LeftLion print ed #17 - My Christmas letter
2009-12-11

Our Rob looks back upon the entire decade with a special letter to you,

Dearest reader,

If there is anything better than receiving those yearly family Christmas letters, then I don’t know what it is. Why, who doesn’t want to hear about how Aunt Sally’s dog came through ass surgery, or how Uncle Frank’s kidney stone issues have sorted themselves out, or especially how cousin Jimmy just got a new job making twenty grand a year more than you do, even though he was born the same year you finished Uni.

Christmas letters are great. Aunt Sally certainly isn’t writing to you to remind you how crappy your life is - she’s just keeping you up to date on her family’s exciting and fruitful lives! I’ve certainly had an exciting and fruitful life, so I thought I would write you a decade’s worth of Christmas letters, all in one. Aren’t I just the most thoughtful person in the world?

Boy, what a decade it’s been! I married myself a nice English girl, quit smoking, bought my first house and I finally completed the two college diplomas I’d been working on for years. And that was just 2000!

After a few years of living in Canada, my wife and I didn’t think our lives were thrilling enough, so we decided to move to England. We were young, we didn’t have kids, England doesn’t get cold winters and, gee whiz, won’t my friends think I am so cool and worldly when I come back with an English accent? Pip pip, Guv’nor! Chim chim cheroo!

We sold the house in Calgary and moved across the pond. Sure, there was a housing boom just after we sold, and Canadian money was worth more as Aunt Sally’s dog’s ass-bandages than actual money - but hey ho, a little problem like that wasn’t going to stop two dynamos like us. We moved over anyway and bought a house with money borrowed from the in-laws. Fortunately since then, there was a mortgage crisis and the price of our house has dropped to the point where we are in negative equity. So really, it’s like they never gave us any money at all!

Being a homeowner may be a big responsibility, but this is an English semi-detached home. It’s made of brick and concrete! Not that flimsy vinyl, chipboard and fibreglass my condo back home was made of. English houses are the ones the third Little Pig would’ve built. He’d be sitting in front of his fire smoking his pipe while the Big Bad Wolf disemboweled his foolish colonial brothers in their houses of sticks and straw. In the four years we’ve owned the house, we’ve only had a few small problems. The fence blew down, a pipe burst and flooded the front room, the boiler crapped out, the sewage pipe broke and backed up, the roof’s caving in and the walls are as damp as Bruce Forsyth’s underpants.

Luckily, English contractors are so reliable and skilled! We only had serious problems with just over half of the ones we had to deal with. You would’ve thought that the house issues would’ve been spotted by our surveyor wouldn’t you? I’m sure he did his best though, I mean, he only charged us a grand for a whole afternoon’s work. Peanuts, really. We should be happy he showed up at all.

The latter part of the decade was even better than the beginning. There were a few years there when we were too stable. Our jobs were secure, we ate out, we went to the pub and we made pension contributions. It bored us to tears. Thankfully in 2008, we were both relieved of our mundane nine-to-fives. That silly old Credit Crunch. Even better for my wife, marketing was the last thing any company wanted to pay for when they were laying people off, so she didn’t work for months. Not having any money meant she could spend as much of her "career break" at home watching daytime TV and eating as many bon-bons as she wanted. She wasn’t burdened by the problems most women experience, like having to decide what shoes to buy or where she should go for drinks on a Friday night. She couldn’t afford to do anything. Her life was completely simplified and stress-free. She totally didn’t feel like a stir-crazed loser - in fact, she was an absolute delight to be around.

I didn’t view my being made redundant as a setback either; it was an opportunity in disguise! I picked myself up, created my own business, did a couple contracts, shut the business down and took on a part-time job. All the extra spare time allowed me to write a number of sitcoms and send them off to producers. None of the scripts were picked up, of course; in fact no-one got back to me at all, but it was a fun exercise nonetheless.

If there is one thing my wife and I are not, its traditionalists; so, it was with this in mind last Christmas, that we suggested to her family that we forego the grossly capitalist Christmas tradition of exchanging gifts. The festive season should be about family, not frivolous and boringly bourgeois conventions forced upon us by society. Together we will stick it to The Man, yeah! It was totally not because we were a couple of broke-asses. They, being freethinking non-conformists themselves, were only too happy to agree. And we totally didn’t feel like a couple of dicks when we were the only ones to show up giftless.

The best thing about the noughties was probably the fact that I developed the three nerdiest health conditions a person could possibly acquire: Astigmatism, Carpal Tunnel syndrome and Plantar Fasciitis, which means I have to wear glasses, a wrist strap and special shoes. All I need now is some orthodontic headgear and eczema and I’ll have the full set. It’s good though, it’s like being back in high school again, which as any regular reader of my column will tell you, was totally not a difficult time for me.

My wife eventually got another job, and between us we started making enough money to do silly things like invest in the stock market. I thought to myself, hey, this is the perfect time to invest while all the stocks are low. Buy low, sell high, right? Everyone knows that. With that in mind, I bought stock in Lloyds TSB and RBS ready to cash in when they pull themselves out of trouble. The government owns them now, and surely they won’t do anything to screw me over. Of course, I’ve only just found out today that both banks are going to be broken up and sold off in pieces, so I can probably kiss that money goodbye, but that’s OK; it’s another valuable life lesson learned.

Here’s hoping the Terrific Tens are just as exciting.

Merry Christmas.

Rob xoxo