Five Gold Rings

One of the frustrating things about young people is that they are unaware of the things we older folk consider to be essential and important about the past. That is, our past. Or, if they do appear to know about them, not having been there at the time, how could they really know? They've just read about it! This can become annoying when these particular young people are the ones reviewing things in your favourite journals, hoping to build a CV and a reputation based on their all-round cultural knowingness. But what the hell do you know about Joe Strummer or Joni Mitchell, kid? Knowest thou it, because thou wast then born? Or because the number of thy days is great? No, I thought not.

But we need to cut the young some slack, here. The fact is that we older folk weren't there either, in our own younger days. Obviously, whatever knowledge or opinions I might have on anything that happened before about 1960 are entirely based on hearsay evidence, filtered through a postwar sensibility, and curated for me by the media's less than museum-quality nostalgia. How annoying, ill-informed, and arrogant we must have seemed to our parents, who, in turn, must have been a serious source of irritation to our grandparents, quietly simmering about the misinformation being bandied about concerning life in Edwardian England. I'll give you Upstairs, Downstairs, matey!

One of the curious things about culture is that it is not cumulative. You might suppose it to be like one of those counting songs with an ever-lengthening chorus – "One Man went to Mow", or "The Twelve Days of Christmas" – with the added torment that the culture song never ends, and the chorus just gets longer and longer and longer. In which case the aspiring young critic would need, ideally, to know everything you know, plus everything your forebears knew, plus everything that has happened since you stopped paying attention. Not forgetting Old Ma Riley and her cow, and the partridge in a pear tree.

But, of course, it's not like that. Beyond a certain point (which I'd set around 1980, which just happens to be when I stopped paying attention to a lot of things, but might as well be 1880) there is simply too much stuff to know. So, things get ignored or forgotten (I was outraged to hear the Third Ear Band described as "totally obscure" on the radio recently), recast into a portable shorthand travesty ("Punk was a reaction to Prog"), or appropriated as a "rediscovery" every time there is a shift in sensibility (see: Nick Drake or William Blake), which is quite often, these days.

So, a culture is not so much about the accuracy, temporal persistence, or sum total of its "facts", as these would interest a historian, but about the way they mutate and are transmitted into the present day. It is also very rarely about the real, lived experience of the past. I mean, what have we really retained from Victorian family life? We live in the same streets and houses, but utterly transformed with the addition of electricity, running water, mains sewage, and central heating, and the subtraction of smoky fires, gaslight, abject poverty, unpaved roads, and (for the well-off) an endless supply of cheap servants. Who today would need or even know how to darn a sock, or give a brass farthing about scrubbing their doorstep every day? Life for the majority was not just hard, it was pretty grim. Or so I read, imagine, and project, retrospectively. But maybe it didn't seem so bad at the time? Maybe having socks to darn and a doorstep to scrub felt like real progress.

Which, inevitably, brings us to Christmas. Due to the efforts of the likes of Charles Dickens, Prince Albert, the Coca Cola Company, and the greetings-card industry, Christmas still has what we fondly imagine to be a residual but distinctive "Victorian" flavour; an organic vegan turkey-substitute roast, wasabi-sprinkled Christmas pudding and deep-filled Belgian chocolate mince pies, accompanied by a tree hung with ironic decorations, sleighbells in the spray-on snow, and the wailing of wassailers outside in top hats and bonnets, holding lanterns on poles, and doing whatever else wassailing involves. Which, in our street, seems to be mainly driving a van slowly down the middle of the road playing loud, distorted carols over a PA system, while Rotarians in idiotic hats go door to door, extorting cash. To which the most authentically Victorian response is, "Garn, git orf my drive, 'fore I sets the dog on ye! I'll give you deep and crisp and even!"

But let's not be curmudgeonly; it's Christmas, after all! The decline in transmitted seasonal lore amongst the young has its advantages. I, in my time, was never woken up early to go wren-hunting, for a start, or even to observe the livestock bowing at midnight in the barn, and in recent times an ignorance of any carols (and the reluctance of householders to hand over mince-pies and/or cash) has led to a blessed decline in door-to-door carol-begging. This reached its nadir a couple of years ago, when every ten minutes there would be a knock on the door, you'd open it, and yet another pair of young scruffs would instantly start singing, "We WISH you a Merry Crissmuss, we WISH you a Merry Crissmuss, anna Happy Noo Yeeer!" And stop. Well, OK... And? But that was it; not only was that all they knew of that particular song, but the extent of their Yuletide repertoire. So I set the dogs on 'em, didn't I?

Anyway, this year I'm here down by a foggy Dorset coast for the duration, but wherever you are and whatever the meteorological conditions I wish you whatever you need (I'm told alcohol can help) to see you through what, through gritted teeth, we will probably have to learn to call "The Holidays", but hopefully not the mooted "Winterval". Not least because, although it may not be "Christmas" for everyone everywhere, it certainly isn't winter in the Southern Hemisphere for anyone. I also wish you all the best for the coming year (things can only get better? Don't bank on it) and thank you, most sincerely, for reading my efforts during 2017.

Hardown Hill, Dorset