Do they know it’s Christmas time at all?

I walked down a shopping street this evening. 17th December. A week before Christmas Eve. But I must have been on an alien planet.

No lights above the road showing flying reindeer: perhaps no runner-up from Big Brother 5 had turned up to turn on about a month ago.

No Salvation Army band, bang on the money after practising for this moment for 11 months. (You know they spend weeks just planning the staggers in their breathing so as to keep the dynamics even in Silent Night?)

No German markets to peruse the overpriced wooden toys and then just buy another gluwein.

And I couldn’t see my breath, what with it still being over 25 degrees and that.


Christmas doesn’t really happen here – at least not publically. There are over half a million Christians in Bombay, and they’ll certainly have a cracking Crimbo – although they probably don’t have Noddy Holder or Morecambe and Wise, which frankly seems like missing the point to me. But not one of the hundred irritating adverts on telly at the moment is festive-themed; you can walk through a supermarket without seeing a single drop of spray snow or an inch of tinsel; and there’s not nide nor hair of any double issue of the Radio Times with a lame cartoon of Father Christmas on the front for the 82nd year in a row.

But it’s the weather that’s the greatest dampener on things, if you’ll excuse the inappropriate terminology. How am I supposed to start panicking about presents like I normally do at this time of year, when I’m walking around in a t-shirt and sandals? I tell my brain to do it but it just says ‘yeah whatever, turn up the aircon, snowboy’.

So I close my eyes and gently daydream about what I really want for Christmas .