The Private Secret Diary is currently closed for the festive holiday.

We shall be returning in the New Year for your continued entertainment.
In the meantime, archives are available for your amusement.

A very Merry Christmas to all readers, subscribers, commenters and lurkers.

I step back from the bar in some alarm. At this point I am unaware of the situation, and all that I see is a balding man with bared teeth. He makes some ‘yes! Yes!’ noises, and orders a pint.

A scoresheet is thrust in my direction. I study it, intrigued.

We have won a snooker match!!! I blink at the figures.

We have won a snooker match!!! The scores are there in black and white, and do not lie. This is a crazy situation. We are possibly the worst snooker club that have ever picked up cues. This is a ludicrous situation.

It is typical. I drop out for one single match, and we only go and win it. Blimey. We’d have absolutely thrashed them had I been playing, surely.

Starting the snooker club this year was just one of those stupid things we did. None of us can remotely play snooker. But Colin had been reassuring, being the sole remaining link to the original Village snooker club that had existed years back.

“We were always crap,” he had promised. “Utterly crap. Renowned for it. In fact I can’t think that we ever won a match. Ever.”

It is a shame when such a long-established 100% record falls. Something has been lost that cannot be regained, like a horse’s virginity. The Chipper Barman disappears off to the back room to photocopy the result for mounting somewhere.

“Who were they?” I puzzle, referring to the opposition. It seems inconceivable that anybody else could be worse than us. Even the hard-nosed sports reporters at the local paper take pity on us, and only print the top eight in the league table.

There are nine teams in the league.

It is an odd way to end the year, and perhaps a good omen for the next. If we can achieve this win, then there’s no reason why the Arabs and Israelis can’t pull their finger out and achieve world peace, along with the climate problem and the whales.

Mal’s outside lights are the wonder of the region.

If people don’t understand where I live, I can always tell them ‘two doors down from the guy with the Christmas lights’ and they will know. He spends ages each year, cutting enormous wooden Christmas shapes, wiring up electrics and painting cartoon characters. It is amazing.

In a way, I feel a bit sorry for him – once nobody had these outside decorations except those who could create them themselves via a combination of hard, hard work and mad genius. Now any idiot with a retarded sense of taste can go to Homebase and buy twinkly outside illuminations for a tenner.

I go to Homebase.

The town is tense and busy. Nobody looks particularly happy. There is no festive air in TK Max, heads are down in Woolworth’s. And far across the ocean, deep in the bowels of the CIA building, anxious agents are frantically destroying video footage of Guantanamo detainees being sent to Christmas shop at Argos.

I hate installing outside lights. I am scared of heights and ladders or, more specifically, the hitting the ground bit that occurs when you plunge from the former off the latter. As it is, I do a magical and sinister Derren Brown trick on Short Tony, and he does them for me. I stand at the bottom, resting my foot reassuringly on the base of the ladder and shouting encouragement.

There is one window that is not covered, so I scoot indoors and fix indoor lights around the inside of the frame. This takes me ages and ages. By the time I have unwound them I am ready to kill somebody; by the time I have hit my finger with the hammer for the third time I am ready to revive them in order to play them Dido records. In the end I bang in some of those barbed galvanised things that you use to fix fence wire up, deciding to worry about removing them when the time comes. I step back to admire my work.

Short Tony’s figure looms at me – he is walking down the secret path that leads between our front gardens. I open the window to wish him well.

There is the dull crunch of cheap glass as I heave the window shut, crushing the bulbs between the frames as the hinges close. They do not even have the decency to shatter spectacularly.

A while ago I came up with a spectacularly good plan.

Battling depression, following the loss of my secret hideaway that could only be reached by opening a swinging bookcase like in the Scooby Doo cartoons, I decided on a course of action.

I would create a secret wardrobe door that led into our bedroom, like in Narnia.

The LTLP was not greatly enthusiastic, but she would have come round in the end, like she did with the relationship an’ stuff. As it was, I spent ages studying the doorway and working out what would be required to create a really brilliant secret wardrobe entrance thing. Like in Narnia.

Then I discovered that the Canoe Man had got there first.

I do not normally do a cry for help via this private secret diary. But you have no idea – no idea – how it feels to discover that one’s cherished plans are not unique and brilliant after all, but are in fact of the same level of intellectual creative thinking and insight as the sort of plan that Canoe Man comes up with.

Honestly. You have no idea. None.

I am crushed.

I read the notice with exasperation.

Fortunately, I already have some petrol. But it will not last me forever. I point out to the petrol station man that I have read his notice and that it will cause me inconvenience. The next-nearest petrol station is one of the new ones where you have to work the pump yourself, and it is not nearly so handy. I want the petrol station back!!!

He is apologetic. There are new health and safety and environmental rules for his petrol station, and he can’t afford to make the health and safety and environmental changes required. So he has to stop selling petrol.

It is annoying. As far as I can recall, the petrol station has worked reasonably well up to now. There have been no gigantic explosions, no balls of fire, no coachloads of pensioners overcome by fumes. No rivers of petroleum have been seen running down the hill towards Spar, no cars have spontaneously combusted, there have been no instances of Al-Qaida stealing unleaded to use in home-made suicide bombs. Gaseous and noxious clouds have not escaped to cause flash fires or to send people mad and murdery like in the James Herbert book ‘The Fog’; my eyes do not stream with yellow goo when I pull in there; I have not grown an extra arm; my penis has not shrunk and my head remains a normal size. Wildlife flourishes locally; children play in a frolicksome manner in local gardens; there have been no reports of higher-than average radiation sickness amongst adults 18-35 within a five mile radius; the ozone above the forecourt seems no less layered than it is above any other area of Britain.

Still, I am sure there is a reason.

I drive home anxiously. I have been living with a time bomb on my doorstep for some years, without even knowing it. It is now a twelve-mile round trip if I need to buy petrol, but this is a small price to pay to save the environment and to be healthy and safe.

The rain has stopped temporarily. I take the car across the common then down the long bosky lane that leads to the Chinese Pub. The car senses my hunger as it ploughs through mud and puddles. It is clever like that.

I bring it to a halt suddenly. There is a small deer standing in the road. I crawl forward, trying to move it with the rays of my main beam. It raises its head and notices me, before continuing its unhurried deering.

I am a bit flummoxed by this. There is a small deer in the road!!! Preventing me from getting to my Chinese food!!! I flash the lights at it a bit, and I believe I even say ‘shoo!’. It is unlikely that a deer can hear a human being saying ‘shoo!’ when he is behind the wheel of a car. It is just more evidence that I need to start worrying about myself. I edge the car forwards.

The deer ambles into the hedge. Hoorah! The road is clear. I proceed to the Chinese Pub. “Hi Jonny,” says the landlord. I chat to him hungrily, and share a few words with Alan from Bowls. My meal appears in the regulation bags, and I set off for home.

Round the sharp bend, past the gatehouse, down through the woods. The car speeds along, urged by stomach noises.

I bring it to a halt suddenly. There is an owl in the road. I cannot quite believe this. Not content with slowing me up before, the deer has sent his friend the owl!!! I crawl forwards whilst it examines some dead thing in the road, pretending to be all predatory whilst making excuses to hold me up.

I think about hooting, and so does the owl. As it is, there is a long face-off, before it gives me one last lugubrious and slightly disapproving look, like Stephen Fry confronting some burglars. Then it flies slowly off into the trees.

Neil Forsyth kindly sent me a copy of his new book, thinking that I might like it. Neil’s with a small publisher and doesn’t have an Evil Pr company to do his Pring for him, so I said that I’d write something about it if I enjoyed it.

I then spent the next week kicking myself for being so stupid, as I immediately realised that it would probably be shit. The concept, you see, is that Neil, under the guise of cheeseburger van tycoon ‘Bob Servant’ has been replying to spammers, engaging them in convoluted email exchanges and then printing them up in a book. I know, I know – ‘prank call’ humour. So it seemed horribly clear that Neil and I would have our own awkward exchange of emails, which would probably then be adapted for the sequel – ‘Conversations With People Who Thought The First One Was Shit’.

Happily, I’ve been laughing myself silly at it. Bob’s a superbly rounded character, there’s a natural sense of the intrinsically funny and the author knows how to pace a gag. There are some beautifully dry annotations, and a picture of an ostrich that is perfectly, perfectly placed.

Take that as a recommendation for the Christmas pile, then. “Delete this at your Peril” – more information here.