Christmas Story

The house I rent while I am staying on the Isle of Wight is about a half hour commute from the factory and, since winter came, has been a drive to and fro in the dark. As my last visit coincided with the start of Christmas, there were various displays of lights en route. The garden centre had fairly freaky lights on their conifers which, in combination with my enamel dust filled eyes, danced alarmingly in and out of focus Bridget Riley fashion, causing me to drive past at geriatric speed each night. The real stunner was in Sandown itself. The wattage was so powerful and the combination of religious and festive icons so varied that it was a couple of days before I managed to make out some of the detail.

One of the things I noticed was a giraffe in blue twinkling lights. Now I went to a fairly high church Anglican boarding school and we had plenty of religious instruction. We had our own chapel and in addition to the usual daily assembly service we had evening chapel twice a week, Communion Wednesday crack of dawn, Compline Friday evenings and full services Saturday and Sunday. Come Christmas there were a lot of extra services and I emerged at seventeen with an encyclopaedic knowledge of hymns, ancient if not modern, and a fair grasp of the King James Bible. Nowhere could I place a blue giraffe in the Christmas story and yet I drove past it each evening, large as life and beautifully detailed.

Finally I decided that the thing to do was to go and have a proper look and see if there was some sort of African twinning theme happening. Imagine my utter disappointment when I walked up to the building from a different direction and discovered that my beautiful blue giraffe was in fact just an ordinary tree draped at random with a string of lights, reliant entirely on the angle of the road and the height of my mini to conjure it into life. I thought about this, wasn’t happy and decided that there was a bit of space in the Christmas story for a blue giraffe after all. What if one of the wise men (wiser than the other two and perhaps with kids of his own) realised that no young mum, however inexperienced, would let her infant near frankincense, myrrh or gold pieces so, knowing all babies like bright colours and soft toys, took an extra baby-friendly present in the shape of a blue giraffe?