Let's all mourn the death of an obese ginger child

OH JOY. It’s Christmas, and the season of goodwill to all men. Except for the people who sent out this round robin in their Christmas card.

“We have had a few celebrations this year, but we started on a sad note: in January the smallest and laziest member of the family passed away after spending 14 years with us.”

Now at this stage I’m thinking that they’ve lost an obese ginger child (I don’t know them; they’re acquaintances of Mrs B) but no, it’s much worse than that.

“Bobby has gone through the pearly cat-flap to the place where the wicked mice go.”

So it’s the cat that’s snuffed it and is now apparently lounging on his cloud, harp in paw, while “wicked mice” dance around him. It’s an image that will live with me forever.

And all this before relentless details of the garden, the walking holiday, the chest infection, the weddings, the trials and tribulations of the children: “Sophie’s second marriage didn’t quite work out as planned and she’s now back living at home with the five (!) children. It can get a little crowded at times and there were one or two hurtful remarks in the village Post Office about the yellow one and the brown one. But Christopher seems very happy in Brighton, where he seems very close to his flatmate Elton. And Neil’s lawyer thinks he might be released with a Royal pardon when the King of Thailand’s next birthday comes around. Let’s just hope he doesn’t bring back any packages for friends this time!!!”

Why do these people think that we need to know this mindless minutiae? It’s utter drivel, imposed on an innocent audience who have done nothing worse than open a Christmas card. I don’t want to know. Leave me alone.

I’M WOKEN in the middle of the night by a terrible kerfuffle in the kitchen. The Christmas Stilton – bold, blue, brash and British – has reacted badly to sharing its refrigerated living quarters with the remnants of a huge lump of finest Parmesan we brought back from Italy in September.

By the time I get down there four pots of organic rice pudding are in tears, the brandy butter has taken to drink and the stuffing balls are playing skittles with the chipolata sausages. Meanwhile the Parmesan has retreated to the back of the vegetable compartment where it’s waving a train timetable and clutching its chest as if it’s just been head-butted by Zinedine Zidane.

It has to go. European integration is one thing; cheese wars are another.

NOW CAN I say that it’s a great shame that five prostitutes have been murdered in Ipswich. They were all somebody’s daughters, most of them were someone’s mother. I hope whoever killed them gets caught and convicted. Blah, blah.

But do we really need to undergo another bout of Dianafication? Read the Guardian or listen to the BBC this week and you’d have thought that five nuns had bought the farm. These poor “sex workers”, horribly exploited by Evil Men, have suddenly become the new icons of the hairy armpit brigade.

Well excuse me if I beg to differ. Yes, they might have been mothers, but where were their children? Taken into care, that’s where. They weren’t selling their bodies to put Findus Frozen Pancakes on the family table; they were selling their bodies for the next rock of crack or the next wrap of heroin. These were women so far gone that they couldn’t hold down a “job” in the relative safety of a massage parlour (this country’s equivalent of the legalised brothel).

So yes, it’s sad. But even sadder is the fact that a tidal wave of illegal drugs continues to drag people under into a life of crime and degradation. I refer you to last week’s column: give it away free on street corners. And let the weirdos who find drug-addled skeletons sexually attractive find their kicks somewhere else.

TO BE fair to the Guardian, it’s not all one-way traffic. There are some seriously deranged people on my side of the argument as well.

Let’s just take this one message from the Daily Mail’s website, shall we? Step forward, Mavis C. of Chester-le-Street, who writes: “I wonder how many men would buy sex if these harlots were not out on the streets tempting them?”

Yes, well … thank you madam for that contribution.

A CHAP called John Hutton, of whom I’ve never heard but who is, apparently, NuLabour’s Work Secretary, has condemned benefit claimants who live in areas where there are plenty of jobs and who are physically able to work, but who choose not to.

Well, if he’s considering a crackdown, I can point him in the direction of one prime suspect. This bloke is fat, lazy, dresses outlandishly and only manages to work one day a year.

He exploits child labour (well, labour of diminished height anyway) and also keeps wild animals without a licence – one of which appears to have contracted a nasty dose of Polonium 210 in the nasal area. His name is Santa Claus, and the sooner he’s taken off the streets by government snatch squads, the better.

BUT BACK to the festivities, and the office party. Good God, I’d rather have been standing on a street corner in Ipswich. (And would have been safer.)

The idea of holding it in a Greek restaurant wasn’t a total success. I mean, what do you know about Greek restaurants? Yes, you eat vine leaves and then smash the plates.

What Colin the tea boy didn’t fully appreciate was that the plates you are meant to smash are actually special “smashing plates” made of cheap earthenware that are brought out at the end of the meal for the ceremonial activity. Thus, once the calamari starter had been dispatched, the idiot started laying waste with the finest porcelain. Unluckily for him, he was caught over the eyebrow by a flying shard of fine china and had to go off to hospital for stitches.

Unluckily for us, he still returned in time to throw up in the toilets. Wedged in between crying secretaries and the over-emotional “bloke who hasn’t been sacked because it’s Christmas but who everyone knows is going in January”. Season’s greetings to you all.

O The views of Mr Beelzebub are purely personal and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Editor or staff of this website, or of anyone who's bought their wife a TomTomGo satellite navigation system and then taken it out of the box, two days in advance, just to make sure that it's working properly, only to find that the useless piece of plastic shite is a complete duffer. So I ring the customer hotline. "Sorry, it's Christmas. Try again next week." So then I lose my temper and throw the offending box into the field next door. And then I have to go and find it again if I want my money back. With a torch. In the mud. And I now have several days of grief and many hours on the phone to look forward to as I try to gain recompense for this disgraceful let-down. Christmas? Bah humbug.