Digested week: Happy Christmas, let’s get it over with | Lucy Mangan

Monday

I recently had to help a friend organise home care provision for her father. She said he was looking forward to having someone around the house again.

Which made me think about my own declining years, whose happiness is very much predicated on NOT having anyone round the house whom I haven’t at least married or birthed. So I need to found, or someone needs to found for me, ta, a care service specifically for introverts. It will hire people who only want to work, not chat. Introvert carers will be matched with introvert clients and a comfortable silence will be maintained throughout, broken only by friendly but necessary questions and responses. “Cup of tea?” “Yes please.” “More tablets?” “Yes please.” “Shall I go and kick that barking dog’s owner?” “Yes please.” Everyone will be happy. Including all the dog’s other neighbours.

Tuesday

The president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, has announced that this year Christmas will be brought forward to 1 October . Sure, he’s doing it to try and dissipate the growing tension around his decision to claim victory in the country’s July elections without providing any proof – but what a brilliant idea. What a gift to any populace! If we could import it to Britain, ideally without any of the authoritarian regime stuff, attached and retaining our commitment to transparency in democracy ‘n’ that, I would be over the moon.

Imagine having just three weeks to get through before Christmas. The announcement could come at any time, and then you’re off to the races. Everything packed into one small stretch and then – done. Over. No months of aisles filling with mince pies whose sell-by date precedes 25 December. No TV schedules filled with emetic dramas and whimsy. No huge family gatherings to muster; whoever can come at short notice can come, but is it really worth bothering? Nah. A limit on the feverish heights all the madness can reach. Me gusta. Me gusta very much.

Wednesday

“Watch,” said the headline. “This is how a mushroom wearing a robot body dances.”

“Gosh,” I thought, “Nothing bad can come of this,” and clicked.

I am writing to you now from a bunker. Scientists have figured out a way to grow mycelium (the extraordinary fungal network beneath mushrooms, whose almost infinite mysteries and intricacies experts are only now beginning to uncover and just barely understand) into the electronics of robots and use the one to control the other.

This is excellent news. This is just what I pay my scientist tax for. The fusion of two nightmares helps streamline my anxiety and make my panic attacks more efficient. If the new robo-shrooms are also found to release large amounts of CO ₂ as they go about their hellish business and accelerate climate change, I shall be terrifically grateful and will take up macrame with all the free time I shall have. Merely screaming unstoppably into the void still leaves your hands free.

Thursday

I don’t know quite how to tell you this but a member of our own government has been caught – on very camera – partaking of an activity so unnatural that one finds oneself groping for the words to describe it, but here goes: Angela Rayner danced in a DJ booth while singing along to a remix of Gotye’s hit Somebody That I Used to Know in front of a crowd in a big nightclub in Ibiza. I know. I know. She was on holiday too. I will give you a moment to loosen your stays and procure your sal volatile.

Of course I understand the natural and immediate trepidation that greets any news story involving a politician dancing. We have none of us recovered and nor shall we any time soon from the sight of Michael Gove throwing shapes on an Aberdeen nightclub in 2021 in defiance of all known laws of physics and rhythm. But Rayner looks – how can I put this? – like a normal human woman having a bit of a boogie and a bit of a laugh. In a week when research found that even among its own voters Tory party members have started to be seen as “weird” , this is surely no bad thing at all.

Friday

“This would kill your father.”

“Yes, but I thought that one of the few advantages of him being dead was that it couldn’t happen again. So …”

“I never thought I’d see the day. What will folk say?”

“If they’re normal – not very much. If they’re family, I’ll just have to deal with it.”

But on the whole, breaking the news to my mother that I am intending to avail myself of a weekly laundering service for my son’s school shirts now that he has started big school and moved out of cute little polo shirts and into 14 yards of recalcitrant white cotton that he reduces to a grey rag each day, went quite well. Yes, I am abandoning my northern heritage and the principles by which I was brought up and putting the seal on the soft southernness that has long threatened. But – I am doing this. I cannot add this much ironing, which I hate even more than cooking, because you cannot even eat the results, to my schedule without wishing to die. I am going to pay someone else to do it. If this is the beginning of an inexorable slide into immorality and destitution, so be it. Let the fun begin.