POLLY VERNON
COLUMNIST OF THE YEAR
YOU COULD ALMOST have guessed – couldn’t you – that Shane MacGowan would die precisely when he did: at the height of A Fairy Tale Of New York season. Just as the song is played ever ywhere, all the time – the bittersweet ache of it amplified tenfold by his death.
That song , though! That song! Raucous and wild and beautifully crass, so joyful and bleak, so romantic and cruel. So craftily clever, so elegantly chaotic, a work of such rowdy genius. No wonder it was our favourite Christmas song , our most streamed – even before MacGowan’s death.
It’s a sort of unofficial, seasonal national anthem for us, no? Cracked out every year in celebration of the darker aspects of our character, the rudest, lewdest, drunkest, most maudlin, least Dickensian bits. The bits that writhe, thrive and rise up, unbidden, in us; as much a part of Christmas Us as glad tidings, mulled wine and Hannah Waddingham specials on Apple T V+.
I’ve said it before – last year, actually, in this column, this is becoming my own lil tradition, you’re welcome! – but Christmas is awful. Great, but also: really awful. As dark as it is light. As sad as it is happy. As confusing , complicated, compromising as it is comforting and joyful; as A Fairy Tale Of New York as it is: it’s CHRISTMAS!
Take me. I cry more at Christmas than I do at any other time. Feel more lonely, lost, more confused about who I am, where I belong , where ‘home’ is, what it even means. I desperately miss the people who aren’t here any more, the ones who left, or died, or who I left, because I couldn’t see any other way, but what if I’d tried harder ? I’m filled with a general, vast, fathomless regret. I mourn thin
