Miracle on Gaylord Street

Let me tell you something about Christmas you might not be aware of: over 90% of paedophiles, when surveyed by Heat magazine, claimed that Christmas was their favourite time of year. Despite these mind-bogglingly lusty figures, it is still a time of year that, notwithstanding my horrific run of luck where the festive season is concerned, stirs a glimmer of inter-generational warmth in my pig-valve-ridden heart. I don’t have any children myself (well, actually, I do, but they have legally disowned me and my only contact with them is some tatty, tear-stained photos I have pasted in my scrapbook of pain), so this Christmas I decided to make a rare positive contribution to the community and volunteer to hand out presents and serve Christmas dinner at a local orphanage. It hardly needs to be stated that it became yet another postcard of disgrace from my long holiday in the morally-dubious republic of Gaylordia.

Things started well enough. It was a bitterly cold night, snow lashing against my inexplicably exposed genitals (I developed frostbite in the days afterwards and my member was only saved after some terrifically intricate surgery performed by a man I met in an adult cinema), and by the time I got to the orphanage the thronged masses of doe-eyed children were begging to see what Santa had brought them. It soon became clear as I pushed the gifts into their grasping hands that what he had mainly brought them was some old cassette tapes or DVDs that came free with the Daily Express (quite what a 10-year-old boy living in a state-run orphanage wants with the first three episodes of The Forsythe Saga is beyond me). But I wasn’t perturbed: my soul was filled with the warm glow that is the true spirit of Christmas.

The problems began when, in the midst of serving some leathery slices of turkey, I made the quite innocent mistake of knocking an entire vat of boiling gravy onto the floor and then, in a panic to clear it up, kicking a three-bar electric heater into the rapidly-spreading pool of meat sauce. The result, which anyone with a modicum of basic physics will know, was a dining hall suddenly and lethally alive with the raw kinetic power of live electricity. The few children already in the hall managed to get away but my fellow volunteer, a magnificently fat woman called Yvonne who talked incessantly about Jesus, was reduced to a kind of awful Christmas tallow candle, smouldering with the stench of a cattle pyre during a particularly virulent outbreak of foot and mouth. I was so disgusted that I barely had time to hide from the police when they arrived and spent an uncomfortable night in a cupboard evading their ever-more ingenious attempts to capture me. I eventually escaped through a window and went straight to the only bar left open where I ordered a full turkey dinner and bucket of hazelnut Baileys. The police, I assume, realised that Yvonne’s time was probably up anyway and gave up their search.

It’s important to put a bit back at Christmas, although if that involves electrocuting a devoutly Methodist divorcee from Kettering who’s only contribution to the world is to volunteer at an orphanage where the children all carry knives then you do have to question whether it’s best just to stay at home and weep at another re-run of Noel’s Christmas Presents as you curse the lack of erectile function in your John Thomas.

Merry Christmas everyone.