T’was the night before Christmas, when all through the house,
Na’er a reveller was drinking, not even a Scouse,
The warnings from Liam, we’d listened with care,
In the hope that our children, the better would fare.
The children were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of polar bears danced in their heads,
The Climategate adverts that we thought were crap,
Our spirits, subliminally, were starting to snap.
And Mamma and I just longed for a fag,
That no-smoking lark was starting to drag.
Away to the window I flew like a flash,
Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.
With trembling fingers, I opened a pack,
And drew out a Woodbine – the Hell with the flack.
With smoke curling upwards, the end all aglow,
I deeply inhaled, and gazed out at the snow.
When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,
Mamma sprang from her chair to see what’s t’matter,
And what to my rheumy old eyes should appear?
But a unit of PCSOs with smoke detection gear!
“Oi! You there Old Man, ‘tis smoke that I see”,
‘Tis forbidden by Order of the State Smoke Committee.
My Christmas was ruined! Imprisonment I feared,
When up popped my saviour, himself, Old Greybeard,
He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,
And I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself!
A wink of his eye and a twist of his head,
Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread.
The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,
And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath.
He had a broad face and a little round belly,
That shook when he laughed, like a bowlful of jelly!
“Tis my smoke that you see”, he called to the crowd,
“The nightsky is my workplace, and so I’m allowed,
A drag on a fag and a drop of Sherry,
As I give to your world its one day of glee.”
He laid out our presents, and munched his mince pie,
Then took off with his sleigh in-to the night sky,
But I heard him exclaim, ‘ere he drove through the night,
“Happy Christmas to all, and keep those fags out of sight!”
Anna is the landlady of the Raccoon Arms. She lives in the Monbazillac area of South West France and still takes a keen interest in British politics.
{ 41 comments }
/applause
Poet Laureat
’tis the day before christmas
an occasion I don’t celebrate with any gusto
but nevertheless, there’s something brewing amongst the sprout fraternity..
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/christmas/6866453/Brussels-sprout-sales-jump-as-we-learn-to-cook-them-properly.html
I’m taking our home growners down to the ‘in-laws’ for a couple of days so, have a good one everybody
Happy non-discriminatory Winterval to one and all!
It is very hard indeed to get a sentence containing PCSOs to scan, but you almost made it.
Santa won’t in fact be coming this year anyway. He was stopped just outside Reading for joy-riding while hunder the hinfluence of sherry, an’ smokin’ while hin possession hov hey sleigh.
Then when Old Nick got to Dock Green nick, they found out he hadn’t been vetted. And as it takes five years to get off the sex offenders’ list, he won’t be with us again until 2014.
As a result of this, nobody will buy anyone presents next year. The economy will finally breathe its last somewhere around June 27th, after new Spending Tsarina Wanglesome’s scheme to revive the Summer Solstice instead has failed, at a cost to the taxpayer of
I have worked it out and after all these years believing I now know the truth!
There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18) in the world. However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim,
Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist (except maybe in Japan) religions, this reduces the workload for Christmas night to 15% of the total, or 378
million (according to the population reference bureau). Assuming an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that computes to 108 million homes – presuming there is at least one good child in each.
Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming east to
west (which seems logical). This works out to 967.7 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with a good
child, Santa has around 1/1000th of a second to park the sleigh, hop out, jump down the chimney, fill the stocking, distribute the
remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left for him, get back up the chimney, jump into the sleigh, and get onto
the next house. Assuming that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be
false, but will accept for the purposes of our calculations), we are now talking about 0.78 miles per household. This amounts to a total
trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting bathroom stops or breaks.
This means Santa’s sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second–3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest
man made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a pokey 27.4miles per second, and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 15 miles
per hour. The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element.
Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium sized LEGO set (two pounds), the sleigh is carrying over 500 thousands tons,
not counting Santa himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that the “flying”
reindeer can pull 10 times the normal amount, the job can’t be done with eight or even nine of them—Santa would need 360,000 of them.
This increases the payload, not counting the weight of the sleigh, another 54,000 tons, or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen
Elizabeth (the ship, not the monarch). 600,000 tons travelling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance – this would heat up
the reindeer in the same fashion as a spacecraft re-entering the earth’s atmosphere.
The lead pair of reindeer would absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each. In short, they would burst into flames
almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer
team would be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second, or right about the time Santa reached the fifth house on his trip. Not that it
matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to 650 m.p.s. in .001 seconds, would be subjected to
acceleration forces of 17,000 g’s. A 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by
4,315,015 pounds of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a dribbling mess of twitching innards.
Therefore, if Santa ever did exist, he’s dead now.
Bog Off, will ya. I’ve just seen him down the road a bit, climbing a chimney.
Hurrah for Mme Raccoon and hurrah for a wonderful rhyme! Merry Christmas, one and all!
And hurrah for Saul for bringing us such cheery imagery too!
Brilliant contribution young Saul, and Happy Christmas to one and all.
Ah, the unforgettable smell of Woodbines. Christmas Day in the 50′s with the four of us on a twelve hour shift on double time (you lived on cash in them days) in the parcels’s office, with assorted goodies and only three trains to deal with. One had to be particular about the sherry. It had to be British, in squat bottles you could swig from. None of that fancy foreign muck.
Bill Shakespeare – eat yer heart out son.
“Brilliant contribution young Saul”…..
Seeing this with the word “young” next to my name, I was tempted to keep quiet, however as it is Xmas I have to admit I received the “Santa facts” in an e-mail.
Merry Christmas to everyone, and I hope Santa brings everything you have all wished for.
Thus I felt I could do the same and send it to a select number of friends of whom I know they can take some gore …
Merry Christmas, Vrolijk Kerstfeest, Joyeux No
@Saul.
Don’t be daft you can’t use calculations like that for Santa – and you know it. Anyway having children, I have talked to him and he explained it to me – Simple reverse euclidean temporal black hole manipulation. Apparently all the while he is in a black hole there is “no real time”. In fact it goes backwards just for him. The Sleigh is actually only the receiving end of a mass-movement inversion engine only delivering the right presents for each house. Rudolf holds the key to the movement – his nose contains a red-hole relativity singularity generator, which enables him to “jump” not actually travel. Which he says is why we don’t see him unless we catch him emerging from the black holes err.. chimneys to us.
How did you expect me to cope with all these billions of children without high tech systems he observed, a sleigh and few Reindeer?
I gave him his pies and beer…
Tim. Merry Holiday of you chosen naming.
ah, TimOfEngland – the old ‘reverse euclidean temporal black hole manipulation’ coupled with the failsafe ‘red-hole relativity singularity generator’. I thought it had to be something along those lines.
Brilliant, Anna.
Hope you and yours have a great Christmas & New Year.
First time (or perhaps second) here, but I’ll be back. Scintillatingt; a very Merry Christmas and a Prosperous New Year to you.
Gloria, please tell me you didn’t fall for the old
Kala Christouyenna to Anna and all her friends!
Saul – not only did I fall for the old ‘reverse euclidean temporal black hole manipulation
Bang, bang, bang, ouch….
Haven’t you got a sprout to peel or summit, Missus?
I say, I am back at the keyboard with a keen attitude and a repetitive nature …. whooops! Mme Raccoon, sorry – how’s the headache???
(tomorrow’s sprouts are still in the field, waiting for tonight’s furtive Brussel Rustlin’ expedition… the boys are threading bailer twine into their belt-loops as I type….)
Here’s a little explanation of my on-going love/hate affair with sprouts….
Q: What
Gloria!
‘Tis true, ’tis true, Ch
I knew I shouldn’t have mentioned the sprouts…..
But you did, Oscar, you did…. but you know better than to pop round tomorrow after sunset and open the door…..
Yeah, I know they keep repeating on you, keep repeating on you, keep repeating on you…..
… whooooooo!…..?…….whoooooo-eeeee! …..???? pwhor!… argh!…grrnnnnnnghhhh……(and the visitor was never heard of again).
Just look at my face… would I ever submit you to a sprouty whiff?
and a twist of turnip, I wouldn’t put anything past you
Ha-ha! You are near to giving away the secret of my special eggy fragrance, therefore I cannot enter into any further public communication with you…for fear that the Paris Parfum houses are monitoring your site… I would hate Britney Spears to turf up on terrestrial TV advertising ‘Oeuf et Beuf’ when it’s a combination of which I am so very modestly proud… and that’s a powerful whiff without the turnip, I can assure you.
I am sending you a bottle of eau de nicotine for Christmas, Chatalaine and I swear by it…
Tabac or not Tabac, that is the question….
Not tonight Josephine, they are all closed now.
I’m off to bed too, Happy Christmas all, and especially Gloriana.
(and, strictly entre nous, I’d welcome better than anything a top set that didn’t fall forward during the trifle)
Mwwwwah Mme Raccooniana. Et Joyeux Noel to you and Mr G. (& Ozzzzzzzzzzzzz) xx