Middle Aged Festivities

by

Gillian Polack

It’s too late for season's greetings. You don’t know how very lucky you are. I’m one of those souls who tend to seasonal loneliness. After all, I am middle-aged, Jewish and female—Christmas can be lovely, but it can also be a bit isolated.

When the going gets disconsolate, the disconsolate get snarky. This is why January is the perfect time for snark.* Not just for me, either. I didn’t realise how many lonely souls abounded until recently. Eleanor Rigby ought to be the seasonal tune. Also at Easter. And even on some birthdays.

The problem is, of course, that it’s summer. The rest of the world is geared for short holidays and hard work, but where I am, it’s summer. This isn't a problem to do with festive seasons, or spinsterhood, or even Jewishness. It’s that the reading the US and UK industry want to talk about is the wrong reading entirely. I intend to solve this problem.

I took my great brain out of cold storage (I use my little brain for everyday life, which accounts for a lot) and I carefully determined that the problem is that there needs to be more fiction that affirms or supports middle-age-singletons. What we all really need is more books.

Here are the plots of thirteen books, just waiting to be written. Or rewritten. Either way, these books will solve the summer blues dilemma. Sometimes they may even solve those blues in a good way. In deference to the holidays just past, I’ve given them a touch of Christmas festivity wherever possible.

1. The Cute Ten Year Old Who Stole Christmas. In fine Dr Seuss style, a bunch of grumpy middle-aged souls win back Christmas for adults and send a cute ten year old to the bedroom for the duration. They also win back ten other festivals. By the time the ten year old is through with being sent to bed, he's eleven and is developing a very interesting psychosis.

Atheists swear revenge, because the group forgot to win back anything purely secular. The sequel is The Atheists Win back Dawkins Day, where a bunch of grumpy middle-aged souls go back in time, knock down all statues of Julian the Apostate and replace them with monuments to Richard Dawkins.

2. Cold Comfort Farm at Christmas. Where Aunt Ada Doom admits that the nasty thing in the woodshed was a guy called Ebenezer. Trust me, you really don’t want to know the rest.

3. A Rather Charming and Slightly Silly Ghost Story**, probably written by Tom Holt. It's about this guy called Nicholas. “I once was a bishop,” his ghost explains. “I brought pickled children to life and I was certifiably and wonderfully saintly. I’m dead. Let me rest in peace. If you don’t, I’ll put on my hockey mask. You know what that means.”

4. Outlaws of the Forest. Just as in many new Robin Hood adventures, Robin makes only a passing appearance and the forest is replaced by a castle.

Richard the Lion-Heart is made a mockery of by four middle-aged women who have travelled back in time to fall in love with him. He spurned them and went on crusade, and now he will pay.

Every day for three years they send him twenty bus tickets, ten tea cosies, five romance novels and a bucket full of tears. The tears go in his favourite moat, creating the first saltwater moat in Normandy. The romance novels are in English so he can’t read them—he uses them to start the British Library. Or rather, he uses them to start an open fire on the exact spot in Bloomsbury that will become the British Library. The ghosts of those books combine to become the very first Ghost of Christmas Past.

Richard loves the tea cosies, because one of his great fears is of getting an ingrown toenail, exactly like his father’s. He wears them on his feet when he travels.

The bus tickets defeat him. He tried to cash them in to fund a new crusade and the travel agents simply stand aside and let much masonry fall on his head. Just as they did with Harold, a few generations earlier, they claimed an arrow killed him. The women go home and plan their next trip: to see President Kennedy. What can go wrong in the Swinging Sixties, after all?

5. The Wimsey Chronicles, volume 23. Aunt Dorothy leads a secret life. She follows her best friend, Aggie, round the world. Aggie supervises archeological digs: Dot solves crimes. Not just any crimes. She needs her secret martial arts training and her superior accent just to stay alive. This is the woman who, in previous volumes, devastated seven pachinko parlours and brought crime in Kamakura to a halt while Aggie was demonstrating that an ancient shrine was indeed an ancient shrine. In this volume, Dot’s little nephew Peter makes his first appearance, as a demanding prat. Dot resolves to leave him alone until he grows out of it.

6. The Wise Woman’s Guide to Avoiding Christmas. This book is full of practical advice. For instance, it teaches you how to make frankincense and myrrh into a delightful perfume, suitable for a night on the town. It has many hints for both spending and investing your gold. It discourages travel to the Middle East, or, in fact, anywhere in the Ancient Roman Empire. If you must travel in the Ancient Roman Empire, the book says, avoid the food.

7. The Sixth’s Sheikh's Sixth Sheep is Sick. A romance for those who love shepherds in far-distant Arabie. The heroine is an Australian vet, brought out to help a distraught bunch of sheep to their new life. The illness turns out to be sheepish flu and the hero dies, blushing. So do both the ram and his truelove, a gorgeous merino who overheats in the hot suns of Arabie. The heroine swears an oath to save the world, so that no more sheep will die of overheating.

She meets and falls in love with a djinn, who also dies of overheating.*** In her old age, she has only her memories, an OBE, her fortune and a magic never-ending box of chocolate to console her.

8. The Waning of the Middle Ages. A response to Huizinga’s masterpiece.

The argument is simple: Huizinga was wrong. The whole of Western Culture was wrong. We should not be stuck with labels that Great Dead White Men invented hundreds of years ago.

What we should be doing is celebrating menopause and eating chocolate. If people want to deny the Middle Ages a sense of humour and artistry, if they want to claim we’re decaying or boring, all we have to do is deny them chocolate. Besides, they’ll be us some day. Although they may never read Latin or Old French or Middle English quite as well as we do, nor be able to get the jokes in the Farce of Pere Pathelin. How could they, they’ve been brought up on Mel Gibson and believe in Braveheart? The cover comment is by Stephen Fry.

9. Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Part One of a seven part series where everything George Orwell wrote is reconfigured to include middle aged women and to sharpen his sense of humour. We admit that the modified Keep the Aspidistra Flying still has certain underlying Orwellianisms, but we’re hoping that burying the bone of his middle finger (right hand) in the pot will act as fertiliser and that the book will relax a little and turn into the fine read it was before we embraced our Great Literature Reform.

10. The Very Hungry Caterpillar’s Inner Life. What happened inside that green head just before mothdom. Like menopause, this is something that much of the population would rather not know. Perhaps the murdering spree was a little bit of a problem, or maybe it was the savage mood swings. By ignoring this aspect of the caterpillar’s life, however, her great achievements have not been recorded. She was never nominated for a Nobel Prize and the tens of thousands of hours of volunteer work only resulted in a sad little card one Christmas. This novel is bitter and unredeemed and perfect for after the holiday season.

11. Great Expectations. In the rewritten version, it doesn’t matter that Miss Havisham was dumped at the altar. She used her wealth and her removal to New South Wales to buy up vast tracts of land.

Pip gets a job as a menial labourer and works up to being farm superintendent in the Monaro. He developed an inordinate love of sheep in his middle life and helped bring merinos to the Monaro.

Miss Havisham died in Sydney and is buried under her real name, Eliza Donnithorne. She left a bequest to the city of Newtown, where a big party is thrown every year for jilted lovers where they get to abuse their exes and drink champagne. Several miracles have been attributed to her and a petition has gone to the Pope to ignore the fact that Miss Havisham/Donnithorne was Church of England—she needs to be made a saint. The most interesting miracle was, of course, the one where no-one who prays at her tomb is alone on a holiday or birthday. They might find themselves in a police cell next to an axe murderer, but they’re never alone.

12. Never-Ending Story. Not suitable for male readers, this is a pithy and adventurous look at the years immediately before menopause. It has been banned three times. No doubt after it is written, it will be banned again.

13. Yet-another-bloody-book of nursery rhymes. These ones are suited to the adult who has no children to keep them in order. They are entirely unsuitable for children. The most innocuous (and most traditional) reads:

Mary had a little lamb
Freddy had a pup
Vincent had a crocodile
That ate the others up.

Vincent and Mary went to sleep
Freddy didn't have to…

Now I need to work on some TV programs for the next festive period. Or maybe the one after. Not cookery. Not musicals. Not Mel Gibson. This is going to be a tough one. I promise, I’ll have your new TV guide ready by 2012, just in time for the world to end. It will include a talent quest called “Apocalypse Wow!” where the aim is to bring the house down, literally, to save it from the Mayan calendar.

* I so want to make a joke about Boojums, but Boojums are the least funny kind of Snark. Unless you softly and silently vanish away to somewhere utterly hilarious, of course. This is where I ought to tell you of the strange Australian township called Bringacuppatialong. But I shan’t.

**Its original name was Santa's Ghost, but that appears to be unmarketable. Most adults refuse to believe that Santa was real and that he died.

*** Yes, it’s summer where I am right now, and even cold days are too hot. What of it?

Gillian Polack is based in Canberra, Australia. She is mainly a writer, editor and educator. Her most recent print publications are a novel (Life through Cellophane, Eneit Press, 2009), an anthology (Masques, CSfG Publishing, 2009, co-edited with Scott Hopkins), two short stories and a slew of articles. Her newest anthology is Baggage, published by Eneit Press (2010).One of her short stories won a Victorian Ministry of the Arts award a long time ago, and three have (more recently) been listed as recommended reading in international lists of world's best fantasy and science fiction short stories. She received a Macquarie Bank Fellowship and a Blue Mountains Fellowship to work on novels at Varuna, an Australian writers' residence in the Blue Mountains. Gillian has a doctorate in Medieval history from the University of Sydney. She researches food history and also the Middle Ages, pulls the writing of others to pieces, is fascinated by almost everything, cooks and etc. Currently she explains 'etc' as including Arthuriana, emotional cruelty to ants, and learning how not to be ill. She is the proud owner of some very pretty fans, a disarticulated skull named Perceval, and 6,000 books. Contact Gillian.