He Knows When You’ve Been Naughty – but he’s got no sense of perspective

It is the season of good will, which basically means that most people have to spend two days with people they secretly think are wankers. My family are no exception, but what we did was outsource.

The presence of these people was, in fairness, a ruse that backfired. Our mum had invited them, thinking that they would refuse, as it would be such an imposition. Plus, in theory (if our mum's fiendish plan had worked) they would have taken our 86 year old Granny with them to Ipswich, as they are related to her 90 year old beau.

They started off nice enough, asking us how the recession had effected each of us in turn, just in case some one had actually been effected by it. But none of us had. I was poor before and I will be poor for a while. And my brother has consolidated all his monthly ambitions into one giant pipe dream, so we’re the same as we ever were.

Despite the fact that my parents live in the countryside, they couldn’t get over the notion that our Mum keeps chickens, and found this a highly amusing eccentricity. ‘Where’s your Mum? Down feeding the chickens?’ The husband asked, with a smirk, and with an emphasis that suggested she might as well be at a VD clinic.

Despite us not really reacting, or laughing or apologising for this heinous weirdness, he couldn’t seem to let it go. ‘What’s for dinner? One of the chickens?’ He continued. ‘No, turkey, obviously,’ we replied, un-amused. ‘It’s Christmas.’ (‘You twat’ we refrained from adding). ‘Do the chickens get Christmas presents?’ he chortled.

Lunch was all set to be an irritating amalgamation of politely putting him back in his box or faking laughter, depending on which chicken based quip he was making, and how offensive it was for him to be smugly passing judgement on people who were feeding him. But luckily the arrival of our uncle Pat was a welcome distraction. Uncle Pat is a happy but opinionated man, who had told no one he was coming for Christmas dinner. Though there were spurious references to an answer phone message that no one remembers.

I had bought my family a larger than average number of presents read by Stephen Fry. ‘You don’t like Stephen Fry, do you dear?’ the woman meekly offered. ‘No I don’t’, he said, and threw his energies into stuffing a plastic bag with dead wrapping. My brother asked ‘Why?’ (perhaps wondering if this man thought Fry had gone too commercial these days).

The man’s reasoning was slightly further leftfield: ‘I saw a few films with him playing… homosexual characters… and he – he….uh, seemed to… relish parts of those, those parts of the character.’

My brother then sarcastically replied, ‘Well, I hope Stephen Fry doesn’t slip any buggery into his reading of Chekov's short stories,’ angrily tapping the case of which, with a book he had also been given for Christmas.

‘Yes, that was exactly the kind of thing he was talking about.’ The man answered, without missing a beat, and completely oblivious to how much he’d missed the point, (or how much my brother later told me he wanted to rape him, making a slightly fatuous point about gays in the process).

They, possibly like us, weren’t looking forward to returning on boxing day, which we’d all agreed previously, to sentence ourselves to. Although boxing day turned out to be a bit more entertaining.

My Mum delighted in telling the story of how she and my dad met, claiming to have let my dad win at a squash game, which, out of nowhere, our Uncle Pat proclaimed to be ‘feminist crap.’

Pat then gamely held the floor and started deconstructing Othello, advising us that it was the only play Shakespeare got wrong, as it wasn’t black enough. Pat asserted any black man would at least wait for more evidence before killing his wife.

Pat then revealed that the next cleverest man after Shakespeare was Oscar Wilde, which was probably a role that Stephen Fry relished. But the man didn’t comment on this. He had nothing to say. Except ‘Ha ha! Will the chickens be getting any Christmas dinner?’

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This Christmas blog was brought to you by both Catie and Duncan Wilkins.