ALEXANDRA SHULMAN'S NOTEBOOK: A Christmas tree's always festooned in memories
So what is it to be – a Nordmann fir or a Norway spruce? Tall or short, slim or bushy? And when is the best day to buy one? These are pressing questions.
There may be people who don’t bother having a Christmas tree but my household is not one of them. Even so, I’m wondering why this tradition has lasted so long when countless others have dwindled? And why in our home, when there are no longer children to be enchanted by the tree, do we still always put up a whopper in the living room?
And the answer is that although I come from a non-religious family with few traditions, the decorating of the tree was an annual ritual in my childhood home well into my 20s. It’s deeply ingrained and as much a part of the season as Christmas Mass is for others.
The thought of not having a tree is intolerable.
There may be people who don’t bother having a tree but my household is not one of them (file)
I’m wondering why this tradition has lasted so long when countless others have dwindled (file)
Our childhood tree always came from the local greengrocer and had to be crammed into a small lift to carry it up to our flat. Once inside, there was inevitably some problem with getting it to stand up straight since, for some reason, it was placed in a bucket of earth.
If the task had been left to our mother, I doubt we would have had a tree at all, but our Canadian atheist father loved the tree, taking control of proceedings, including the nightmarish untangling of the lights and dire warnings of what would happen if one of us clumsily trod on them and the whole lot blew.
Every year the same old brown linen suitcase was brought down from a cupboard with its treasured collection of glittering, colourful glass balls to be hung and topped off with a fairy dressed in tinsel. Pure heaven. All these years later, it’s those memories that drive me every Christmas to replicate that childhood feeling of delight.
Late at night, when the house is dark, I love to sit and look at the twinkling tree, heavy with familiar decorations collected over the years, a strangely reassuring presence in an often turbulent world.
Here’s the headline: I’m a news addict
No wonder I want a tree. The news coming at us from every avenue is so bleak that I decided to experiment by not listening to it.
As a news addict, usually I’m avid for every bulletin available. But since there’s little I can do about Ukraine, Gaza, the status of the Chagos Islands, National Insurance hikes and the almost daily shootings just up the road from me, I decided to zone out and listen to something less stressful.
However, the experiment lasted only three days. Soothing as I assumed waking up to classical music rather than the Today programme would be, the effort not to discover what was going on in the world was in itself too stressful.
I became so busy wondering what had happened overnight that I couldn’t concentrate on the music. I suppose this makes me an addict – and, perhaps, if I tried a bit harder and longer, like any addiction, it would get easier to resist. But then being stuck with only personal problems to worry about is probably a worse place to be.
Could Waitrose be a magnet for muggers?
Talking of problems, a doctor friend was mugged the other evening outside Waitrose on Marylebone High Street in London. The attackers had targeted his expensive watch, a gift from one of his patients that day, and which he wouldn’t usually have on his wrist. He tried to fight off the thugs but suffered a badly broken shoulder.
Since watches of any kind are only visible from close up, it’s unlikely the gang had tailed him for some time but had simply spotted him leaving the store. Do thieves just hang around outside, waiting for their prey?
Central London Waitroses are open late, so, presumably, offer the good prospect of relatively wealthy shoppers who make prime targets, while emptier streets make it easier to escape.
File photo. Waitrose in Marylebone, London, December 2020
Forget the Groucho, this is my new club
My old stomping ground, the Groucho Club in Soho, has temporarily lost its licence for an as yet unrevealed reason. Hopefully soon it will be back up and running. In the meantime, there’s a new club coming, the Supporters’ House at the National Gallery.
Last week, I was lucky enough to be given a hard-hat tour of what will be a series of beautiful members’ rooms when it opens next May, along with a reworked Sainsbury Wing entrance hall.
Supporters’ House may not have the risqué, boho appeal of the Groucho, but it will certainly be a best-in-class place to sink into an armchair for a cup of coffee – with some great paintings next door.
Why a tuxedo might turn you into Arnie
Although tuxedos are often recommended by fashion journalists as a one-stop solution to Christmas partywear, the simplicity of the tux is a myth.
If you have even moderately sized breasts, the buttoned-up jacket can endow you with the bulky allure of Arnold Schwarzenegger rather than the disturbingly sexy androgyny that Yves Saint Laurent was going for when he invented the look in the 60s.
Model Natalia Seminova in YSL's 1966 tuxedo during the Saint Laurent's Spring 2002 Couture collection
There needs to be a Find My Specs app!
If anyone with an entrepreneurial spirit and tech expertise wants a surefire business proposal, I have one. Invent a way to find lost glasses, in the same way there’s a Find My Phone app.
As any spectacles-wearer knows, losing your glasses comes with the territory and involves hours that you will never get back spent hunting for them. Of course, the problem is made all the harder because without glasses you can’t see to do the searching.
If I’d had a Find My Glasses app or something similar, I would have been able to quickly discover that, yesterday, mine were at the bottom of a black bag in the recycling bin in the front garden.
How they got there, I prefer not to speculate.
