Record-breaking festive rant

It's friday the 7th of October, but sometime last night as I slept, someone must have lost track of the date because I awoke this morning to find the Christmas decorations hanging in the street outside. Anyway, let me be the first to wish you the compliments of the season.

Yes, Happy Autumn everybody. The summer ended almost as abruptly as it began about 4 days ago, and I went from sweating in shirtsleeves the day before yesterday, to shivering in a thick woolen jumper the next - with no cooling-off period at all in the 24 hours between.

During the 29 degree celsius heat-wave of the end of last week, someone was decorating a large Christmas tree in our local shopping centre and everyone was averting their eyes in embarrassment as they walked passed, but the store holder may only have been trying to break the record for the first person to seriously mention the 'C' word after the end of the summer break. I believe that last year's attempt smashed all the previous ones by being blurted out on November the 1st - exactly 8 hours after all the trick-or-treating had finished and four days before the nation celebrated the death of 'the only man to have entered Parliament with honest intentions' - Guy Fawkes.

The trouble is that we are getting daily doses of conflicting information and advice from today's members of Parliament, who are truly between a rock and a hard place when it comes to Saving The World - or at least making it a slightly easier place to live in now that a handful of bankers have stripped it of 90% of it's material worth.

One day they are telling us that if we don't save 30% of the pennies we have worked so hard for over our lifetimes we will die of starvation on the streets, and the next day a different department tells us we must spend, spend spend our way out of this crisis, then all will be well for our grand children. The shopkeepers would - of course - rather believe the latter advice, but the poor things are in the same boat as everyone else and may well end up lying in the gutter of the High Street right outside their own premises if we don't all spend our retirement fund/kid's inheritance on their January sales - the January sales which now begin on Boxing Day, but may well start on Christmas Eve this year if more records are to be broken.

Each year, the prospect of a truly Dickensian Christmas becomes more of a reality and not just a romantic and heart-warming series of iconic and kitsch images that have found their way onto the lower end of the now bankrupt Woolworths greeting card range.

As the social divide increases and actual poverty is beginning to be experienced by families that used to buy electronic luxuries for the kiddies in place of spinning-tops and hobby-horses in the middle of the coldest months of the year, people are now having to decide between whether to heat the house or eat during the festive season, and the sight of charities begging for donations of tinned foods at the supermarket check-outs is becoming more and more frequent.

In the Dickens model of the ideal Christmas, the rich and misanthropic Scrooge displays a complete change of behaviour as remorse and compassion fill his heart, and he knocks on the door of the little freezing hovel with a goose large enough to feed the entire family and himself.

This Christmas - 150 years after this scenario was imagined - the scene will be reenacted up and down the country, but with one difference.

The modern day Scrooge will not be knocking on the door and begging to be forgiven for his hard-heartedness because he will either be sunning himself on a private island in the Caribbean, or skiing in Chamonix.