Up Front 12/02

I knew someone year’s ago – in fact many, many years ago – who once gave his best friend a Perry Como record for Christmas as a joke. The following year the recipient carefully broke the record in half, repackaged it in glossy Christmas wrapping and gave it back. The re-trading of the same Christmas present went on for several years, with the piece of ‘lovely black vinyl’ morphing into many guises over time. The record was shredded into tiny pieces, reassembled into the shape of a reindeer, pasted around a cornflakes packet, and one year it was even melted down and handed over in a badly burnt saucepan. The methods of re-assembly became more and more ingenious as the years went by. One of them managed to recreate the shape of the record and glue fifteen different pizza toppings to it, while the following year the resulting mess was placed in a wooden picture frame and delivered inside a redundant washing machine! I lost touch somewhere around the washing machine episode but did hear a story about a digger arriving at my friends house one Christmas day with a pristine Perry Como CD inside the remains of a lawn mower.
We’re not exactly far off Christmas now and as the Father Christmas letter becomes more coherent, more expensive and more like a toy company brand manager’s desert island wish list, I can’t help hoping that we can instil enough of a sense of the ridiculous into our children, to ensure a more interesting life for them and a much more amusing retirement for us.