Here we are in the first full week of December in the run-up to the winter holidays and taking top billing in TV and reading lists will be Charles Dickens’ famous novel “A Christmas Carol,” which features fictional miser and all-round meanie Ebenezer Scrooge.
The novel is 180 years old this year.
I am reminded of it as I just received an email in which the central thrust of the news release is to remind everyone to be kind to hospitality, hotel and retail staff during the end-of-year celebrations.
Is this reminder worth leading an outreach to the press? Apparently there is due cause for concern.
According to the release, in the United Kingdom in the past 12 months, “65% of retail staff experienced verbal abuse, and 42% have been threatened by a customer.”
Be kinder to other people, and those other people will be kinder to you, seems to me a message that is not getting through. Although I have always, naively perhaps, considered 99.9% of all people to be good.
The release even had an embargo on it, meaning the organization or public relations firm who sent it wished that we journalists would show some discretion and not divulge its secrets until a specific date, in this case Dec. 3.
I smiled when I realized I had received a warning about an email asking us to be kind!
Now, some information — such as, perhaps, a huge merger and acquisition — might have to be strictly embargoed so as not to affect shares prices, for instance. The mischievous side of me wondered if I had carte blanche from the moment I file this blog until 22:59 GMT on Dec. 2 to be rude and annoying to employees of some of our favorite High Street shops, bars and hotels?
You cannot do likewise, as by the time you read this, the news release would have gone public, and if you do still feel rage, then perhaps do all of your Christmas shopping online?
Shame About Shane
Christmas in the United Kingdom is never the same, at least for the years since its release in 1987, if the radio does not play The Pogues’ wonderful tune “A Fairytale in New York” at least once per day over the course of the festivities.
It is with great sadness that we learned of the death of its talismanic frontman and creative force Shane MacGowan on Nov. 30.
His lifestyle choices, or his demons, were well-known, and he had been seriously ill of late.
In a much-maligned history of Christmas-related songs, he is the co-author along with Jem Finer of a song that stands out from nearly all of the rest, a song that plays a beautiful trick of being tuneful, raucous, chaotic, sentimental and oddly triumphant all at the same time.
In Camden, North London, many years ago — 1991 or 1992, I believe — I and two other people helped carry MacGowan from the Good Mixer pub on the corner of Arlington Road and Inverness Street to help him into a taxi. He was rather worse for wear.
A taxi did appear to be pulling over, but when the driver saw the general state of things, he started to speed off, only to stop 20 feet up the road.
The driver reversed at the same speed, and he leaned out of the window, asking us to be at attention when he put the musician into the back seat.
“Be very careful with Mr. MacGowan,” he said. “London’s best tipper!”
We can all return MacGowan’s thoughtfulness by being kind to everyone this Christmas and at all times in whatever hotel, pub, restaurant, shop or transportation facility we find ourselves in.
Kindness is as infectious as The Pogues’ back catalog.
And as I finish this, it started snowing in London — well, for all of two minutes. It's the first snow of the year, with some years not getting any at all, so I have to take that as a sign of something or other.
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