonight.

So it's been a great holiday. Lots of reading, no exercise, good food, no sirens, gunshots or murders under my window. As you can imagine, I'm really looking forward to work next week. Especially as I'm wholly unprepared…

Warming the cockles

Proving that genocide is the key to a good Christmas, here's something I spotted in Waterstone's a few days ago:

Waterstone's appears to have a thing about the Nazis: according to the Guardian, some branches have been recommending Mein Kampf as a 'festive' read.

Uppal's Christmas Message

Dear me, what a complacent man the Secretive Millionaire and occasional MP Paul Uppal is.

Looking back on the year I believe that as a country and as a city we have much to be proud of and be thankful for.

Ah yes. What records have we broken?

• Highest unemployment since 1996, when the Tories were last in government. Perhaps they're not evil after all, just really nostalgic.
• As a city, we're proudly on top of one league table… most empty shops, with a magnificent 28%.
• True, a Land Rover factory is coming. But not thanks to Uppal's free market principles: they've descended like vultures on government subsidy. 
• We had a bit of a riot, but it was only a token effort. 
• Student fees tripled. 
• Environment abandoned. 
• Planning laws ripped up to suit property developers. Wait a minute. That's what he's 'thankful for'. I'd almost forgotten that when he's not slaving away for his constituents (ho ho ho), Mr Uppal is a property developer. 
• Isolated and a laughing stock in Europe. 
• The few workers' protections remaining now threatened.
• Inflation at 5%. Workers' pay rises between 0 and 2%  = effective pay cut. 
• FTSE bosses' pay up 49% to £2.3m average. 
• Pensions slashed. 
• Tory newspapers revealed to be industrially criminal: Prime Minister's spokesman arrested for his part.
• Tory economics cause global Depression (and I don't mean just emotionally).
• Public services slashed. Deficit actually going up. Poorest, sickest and youngest paying for the cuts. 

If Uppal's pleased with this year, Christ knows what he's planning for 2012. The horsemen of the Apocalypse?

But he does have more to say and it's both pompous and sanctimonious:

We should use this period as we meet with friends and family over the Christmas to reflect and think about those who may not be as fortunate as we are both home and abroad, and what we are able to do to help them.

1. It's 'meet', not 'meet with'.
2. For multimillionaire speculators like him, we're all unfortunate.
3. Maybe I'm wrong, but arming dictators abroad, slashing public services at home, abandoning students and dismissing the concept of education as a public good and halving the benefits paid to disabled children don't really strike me as 'helping'.
4. There's no such thing as 'unfortunate' people who need charity. We are what we are for specific reasons. Some people are poor because capitalism shovels the cash into the pockets of 'socially useless' speculators like Mr Uppal, and because the rest of us are too lazy or selfish to redistribute. Millions of people have malaria because pharmaceutical companies prefer to spend their money researching remedies for rich mens' 'diseases', coming up with Viagra rather than vaccines. The environment is a poisoned mess because we demand cheap food. Etc.

Actually, I'm getting quite angry about this. His smug little homily doesn't mention or even hint at awareness that the country and a large swathe of its citizens are in serious trouble. We're getting poorer. Our jobs are on the line. Our hospitals and schools are being sold off, downgraded and removed from democratic control so that his friends can enrich themselves even further. His banking friends are avoiding their taxes and Cameron's helping them, while abandoning us to the miseries of unregulated capitalism. What do the Tories do? Uppal lobbies for tax breaks for people like him (without ever declaring an interest) and his neighbouring Tory MP pays for stag nights where his friends dress up as the SS and sing songs praising Hitler. They just don't get it.

'Merry Christmas'? Not from where I'm sitting. Fuck you Uppal. Seriously, you complacent turd.

I don't think Mr. Uppal thinks in terms of citizens. There's his family, his friends and his party. The rest of us are simply undifferentiated Bob Cratchits to be sanctimonious about. Unfortunately, this hypocritical humbug, unlike Mr. Scrooge, isn't likely to be converted.

Mandatory Doctor Who post

I'm a blogger. One of the rules of blogging is that no blog may continue to exist without at least one discussion of Doctor Who. Having just watched the 2010 Christmas Special (if you aren't in the UK, search for tips on how to fool the iPlayer that you are), I'm happy to oblige.

OK. Here we go.
Jolly good this year, though slightly lacking in scariness. And very lacking in Amy Pond (I know, I'll get e-mail). I enjoyed it a lot, except for the Katherine Jenkins element. She's a popular singer in the field of light classical. Fine - a storyline requiring a singer who saves the spaceship is Christmassy enough, but choosing a famous one with a lot of product to move risks turning the show into a celebrity vehicle, and the BBC should have a little more self-respect.

As to the new series - the trailer makes it all look rather wonderful. Though the shot of some Nazis makes we wonder how far in time and space we have to go before the British will stop going on about the war. Can TV be subject to Godwin's Law?

This all sounds a little curmudgeonly considering that I enjoyed this episode and think the upcoming ones will be wonderful, but we have to keep an eye on it. To the BBC, it's just another product to be sold, merchandised, cross-marketed and exploited. To us, it's a perfect little world which should be untainted by the need to sell Dalek figurines and Katherine Jenkins CDs. Naive, I know.

Right. If I can't get to sleep, I've always got the cricket. England seem to be coping with Australia adequately.

Have an apocalyptic Christmas

I'll be online now and then, but mostly not. Instead, I'll be marking essays.
You may need to watch this for survival.

Christmas time… even for infidels like me

Ah. Tim Minchin. What a genius.