Last year, Hampstead’s streets were graced with some rather startling Christmas decorations. At least, I found them startling:
Oooh, dearie, dearie dear.
I do wonder whether Hampstead’s merchants and burghers got a bit carried away in some wild academic flight of phant’sy and said to themselves: “well, the whole damn thing’s Mithraic anyway, we may as well have a decent phallic symbol and just get it out in the open. And then later, we can kill a cow and have weeping virgins carry the corpse through Waterstones.”
This Christmas, in an effort to avoid a repeat of the horror and embarrassment occasioned by this rather poor decision, our civic leaders have produced a new design.
One has to acknowledge, however, that there are problems with it:
Mordieux! Mes yeux… c’est horrible!
How is it possibly better to take the proud, porn-star madness of ’07/’08 and transform it into this sad, castrato version of the same thing? Why, in fact, should we go into the new year in the knowledge that, in Hamsptead at least, ’09 is the Year of the Tiny Winkie?