The Weekly Hat – Number Thirty
Good morning, everybody. And welcome to the penultimate Weekly Hat.
I must admit, it has been somewhat of a chore creating this, due to various technical/internet connection related problems. This intro will probably be quite short, in a bid to get it saved an published before anything else has a chance to crash. However (returning to this now that I’ve finally finished the bulk of the tasks), I will mention that I will miss the Weekly Hat in a way, mostly because it’s been fun having a deadline. More sobbing nostalgia next week, along with a fair bit of Doctor Who.
So, contents…
- Stationary For Christmas: This Christmas, transportation has risen up against us…
- Sale Away: And, with the holidays out of the way, the sales can commence…
- Media And Stuff: Doctor Who! Spooks! Music! + More!
- Behatted Photo Of The Week: Big fat festive man.
Stationary For Christmas
Not an article about the horrible experience of leaping out of bed on Christmas morning only to be confronted with a pencil case, but rather a musing on the amount of transport-related moaning that has, as far as I can see, become synonymous with Christmas 2009.
It didn’t start that way, of course. At first, it was all about the White Christmas. After snow happened, it looked like a white Christmas in the south might be possible. For a while, there was great rejoicing. However, the snow didn’t live up to expectations, for two main reasons. First of all, it was not sufficient to shut down London’s transport system, so we still had to go to work.
Second, it hung around, in the form of ice and scattered bursts of snow, for another week, up to a few days before Christmas, and we began to realise that it was going to present us with difficulties as we tried to get home for the holidays.
Personally, I was left in the slightly less critical dilemma of trying to get to the pub, then getting stranded halfway by a mini-blizzard. I could’ve turned back, but I really felt like I’d earned a bloody drink by then. Luckily, I was able to get home, and my trains back to my family home in Essex were nowhere near as problematic.
Other people, alas, were not as lucky. Thanks to the magic of Twitter, I had access to all kinds of cries for help, as people sat on stationary trains, froze on snowy platforms, and generally suffered in the name of reuniting with their irritating relatives.
But still, I made it, all the way back to my Essex-based train station, before finally running headlong into a snow-related inconvenience when I tried to walk back across Chelmsford to my suburb, carrying two massive bags. Unfortunately, many of the pavements on which I had to plod had been frozen into solid sheets of ice.
Those of you who know me in “real life” will be aware of my reputation for falling over, and other assorted acts of unco-ordination. So the fact that I spent the next two days slipping around on frozen pavements and paths, yet did not slip over even once, may come as a considerable surprise to you. But I assure you, that is what happened.
Unfortunately, transportation wasn’t done making us its bitch yet. Because my little sister was in New York until the morning of Christmas Eve and, for a while, it appeared she may not make it home due to heavy snow over there. And then she did, undramaticly.
But in short, the journey home for many people was made much harder by snow, and left many a moaning Brit wondering whether White Christmases were much better left om TV and Christmas cards and away from reality, where they only serve to cause trouble and get on our nerves.
And then, believe it or not, something even stupider happened to make the travel situation worse, when some genius decided to try and blow himself up on a plane flying into Detroit. It’s fortunate that my sister had already flown back from the States by then, otherwise her return would surely have become even harder.
Cripes. If there’s even the slightest sign of a snowflake next year, I’m gonna consider staying put the whole time. (Not really.)
Sale Away
Long has it been the tradition, in the United Kingdom at least, that many sales happen after Christmas. I am not sure if this is the case in America, perhaps they happen around the “Black Friday” thing after Thanksgiving instead, but over here it’s after Christmas. I suspect they’ve crept forwards actually, as there used to be a regular January sale.
But now, it starts the moment Christmas finishes. In fact, many of the online stories like Amazon and Play put their discount details up a day or two before Christmas so people can start ignoring their new presents in advance, in favour of the things they can pick up cheap in the future.
Once Christmas itself has been and gone, the big riots are meant to start. Town centres bunch up, and even the Next website apparently had a limit on the number of people who could view it at any one time.
So, yes, it’s a time for mass hysteria. I must admit, though, I was a bit disappointed by the sales this year. And, much to my pleasure, I found a story on the BBC site which confirms that savings are down on last year, so it isn’t just me being picky for once. Having said that, I’m still going to manage to cobble together a good twenty pounds worth of Amazon order, so maybe I can’t bitch.
But aside from that… like everything else in the world, it simply isn’t what it used to be. Unless you like Sex And The City, in which case I found a chance to get all six seasons for forty pounds, which is a fairly good price. Alas, I am not the target audience. (i.e. I am a man.)
Media And Stuff
- As per usual, there was a new episode of Doctor Who on Christmas Day. Readers of the last few Weekly Hats might expect me to produce reams of material about this, or at least a few hundred words, but I don’t think I will. Mostly because, as marked in the title, “The End Of Time, Part One” was quite emphatically a “Part One” episode, and I don’t feel able to make the necessary sweeping generalisations until I’ve seen the second half.
But this episode certainly served to build the tension, and the cliffhanger is one of these endearingly silly ideas that Russell T Davies is good at pulling out of nowhere. We’ll now have to see where he goes with it. Admittedly, a lot of setting things up took place here. Acting all good, greatly enjoying the return of John Simm. The inevitable lengthy essay will probably follow next week once David Tennant’s Doctor is good and dead. - Meanwhile, the eighth series of Spooks climaxed this week, with a ticking bomb detonator and a painful cliffhanger. Although this run hasn’t been quite as amazing as the previous two, which represented great returns to form, it has been a reliable weekly action injection. The return of Ruth has been used decently, and the death of Jo wasn’t unwelcome either. It’s a shame that Lucas North has been somewhat infected with the stupidity-angst virus that Adam Carter used to suffer from, but hopefully he will get over it. And, indeed, hopefully they will commission a ninth series, because that cliffhanger would be one hell of a way to leave things.
- In music, it appears that after last weeks Power To The People moment, Joe McElderry will almost certainly get his number one today. I don’t care enough to stall publication of the Weekly Hat to find out, but all the usual sources seem to think it’s inevitable. That will at least pad out his statistics, although I think in the public consciousness he has already lost this particular battle to Rage Against The Machine. However, I don’t think this will necessarily harm his career; he could still produce a decent album and make his way in pop music. The Rage victory probably has more ramifications for the future of X Factor than it does for the prospects of McElderry.
- The Christmas TV schedules were a bit of a wasteland weren’t they? Maybe I’m just bitter after last year had Wallace & Gromit, a Blackadder documentary and other good things, but there really hasn’t been much to catch my imagination this time, aside from the above-discussed Doctor Who. Indeed, I’m so uninspired by them that I’ve actually written the bulk of this media section on Christmas Day, while my family watch Eastenders downstairs.
(Although, to give them the credit they’re due, Doctor Who Confidential wasn’t as banal as it sometimes can be. They managed to just about pull out enough insight to fill the whole hour, without resorting to too many tedious montages.)
Behatted Photo Of The Week
Today, inevitably, our featured guest is Santa Claus (strange red entity) with punkesque Santa hat (hat), namely the one I cut out especially for the Christmas special…
Small Print: Original photo stolen from Dustin C Oliver on Flickr, under this Creative Commons Licence.
