Christmas in The Ol’ Lab Days. By Andy Sanson

Andy takes a satirical trip down memory lane, to Christmas time when he was a lad in the lab, often referred to as ‘one of the buggers’.

Christmas – that two day festival that begins at the end of September and carries on through until the sixth of January. The six weeks from Bonfire Night until about 1 pm on Christmas Eve, when everyone trundled off to the staff do, was always a period of intense activity at The Lab as panicking patients clamoured at the portals of the local dentists reasoning that they simply had to have their new ‘pair of teeth’ in time for Christmas so that the whole thing wouldn’t be ruined. I imagine most of them would have spent the early weeks of January rubbing Bonjella on to blistered and swollen gums due to eating hundredweights of turkey and sprouts and endeavouring to splinter almond shells with dentures not given chance to settle in.

By the time you surface for air, around December the second, amidst the finishes, try-ins, and bite blocks, you’re likely to have been subjected to at least four or five weeks of poor quality background Christmas music in just about every supermarket, service area and Mc flippin’ Donald’s which you’ve had the misfortune to set foot. Every year, the same tired old sacrilegious garbage is trundled out by managements to show the public just how jolly and festive and full of giving they are.

I believe it should be a hanging offence to even mention Christmas in a commercial environment until at least the twelfth of December. Dedicated Christmas departments like the one at Harrods can be excepted because you don’t have to go in there, but you do have to eat. For Tesco and their ilk to subject everyone, regardless, to wall-to-wall Ding Dong Merrily… from October the fourth demonstrates an arrogance that has no business inflicting itself on people.

A “joke” that pops up around this time every year is “I’m just beginning to enjoy Christmas then some pillock has to spoil it by dragging religion into it”. Many a true word… Don’t get me wrong; despite the fact that if I were to offer up a prayer, The Lord’s Receptionist would probably tell me they had no record of me and would I like to fill out a registration form, I like Christmas. I just don’t want excruciating advertising people telling me about it, as if I were ignorant of its existence, upwards of eight weeks before it happens. TV and radio bombarding us with Status Quo’s Whatever You Want, in an attempt to induce us and our credit cards into Argos, five times an hour for two months is unacceptable. Even (or especially?) if you are Francis Rossi I imagine you would tire of it before the first week was up.

And doesn’t it just go on, and on, and on...? It’s a sobering thought that a sixth of our lives is spent either preparing, or being told we should be preparing, for Christmas and the other five sixths paying, at an APR of around 25%, for the Christmases we had anything between one and five years ago.

From the middle of August, every pub or hotel with a function room has been urging you to book your Christmas party with it for “only” seventy or so quid a head. For that you’ll get a slice of Bernard Matthews turkey curling up around the edges, two uncooked sprouts, five frozen carrot sticks, four peas, a burnt chipolata, a roast potato with a skin like an armadillo, a briquette of Paxo, a teaspoonful of Bisto and, if you’re lucky, a splot of flavoured jelly purporting to be cranberry sauce. You’ll be provided with a cheap cracker which goes “pfft”, containing a paper hat designed for a small monkey, that shreds itself the minute you try to put it on, and a joke that Tony Blackburn would have been embarrassed to tell on his Radio One morning show in the seventies. There will also be an unidentifiable thing made of plastic or rubber. A pint of Carling will be six quid and if you order house wine it’ll likely be warm Hirondelle in glasses almost, but not quite, made of Pyrex.

Paradoxically, any establishment that’s still advertising spaces left for Christmas meals after the beginning of October should be left well alone!

You’ll have so much work right up until Christmas Eve that by the time the big day comes around you’ll be knackered enough to sleep most of the day and fail to enjoy the magnificent lunch that someone’s spent twenty four hours preparing.

Sometime around the middle of November, most of the papers publish basically erroneous details of what’s going to be on TV over the festering season. I don’t know what TBA’s about but it must be good ‘coz, it’s on thirty times a day for over a fortnight. There’ll be the usual soap “specials”. Somebody will die at midnight on New Year’s Eve, somebody with discover their partner in bed with the neighbour’s alsatian and the token joke character will get ratted and knock over the tree. The African Queen and Raiders of the Lost Ark will be on and there’ll be a twenty hour hoolie from Inverness that nobody will watch due to rolling about the street outside some pub in a nameless city that’s charged them a week’s wages for the privilege of standing six deep at the bar for most of the evening trying to be heard above the screams and howls of party goers in school uniforms and the young swains who are attempting to induce them under the canal bridge to ‘see in’ the New Year. It will consist of Stephen Hendry in a kilt and re-runs of Stanley Baxter shows and will be hosted by Lorraine Kelly and some unknown Scottish actor from the Isle of Oronsay because Ewan McGregor told them to sod off. Lulu will turn up and sing Auld Lang Syne and I won’t win the Lottery or get picked for Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.

Having just got over the expense of Trick or Treat and Quite A Lot More Than A Penny For The Guy you will now be subjected to the scourge of the Carol Singers. I suppose the little buggers were able to buy enough glue to last a week or two, but now they’re back. Were I to get a tuneful, angelic rendition of Silent Night or In The Deep Midwinter sung by a band of cherubs and a beaming vicar with lanterns on sticks that conjured up visions of heavenly multitudes in full voice and peace and goodwill descending like rain from above I would happily shell out and feel good about it. I do not have the same benevolent attitude to three snotty-nosed oiks who hammer on the door and croak “wwshyewamerriKizmuss wwshyewamerri KizmusswwshyewamerriKizmussnnappy nyooyeer” and shove a stained and broken coffee mug at me with an expression that says “Pay up, Knob ‘ead”. Go away!

But it is the Season of Goodwill when all’s said and done and I will join in with the best of them to celebrate something which I can’t quite remember the meaning of.

By Andy Sanson

Oh, and it should also be a hanging offence to call it Xmas.

I’ve mentioned it in passing; the Staff Do, for instance, which was always conducted in a kind of festive setting, though the sentiments that accompanied it weren’t always that charitable. It does come round every year with monotonous regularity, though, does Christmas so why shouldn’t I keep on about it?

In fact, I’m not going to start on about Christmas this time. Not as such. It’s more the run up to it and the effect it had upon daily life in The Lab for anything up to a month beforehand.

You could tell when it was about to kick off. The script was the same every year; The Boss, having just finished moaning about the spent fireworks he kept finding in his garden and being sure that the ‘young buggers’ a couple of doors down aimed them there deliberately, oozed up the back drive one morning and stood there with his chin in his fingers regarding the rear of the building with a look that prompted a thought-balloon fest of “Oh dear. Watch out, Folks”

“It all looks a bit drab out there.” He sipped his freshly made coffee and burnt his lip.

Several minutes later, after he’d blamed everyone from Hitler to the bloke who oversaw car parking at the hotel where he attended his Rotary Club meetings, his attention turned again to the matter that had been on his mind before The Great Scalding.

“It’s nearly Christmas. ‘We’ should brighten the place up a bit”. The knell of doom. “Get the stuff out, someone.”

The ‘Stuff’ was a battered old cardboard box, which I swear had once contained a delivery of ARP hats, full of broken baubles, tree lights and tinsel and miles of those awful paper decorations, layered with years of dust, that people used to hang from one corner of the ceiling to another before the Rolling Stones came along and ruined everything. Let’s face it, he thought Bing Crosby was a beatnik.

There was an old chap down the road; a bit of what would these days be called a ‘traveller’, although he’d lived there as long as anyone could recall, who, every year, took delivery of a Canadian forest and hawked the individual trees off at a couple of quid each. Naturally, one of The Buggers – usually me – got the job of going and fetching one. At least the lumberjacks had a river to float it down. I had to carry the blithering thing. Staggering up the road in a side wind with a giant sequoia over my shoulder, being hooted at by irascible motorists and beaten about the ankles by old ladies who thought I was trying to mug them with an ill-chosen weapon, I found myself wishing I’d taken the advice of my elders in 1969 and stayed on at school.

We’d abandon our flasking, waxing-up, casting, polishing, breathing in pumice and monomer and setting-up to set about making the place look like Harrod’s Christmas Department – after an earthquake. It usually carried on like this for a couple of days when the phone would start ringing; the Gentlemen wishing to know why their work hadn’t arrived back at the surgery.

Then we would have to fire up the Bunsens and attempt to go about the business of dental prostheses as various of our number scrabbled about with drawing pins and the old step ladder vainly trying to render the ramshackle old dump more festive than festering.

You might expect that when it was all done it would have looked splendid; it ought to have cheered the souls of we minions as we walked through the portals of a morning and raised our spirits to the point where we got about our work in the manner of Santa’s merry elves toiling away to Jingle Bells and laughing heartily with no thought of recompense or profit. It didn’t. Rather, it gave the impression we were approaching the end of nine months of industrial action by refuse collectors.

One Friday, I think it was the week before Christmas we were, to a man and woman, ferreting away in order to clear the interminable backlog that inevitably mounted up as the holiday loomed, a situation that, every year, culminated in frenzied activity right up until one pm Christmas Eve when we all downed tools and cleared off to the pub to take advantage of the ‘generous’ gesture by The Management of a plate of chips and a beer or two. Everyone was so knackered from the previous three or four weeks that we would spend most of Christmas and Boxing Day fast asleep in front of the telly while the Morecambe and Wise Special ran its course and Top Of The Pops boomed out at anyone who cared to watch. There was a sudden wail from The Boss who, having thought he smelt burning, had risen from his crossword in The Office to come into The Lab and investigate.

“Are you buggers blind?” he boomed, dashing to the sink and dousing himself in freezing cold water from turning the taps on too high. In the meantime, the paper decoration which, unseen by anyone due to intense concentration on the tasks in hand, had fallen on to the bench and caught fire in a Bunsen flame. It was now combusting with a rapidity that would have put many a forest fire to shame, the conflagration climbing its paper ladder to where all six strands met at ceiling height. The Boss’s bowl of water proved useless – all it did was soak everyone in the place and cause blue sparks to dance across the bench as it got into the electric sockets and soaked all the work tickets so they became unreadable. Then the lights went out and someone stood up and knocked the tree over, breaking at least half of the ancient baubles and scaring the cat, which had thus far been unaware of the maelstrom due to being asleep, so much that it sprang from its resting place and tried to climb up Old Stan by digging every one of its sabre-like claws deep into his back.

Everyone did their best to lighten the mood, Iestyn even suggesting we all sing carols and roast chestnuts in The Senior Partner’s porcelain oven but, as he found out to the cost of his rather sheltered and ecclesiastical upbringing, the Festive Spirit was at a premium that year so he held his peace and got on with his work. The fact that the whole debacle had been cause by The Boss insisting that we use the same drawing pins year after year to save money so that the pins would be wobbling in the heads and had been bent and straightened out with pliers so many times that a slight breeze would snap them carried no weight.

“Why don’t people do things properly? Bah!”

Merry Christmas, Everybody. I’ll be handing round the humbugs later.