DIARY
ALLAN MASSIE It is not surprising that Christmas is the Christian festival which has been adopted by the modern world that is not Christian. And this is not just because it carries with it memories of the old Yule feasts of our pagan ancestors who loved eating and getting drunk and indulging in family quarrels at their midwinter festival, just as we do, 'while', as Scott put it in the introductory epistle to the Sixth Canto of Marmion, 'round, in brutal jest, were thrown/ The half-gnawed rib, and marrow- bone'. And it is not just because we need something to brighten up this otherwise dismal season of the year. It is because the Christmas message — that the birth of a child is a new beginning — carries a meaning that the message of Easter lacks. You really have to accept the faith to believe in a God who is crucified and rises again, but every parent knows that angels sing at the birth of a child, and that shepherds or something like them flock to Bethlehem, or somewhere like it, to see this new thing which has come to pass.
Isuppose many of us go through a phase of disliking Christmas, and of feeling su- perior to it. I did myself once. Yet, with time and luck, most of us come to realise that such expressions of fastidiousness are not superior at all. Chesterton, who wrote better about Christmas than anyone else, wasn't actually writing about it when he said that 'Fastidiousness is the most par- donable of vices; but it is the most unpar- donable of virtues.' But he might have been. In fact he was writing about the family, and the way in which those who despise the family 'shrink from the brutal activity and brutal variety of common men', and, when you come to think of it, people who despise Christmas exhibit the same failing. They feel fools if expected to wear paper crowns from crackers, not realising that anyone who leaves off a paper crown on such an occasion looks a bigger fool. The fastidious complain of the commercialisation and commercialism of Christmas. They have a point. The way people sell things is often disgusting; but the way people buy things, as presents for others, at Christmas, is not disgusting at all. It is beautiful.
Well, it is usually beautiful. Some- times however it is funny. I remember years ago going with my wife to a very expensive shop in the Via della Croce in Rome, a shop where they sold wonderful candied fruits, chocolates, rare condiments and exotic flowers, and it was full of rich women in fur coats with Gucci handbags, and they were pushing and squabbling and shrieking and losing their tempers, and it was just like a bar when 'last orders' had been called in the old days of Glasgow before it became the City of Culture. We, who were very poor in those days, stood amazed and agreed we had hardly ever seen anything so funny. One thinks of Christmas as a northern feast, but Rome is magical then. They put down carpets in the Via Frattina and the Via Borgognona, and shepherds come from the Abruzzi (or pretend to do so — some say they come only from the borgate, the poor housing estates that fringe the city) to play the bagpipes. The light in the late afternoon is of a rare beauty, and at half past four you go to eat poached eggs and drink tea in Babington's Tea-rooms in the Piazza di Spagna. Or you did; I hope you still can. But I am sure you can still go to midnight Mass on Christmas Eve in the church of the Aracoeli on the Capitol; and a shepherd, will play 'Stine Nacht' as you emerge. I defy anyone not to approve such a Christ- mas, or to decline to believe, if only for half an hour on such a night, that it really happened as St Luke says it did.
t this time of year the newspapers
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feature pages on which a variety of people choose their books of the year. But I was asked the other day to go on a radio programme to say which books one would really like to read at Christmas. I had to refuse the invitation, but the question is a good one. They come in two categories. There are the books one receives as presents, which are really for dipping into at that time, while you promise yourself a 'It all all started with my PhD on Jeffrey Bernard.'
fuller read later. Books are still among the best presents, even for an habitual review- er. A couple of years ago my elder son gave me an old copy of Motley's Rise of the Dutch Republic, which I hadn't looked at since I was at Cambridge, and therefore derived a double pleasure from getting. Then the second category is made up of books which ideally you would read, part of at least, every year. I suppose A Christmas Carol still comes first of these, though if your parish church employs a modern translation of the Bible, you should read also the second chapter of Luke in the Authorised Version. But for relaxation I would plump for Mr Sponge's Sporting Tour. I don't think Surtees was really a Christmas man; he was too sardo- nic, too alert to identify cant. All the same it is a splendid book, which you can pick up at any point and be straightaway carried back into a rougher, ruder rural England, which smells of horseflesh and candle-ends and cheese and Soapey Sponge's almost certainly rank cigars. If Surtees is too tough for you, with his no-nonsense damn- your-eyes manner, then you can imitate the bishop 'who loved to curl up in bed with his favourite Trollope'.
January would be a bleak month if it wasn't that it sees the start of the Five Nations Rugby Championship, which en- sures five Saturdays devoted to thoughts of almost nothing else. Surtees described hunting as 'the image of war without the guilt', but the phrase applies equally well to rugby. I suppose England are favourites to win, if only because they play Scotland at Twickenham, where we rarely do ourselves justice. England have a good pack and very good backs, but I still think the pack lacks mobility and the team intelligence. They lost to Wales in 1989 and Scotland last season partly because they couldn't change their tactics. Wales are in the doldrums, though they have plenty of good players if they can find the right mix. Ireland are without the destructive back- row that every successful Irish team has had, and France are still at sixes and sevens. So it ought to be between England and Scotland again. But the odd years are difficult. We have to go not only to Twickenham but also to Paris, where we haven't won since the days of black-and- white television. On the other hand, Eng- land must win at Cardiff, and Harold Macmillan was Prime Minister, Private Eye a baby, cigarettes 4/6 for 20, and whisky a little over £2 a bottle, when they last did that. A final wish for the Championship, which won't be granted: I would like nobody to talk about it as preparation for the World Cup.
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