I have spent the day making Christmas presents.
My sense of unassailable virtue after this activity was very much enhanced when I got on the taxi rank this evening, and discovered an article online explaining how to have an eco-friendly Christmas.
It was an irritating article, with pictures of smiling young women wearing corduroy being assisted by immaculate toddlers in pristine kitchens. Not a single picture depicted a person trying to scrape dried glue off the desk, or realising that they had accidentally cut a hole in their jumper, or turning up at some important school function with paint all over their decent pair of jeans.
However, it detailed, almost exactly, the things that I have been doing today.
Not all of them, actually, it thought that some of them should only be undertaken after careful practice and research because of being a bit messy and dangerous. They were right about that.
Obviously I can’t tell you what they were because it would spoil the surprise, not that I have done anything different to every other year. I suppose there is always the chance that somebody might have forgotten what it is that I give them for Christmas every December.
I felt very pleased with myself, but nevertheless could not see a single reason why it is more environmentally friendly to make something instead of buying it from a shop.
In fact I thought that probably it was worse. People who manufacture things professionally tend to be rather good at it. Factories know exactly how much of everything they need, and do not accidentally cut something too long and then waste half of it, or worse, too short and then have to chuck it out and start again. They do not forget what they are doing because there is something interesting on the radio so that everything boils over and has to be cleaned off the carpet, and they do not chuck a bit too much of things in, because there was only a bit left in the jar and it isn’t worth keeping the whole jar in the cupboard just for a scraping in the bottom.
Factories that had a production line like that would very soon become bankrupt. They have a honed and fined process that wastes as little as possible and further more, is done with meticulous regard to Health and Safety. They do not finish up with burned fingers and splashes of poisonous chemicals all over the surface on which they are going to prepare their picnic later.
Therefore, although I was very pleased to read the sanctimonious online urging for people to express their Inner Creative Selves as part of saving the planet, secretly I thought it was drivel really. The same goes for Christmas cards, which were also on the list of things you can make in order to save the whales from extinction.
Also you are encouraged to wrap your Christmas presents in newspaper. This surprised me since I had assumed that everybody read their newspapers on Facebook these days. I would not know where to find a second-hand newspaper, the closest we have got is the Liberal Democrat Party News that is regularly shoved through our door, and if I used it for wrapping Christmas presents I would have nothing left for lighting the fire.
I have a gloomy suspicion that this is what everybody is doing with the political leaflets that are being shoved through their letterboxes, which was not very encouraging when we went out today to deliver some for our local farmer candidate.
I wanted to do this because he is a sensible and intelligent chap. This is more than can be said for the incumbent twerp, and I really hope that our farmer is elected in his stead. When we discussed this over coffee one morning we thought that wishing for something is not nearly as good as doing your bit to make it happen.
I do not like to see myself as being adrift upon a choppy sea of fortune, and like to try and make the world change the way that I think that it should. Hence we rang them up and volunteered, with the end result that once again this morning we were trudging up and down wet pathways, feeling glad that we had never opted for a career with the Royal Mail.
It is funny how you come to judge a house by its letter box. I liked best the environmentally reckless ones that did not care about the draught and had nothing to obstruct the smooth passing of the leaflet from the outside world to the doormat. I liked least the one that had a large dog on the other side which snatched the leaflet and missed my fingers by a fraction of a whisker, and then hurled itself bodily against the door, barking great thundery barks, and growling horribly. I stood there for a moment after that, so that it would know that I had not been frightened and would not leave until I was good and ready.
If he does not get elected it will not be my fault.
Have a picture of the Lake District.
