Why a prescription for Viagra would be a useful Christmas present
The Christmas Tree was up and fully decorated before I realised it was at a Tower of Pisa tilt that required it to be tied to the pipe leading to the radiator. I thought I’d trussed it fairly subtly until the man in my life came home from work and surveyed it.
“Trying to escape, was it?” he asked.
He got a short answer, because I was busy taking off all of the lights in order to find the one bulb that was on strike and had brought all its pals out in sympathy. It was ever thus. Each year I get one striker and one flasher, so either the tree is dark or sporadic. I can’t bear to have my tree winking at me in a random way, so have to search for the blinker and excise it. I remind myself of my father, who ended up on Christmas Eve blind with rage for the same reason. Except that in my father’s time, Christmas light bulbs were big, rendering the search for the bad guys reasonably simple. These days, they’re tiny and come in clusters. So that instead of testing perhaps 60 bulbs, you have to try out about 600, and I didn’t find the yoke that identifies the dud until I opened the last carefully sealed plastic crate.
The innards of that final plastic crate looked like the contents of those old packing cases murderers used to check into railway luggage storage places, a dead body scrunched up and festering within. Putrid doesn’t come near to describing what was revealed within my blue plastic box when the lid was lifted. It would even be difficult to guess what the slimy smelly mess had once been. I was about to investigate when Himself advised against it.
“You left batteries in everything,” he said. “They’ve leaked acid. I wouldn’t touch anything in it, if I were you.”
You can see how he got all his degrees. I put the lid back on the container, knowing I’ll have to share it with the local authority. They may not welcome it. Spent batteries are one thing. A crate full of acid, suppurating wreaths, a non-functioning gadget for identifying failed light bulbs and a destroyed King and a sheep may count as toxic waste, but I don’t suppose they get a lot of it. Not to mention the fact that the crib looks very odd, with only two Kings (one of them permanently inebriated and so used to falling on his face that his nose is completely gone) and one orphaned lamb. Our Lady’s look of astonishment, with her two hands crossed on her chest, is more than justified, this year.
Every year, I decide to give the Christmas lights to a charity shop after they come off the tree and buy trouble-free new ones the following year, and every year I decide that would be the lazy option. Which is why I’ve ended up with a star for the top of the tree the tubular bit of which has broken off, leaving it with no means of bonding with the tree. I tied it on with transparent fishing wire (don’t ask why I have transparent fishing wire, it’s too sad a story) so that unless you’re up close, you don’t know it’s held against its will, like Dick Roche only silent.
WHEREAS my next door neighbour makes — I kid you not — THIRTY SIX Christmas cakes for eager consumers, no such baking goes on in our place, largely because we all hate the stuff, particularly the marzipan, a product invented by someone with a nasty mind. Puddings don’t get made, either: too many hours spent as a child grating lard and half my fingers into a bowl. Anything involving lard and human fingers and hours of burbling on the stove is bad. I buy a small Marks&Sparks pudding with no fat to speak of, microwaveable in two minutes. This year, I decided to be innovative and bought a tiny bottle of peach schnapps to pour over it and set fire to.
When I confided this little novelty to my son, he laughed at me.
“Ma, peach schnapps has about a 15% alcohol content.”
“So?”
“So it would be considerably easier to set fire to the cat than get a flame going on the pudding.”
The only bit of the preparations thus far that’s been any fun has been buying books as presents. Writers never admit to it, but every one of them, including me, takes time whenever they go into a book shop to either gloat (if their current book is well displayed) or sneak it into a better position (if it isn’t.) That done, it’s time to buy copies of books you’ve loved for other people, make lists of new books to drop hints about, and make yourself feel virtuous by buying a few paperbacks (not hardbacks) just to tide you over until the big day. I did buy one hardback because it was half price, and that was where the Viagra came in.
Schott’s Almanac is a cross between Ripley’s Believe it Or Not and the Encyclopaedia, with a few pages of Hello! magazine thrown in. It updates you on obscurely satisfying data, like that eating high levels of tofu could raise the risk of memory loss in older people. This is a piece of information deserving wide promulgation in the interests of preserving the elderly from one of the most God-awful foodstuffs ever invented. (It’s up there with marzipan.) Another nugget is a survey showing that broadcasters, celebrities and newspapers collectively have three times the influence on people’s day to day lives than does government, which establishes, yet again, that politics is a gruesome career choice attracting oversized amounts of blame for undersized amounts of influence.
The really exciting bit in Schott’s, this year, though, is the bit about Viagra, which is proving to be unexpectedly useful in areas outside its main function, which we will not discuss here at all. Studies show it has “a protective effect on heart tissue deprived of oxygen before and after heart surgery”. It also lowers blood pressure in the lungs of chronic bronchitics. All of which is good.
But the two best results are yet to come. Apparently Viagra is your only man to prevent Raynaud’s Phenomenon, from which I suffer grievously. Raynaud’s is that circulatory hiccup that strikes on cold days, where your fingers turn a corpse-like yellowy-white and fail to function for hours.
The other good thing it does is keep cut flowers fresh. One dose of Viagra, apparently, is all it takes to get a full extra week out of a bouquet.
On the other hand, even if I did score a prescription, I’m not sure I’d be able for the funny looks from the pharmacist…
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