Fun Size Magrs

Merry Christmas! I spent my last Christmas with ' family' over two decades ago. All I remember about it is stress and worry. Would anybody show up?  Who was going to lose their temper?  Had you been thoughtful enough with your gift buying?  Had everybody spent the same amount ? Who was taking their gifts back for a refund on Boxing Day?  Nobody was much of a hugger. Most of my family would have welcomed social distancing in the 1980s and 90s. When I started working I paid for everybody to go out on Christmas Day. It was expensive but it was worth it. People tend to behave better if you're in a hotel or a restaurant. And completely surrounded by strangers.  We'd go to the Scotch Corner Hotel, just south of Darlington. It was always beautifully decorated, the staff would be wonderful (despite the fact they were having to work when everybody else had the day off) and it felt like a genuinely special occasion. Some families can fight for 364 days of the year...

My first boss was a c***. A self-confessed c***. We were making adverts for local radio stations and sometimes we'd forget to fax scripts to customers, mess up a phone number or let the wrong commercial go to air on the wrong day. And whenever something like that happened my boss would go to our Sales Director and say:  " Yes, we've f***ed up. It's a total f***ing nightmare. I'm a daft c*** ".   For him, this was completely logical: admit a mistake and call yourself the worst word imaginable - that way you could avoid a bollocking. He'd sit at his desk and nod wisely;  "What more can they do to me? I've called myself a c*** - they can't say anything worse than that. They can put a snotty letter in my personnel file but that's just a posh way of calling me a c***!"   He didn't seem to worry about getting sacked - he just wanted to make sure that nobody else got to call him a c***. To be fair, my boss said everybody was a c*** -...