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Mince pie with brandy cream on a faux or reproduction Imperial Russian cobalt plate (from the faux writer's own faux collection - the writer can only produce a bad draft that leaves him out in the cold at Christmas and otherwise) |
Invited to a Christmas dinner with a 1920s theme of gangsters and flappers, one foreign guest, Donna Justina Immaculata Dragonard de Volcano von Besserwisser, kept mixing up flappers with slappers even asking at a fancy dress shop if they had slapper outfits (having also originally thought that a blow-dry was called a ... job). Yet that caused less confusing and embarrassment compared to when she popped in an Indian cornershop asking for a large Coke which in her eloquent pronunciation sounded like a Coq au vin... As the shocked shopkeeper did not seem to understand but only looked increasingly bewildered, she tried to explain, 'I would like a really big Coke' and the situation did not improve when she showed with her hands how she would drink the Coke in her mouth!
While Donna Justina took her usual time to arrive, always late but worth the wait, Justin was just in time for the main course. One old couple Mr and Mrs Früh-Alzheimer at Baker Street accidentally took the Jubilee Line to Stratford rather than Stanmore realising only in Canning Town that they were not in Canon's Park. After they arrived two hours late, the lady needed a further hour in the restroom to powder her nose before finally appearing looking like the ghost of Queen Elizabeth I.
When they all arrived late enough, the foreign wife's foreign husband found himself surprisingly greeted by his country's ambassador, he felt obliged to introduce himself and his wife until the ambassador quickly suggested they move further in as the guest of honour, a certain Royal Duke, was expected to arrive any moment. As the couple had safely entered to be out of the way of more important guests, the wife said she was about to ask who the man was and about to give her coat to him and ask for his (first) name as she thought he looked like a concierge (while the actual concierge was immensely handsome and elegant to the point that he looked more like an ambassador than the actual ambassadors who came and went every few years while the handsome concierge remained, and thank goodness for that making visits to the Embassy and Residence most enjoyable (even voting in elections from abroad)! In any event, the husband sighed in relief and thought he should have briefed her wife beforehand if he only ever thought they would come to so close quarters with the Ambassador. His expectations were however met as not only was he of course completely ignored by the Ambassador for the rest of the evening but on the next occasion the two countrymen met only a few months later, the parvenu Ambassador had of course completely forgotten, or pretended to have forgotten, who the young aristocrat was, introducing himself to the somewhat perplexed aristocrat who then could not help but thinking that if his wife had asked the Ambassador who he was, maybe the Ambassador would have also remembered who he was... Who laughs last, laughs best!
He also found amusing to tell fellow guests how on a visit to the United States, the Americans seemed to think he was English from the way he spoke, including the Indian cab driver in New York who was only disappointed to realise that the terrible EU migrant and citizen of the world or citizens of nowhere from England knew little about cricket despite speaking grammatically correct English unlike many English natives.
Not possessing the talent of bloodsucking of Count Dracula or other sinister profiteurs, Count and Countess Drahapula d'Ebit von Fattig und Buddenbroke were leaving their home with their teenage son who was already taller than his parents, there was some trouble finding a suitably stylish overcoat for the fast-growing son to fit in - despite their poverty, their pride was not lost. The mother then told his son to try his father's new overcoat. She then said, 'it looks so much better on you than him so you keep it!' This was stating the obvious as the handsome, blue-eyed, blonde-curly-haired teenager was already taller than his middle aged bald father who had not inherited much of the hair in the family unlike his thick-haired son. Unfair as it was in more than one way, the father was discontent enough to protest that his new coat from the last trip abroad should go to the young whippersnapper son. His wife replied quickly to her husband who's mental sanity and finances had been declining for years but who kept explaining year after year how big a business opportunity was only days away, 'you will be so rich the day after tomorrow that you can buy yourself two new coats then!' Then the son proceeded to empty the pockets of his father's former coat and innocently took out a packet of condoms from the inside pocket before he could even think of hiding it from his mother who was technically half blind, blind in one eye, but never missed noticing the smallest detail like a little spot on a piece of clothing ordering the wearer to change outfit forthwith! His mother then remarked to her husband, 'is that what you wear nowadays when you do it?!'
In any event, all three of them were happy to go for the Christmas dinner because although their porcelain, silver, and crystals were of much higher quality than the petty bourgeois hosts' crockery, the letter had more food on the plate than the impoverished aristocrat neighbours of ambassadors and like, not quite what the petty, narrow-minded, absolutist, totalitarian Marxist class warriors would have them to be! Living in the wealthiest parts of the capital city with declining wealth posed a challenge of keeping up appearances with disappearances to both generations...
Also this occasion of a generous hostess was much more enjoyable than the one time they had erred to accept an invitation from hosts of inevitably a race or several and possibly a religion one would be far too frightened to mention at least to one of them. Here the guests were expected to work hard. First on arrival the hostess would order a guest to lay the drinks on the table but before the guest got too far with his duties the host came to remark how quick the guest was to help himself to the drinks. If that was not bad enough, after the guest then stopped touching the drinks, the hostess returned to tell him off for not having laid the drinks out quick enough to be served - "damned if you do, damned if you don't!" The hosts also had a spacious drawing room with beautiful open fireplace and gilded antique furniture almost as good as in the Château de Versailles but the guests could only see the empty room through a modern glass wall trespassing in the old mutilated and sterilised Edwardian building from a small garden room crowded as full of guests as inmates in a Middle Eastern prison cell. The hostess mentioned that her cat eats fish from Iceland. One of the guests nearly replied, 'so do we!' - assuming she meant the supermarket rather than the country or any disputed fishing waters thereabouts... Either way, the cat ate better than the guests. Any mice the cat brought were generously served to the guests - dear darling fatso catso!
Despite a long and old if not highly illustrious history, even if nothing much is known to have actually happened in the Buddenbroke family for at least a quarter of a millennium other than that the son did what the father had done on the inherited landed estate sharing even the same first name for several generations, in this line descending from a younger son, the family had generations of involvement in business. In this male line three generations had lost great wealth and gained some in between. The first generation lost inherited wealth (with substantial help from the neighbouring county attempting to invade) but was helped by the income of the wife who was from an otherwise more humble background even if her more distant ancestors were grander than those of her husband. The next generation first gained and then lost wealth from trading with the "former" invading power, and the third generation again spent inherited wealth and gained some from running a business (both two latter generations lost wealth with substantial help from their wives). The favorite joke of the husbands in the family was, 'how can a wife make her husband a millionaire? Easily if he is a multimillionaire!' (The teenage son was however too young to fully understand how funny his father's joke was until he had been married 15 years himself to a far more difficult wife than his mother, the son of a witch married his own little witch doctor who kept him safe if not from being poor but at least from poor health - to make sure he could keep earning to pay her bills... ) Descending also from an old country family from the middle of nowhere, Gran af Horna, the middle wife's paternal grandfather had from not so great inherited wealth made much money through enterprise and hard work. The wife's maternal grandfather had from considerable inherited wealth lost much money through enterprise and hard work... The wife however had an eye for large sums of money while talented also in spending large enough sums while her father-in-law, husband, Scrooge, and son were all very good at saving small sums while large sums slipped away from them... Once a beggar on the street asked her for £5, she replied that she needed much more than that herself. The beggar then offered his coins to her but she of course declined as she was a real aristocrat rather than a politician or other nouveau riche, capitalist profiteer parvenu or leftie person in power who would have taken the smallest amount from the poor...
Back to the future.... When another couple left home suitably attired, the lady next door did not recognise the wife in her flapper outfit, apparently looking at the husband disapprovingly for leaving the matrimonial house as a married man with a strange woman. Three cans of hair wax had not made the husband unrecognisable. The husband did not even notice, cheerfully greeting the disapproving lady and making himself look even more irresponsible. The flapper wife noticed everything of course and told her husband, getting them laughing already on their way to the dinner. They were both quite mad enough even without getting drunk, and sweet enough without sugar in their tea and coffee, maintaining their fine figures.
Just to briefly illustrate their combined madness, once the husband walked past Waitrose knowing he would find silver polish there quicker than home, he went in to get it. But he is not quite as bad as his wife who gets approximately 75 items from the shop when she says she is only getting one thing. But the husband knew of course that Waitrose sells herrings, quail eggs (if not plovers' eggs), caviar... so he just got all that and cocktail blinis and chopped some onions at home and washed the caviar etc down with champagne - 'something simple, caviar, toast and onions, and some champagne' as A King in New York said...
One gentleman did not notice many things but his wife filled him in on, inter alia, the faux teeth of the hostess, the teeth complementing the bigot's smile, both as genuine as the other. Afterwards the couple speculated if the teeth were of the same plastic as the faux candles on the otherwise impressive star dusted dinner table laid out for Babette's feast and the faux lawn outside, astro turf of the astro turd (sic itur ad astra), spending £50.000 on a small garden with trees "imported from Italy" when that money would have bought a whole house with garden and trees in Italy even if buying a property in the Mafia Republic, Stalinissima Repubblica, could be worse than throwing the cash in the wind, Italians being good both as cooks and crooks - apparently in Italy "functioning plumbing" means that it functions so well that it generously fills the neighbour's cellar with water! Once "the deed is done", as Macbeth might have said, it is all "water under the bridge" or water under the bathroom and in the neighbour's cellar - an Englishman's home (if any) may be his castle but not in Italy even if it is in a palazzo... Back in the suburban London garden, the cheap looking plastic fence trespassing the garden of an elegant old Edwardian house was certainly not from Italy, and there is no toad in the pond in this not so secret garden to impress but a toad in a hole of money. The Bimbo might as well have been better off playing bingo. Maybe the businessman host had nevertheless got a good deal on plastic, assuming it was not all stolen by the northern thug of a husband or his son from the mother-in-law... petite bourgeoisie, middle class, middle minded pretension...
Other property related conversation at the table was a lady advising the gentleman next to her, looking like a mixture of Hugh Grant and Colin Firth, who had considered commuting from Margate to Moorgate, not to buy a property in a Kent as there are too many refugees there, forgetting seemingly that the 'human rights' barrister Mr Justus Lex d'Arcy de L'Étranger de Camus was in fact not only an immigrant but an immigration lawyer (not sure which is worse other than being both but at least he did not specialise in the doubtless highly lucrative area of practice of defending 'high net worth individuals' or in plain English, big crooks, even if that might have been more popular and impressive than immigration lawyer), and neither was she primarily preoccupied by his work-life balance - true British Brexit Christmas spirit, goodwill, compassion, generosity, love of one's neighbours, global friendship among nations and people all over the world!
Like the Swedish-born Queen Ingrid of Denmark had educated her children in French language and civilisation, the mother of Justus had done likewise but poor Justus was not very successful in life, rather than becoming a diplomat or like to speak French with world dictators and other corrupt people with power and wealth, he ended speaking French to their victims, the refugees from various French-speaking countries he represented.
When the first guests arrived the old Baron was outside warmly greeting them in the cold winter evening, 'I am so glad you came, even I can go in now!' Meanwhile the sharp-tongued, authoritarian Lady Hyacinth with her staff had just about finished their bouquet list with the 14th thorough clean of the ceiling of the dining room which was kept locked from anyone entering it or making any mess when no entertaining was happening there.
The lady of the house was showing off one of her silver pots explaining she had inherited it.... The listener thought it had a striking resemblance to something she had seen at an antique shop recently, leading her to name one of her non-inherited silver pots as 'the inheritance' with an explanation of the kind nowadays suitable for a philanthropist slave traders statue.
One young man said he was surprised to receive dinner invitations to Regent Street and Kensington, as neither was quite in Mayfair or Belgravia. Yet all those areas are rather rough areas of high (net worth) crime, certainly in terms of despots, oligarchs and like corrupt parvenu crooks trespassing there with an abundance of stolen goods warmly welcomed by successive UK governments of all major parties unlike vulnerable refugees. Mayfair is so unsafe that even the hypersafe high-security US Embassy had to move out.
While a greedy fat banker Rich 'Dick' Head-Grabber-Bumandcrook was chewing every last bit of meat off the mutton ribs, the old fox-hunting Duke Philip covered in cat hair and ink stains etc etc etc muttered, 'bit mean to leave nothing for the other rats, typical banker's consideration for the wildlife....' Dick was attending with his partner Rob Ste[a]l and also another friend, a property developer called Des Truction. What these three little pigs were doing in his company, the old Duke could not understand... It turned out a distant illegitimate little bastard cousin Boris had invited them. The Duke then offered the fat bastard generously more extra-strong mustard to add to his politically-correctly enormous self-serving of Christmas ham.
Meanwhile a lawyer a few seats down the table had learned from his health-fascist of a wife, la Junta, to eat more healthily including avocado with mustard dressing - l'avocat qui aime l'avocat.
The old half-white-Russian Baron (i.e., one parent White Russian, the other fiercely anti-Russian - one of the many secrets of a happy marriage - also half-white-haired, the other half bald) explained how her Baroness (fiercely black haired and fierce despite her age) had been most displeased about the flowers that had been put on the family graves, making her views known to those responsible for looking after the graves. It just seemed unnecessary to telephone the church office as they would have heard her from the manor house quite well enough without using the telephone.
Another white Russian dimension to the conversation was when the sister of the Baroness explained how her late husband as a little boy was embarrassed having to time and again take the various pots and pans to be repaired by the Russian émigré smith after his parents had been once again throwing the pots and pans at each other, damaging them substantially but too embarrassed to take them themselves to the smith for repair (back in the days when things were repaired rather than thrown away like in later environmentally conscious times). The smith would remark in his Russian accent that it was not that he could not repair the pots and pans but he just could not understand how they had got the pots and pans so badly damaged - the secret of true deep love! They were a rather curious couple, a bohemian musician who earned little and a bourgeoise shopkeeper who earned more not least through tax avoidance...
At least it was not in Östermalm in Stockholm where an impoverished Swedish Baroness who used not only her noble title through marriage but her child by sending his son to the butchers to get more meat on credit... (again not quite what the Marxist class warriors would assume). Indeed after the 'revolution lifted the cleaner woman from cleaning the floor on her knees', a clean floor was never seen in Russia since, unless an aristocratic hostess went on her own knees to clean it properly!
Years later when the widowed daughter-in-law visited her widowed mother-in-law, the following conversation took place:
'Young lady, you are addressing me in a rather familiar manner! Have we met before?'
'I was married to your son.'
'Did I have a son!? Was I married...!?'
Despite not remembering whether she had a son etc. she had not forgotten her business skills, having stolen a walking stick and offering it to her daughter-in-law in a highly uncharacteristic gesture of generosity, having offered her nothing ever before even when the daughter-in-law had been struggling as a young widow with three young children... The cynic might say that the bedridden old bat did not need a walking stick or had stolen already so many of them hidden under her bed that she could spare one or maybe there was just a little amount of humanity in this common profiteuse after all to appreciate that despite everything over the decades her genteel daughter-in-law was kind enough to be the only person to visit her in the care home...
They had only just recovered from the good intentions of nearly paving the road to hell of trying to organise a birthday party for someone other than Jesus at a time convenient for all. The Portuguese friend would not celebrate his birthday before the actual date, no superstition of course on the part of the presumably devout Catholic. Maybe that was precisely why he was traveling away beforehand. But the Albanian chef Shkumbin in an Italian restaurant called La Quieta (but anything but quiet with loud music and Italian customers shouting) would not speak to the Portugueser if he refused to eat his cake delivered after considerable complications after being commissioned by a well-meaning but anxious Pakistani learned friend who would inquire about every two minutes if the cake was being delivered in time... but they were all outdone in the end at the non-birthday party enabling all to 'have their cake and eat it' other than that the wealthy senior civil servant's large wife, Kora, a not so well meaning a Pakistani lady, just bagged the cake and kindly informed the party that she was taking it to her friends, telling another learned friend that she was ready to be chauffeured away but at least the learned friend had not come with his Mercedes this time... The remaining party were gobsmacked and left to do nothing but laugh at the whole drama with no cake for their gobs but at least plenty of other culinary delights by generous courtesy of the Albanian chef of the Italian restaurant, including delicious pork the Pathan lady had disapproved of, saving it being bagged by her (at least she liked her big dogs).
The Albanian chef's cooking was as delicious as that of Brideshead's Austrian pastry maid in the words of the Marquess of Marchmain 'so much better' as opposed to the Italian pastry maid and as delicious as the French dishes in a Parisian restaurant Café Anglais cooked by the Sri Lankan chef... The non-nationalist diners were delighted.
Meanwhile another Pakistani did not omit his usual minimum five mentions of not eating pork... But nobody seemed to have enjoyed the night as much as one elderly gentleman seeing the short and chubby belly dancer performing also by courtesy of the Albanian chef of the Italian restaurant... a certain criminal judge who had to retire early after it became known that he had been somewhat excessively close to a certain attractive lady criminal he had let out of custody...
Back at the birthday of Jesus, one guest had so much hair that the amount of gel needed to even try to make it look like a hairstyle from the 1920s meant a quantity of gel (finishing one can was not enough) that then took several weeks to get rid of afterwards in the new year. Even that effort did not seem to quite produced the best results as he was asked to keep his hat on by the hairdresser hostess.
Among the guests was a gay couple, Dick and Sukhdeep who were talking to a young man called Arshad who did not forget his usual frequent mention of earning £150.000, or was it £120.000, one struggles to keep track of such trivial sums. Young Hardeep similarly said he could not remember how many girlfriends he had had by now, not to mention forgetting how many criminal convictions he had. Mr Million, as his neighbours christened him, was no longer around to say how many houses he owned in such and such place, how many horn-headed beasts he had on his cattle farm, not to mention one big-headed man in the farm house... how much his car, boat, watch, house etc cost because his house had been repossessed. Like an austerely dressed lord of the manor put it, 'he counted his money again...'' (While the more discreetly wealthy older money types may also have lost their homes at least they did not talk about their money (if any) and their losses were because of the dishonesty of the banks rather than their own.)
Missing or removed also was Asif who had explained how many millions he made through his legal practice of charging thousands of pounds from clients with no case of any merit in immigration detention centres with a guarantee of even the Home Office succeeding in removing them, leaving only it to be requested of them to send a post card once they arrive and to take something for a friend there... (There is nothing like a fellow countryman, be it your ambassador or your immigration lawyer!) He had kept repeating "wallahi bro" intermittently with the f-word and other common swear words. Two stern old English barristers wives and a French Madame Vittu-Perse, unified in their hostility to poor or not so poor Asif, who did not tick the right oligarch requirements, kept "kindly" asking him, 'what are you doing here?' Asif was slightly baffled as he thought he had been invited.
'Hi, bro!', said the not so highbrow but cool dude, raising a eyebrow or two, and attracting some considerable excitement and admiration for his funky style even from a rather traditional looking but versatile chum who on other occasions would look rather more cool himself.
At least Asif bravely stayed on while one of his countrymen was first confronted by a near volcanic eruption, which sounded like forty women shouting in the kitchen but as the smoke cleared it emerged to be only the hostess, a Desi Belle, and host discussing if he had brought the right ingredients for the smoky Crème Brûlée, their annual unintended Christmas speciality... This was only interrupted by a loud hammering noise which could be heard from the kitchen. It turned out the c[r]ooks Boris Putain and Vladimir Johnson were opening the oysters... then Asif's countryman had the host's brother start the conversation with someone he had never met before by saying that his wife had just left him. The last straw was when an elderly gentleman seemed to show a little more interest than was welcomed. He had suddenly disappeared quicker than Put[a]in'a henchmen could have managed from the Private Eye's Vladvent calendar of daily Advent surprise defenestrations of people falling down from high rise buildings' windows opened for ventilation, as if he had been a victim of a Stalinist purge in the Soviet Union. Nothing was heard of him since.
Once the generous caipirinha had circulated in adequate quantities to satisfy Oscar Wilde nobody seemed to quite know which glass or chair was theirs, leading to a kind of unwitting play of musical chairs and glasses (at least not ars..s) while the conversation was increasingly witty.
After many Diet Cokes, Dick was having one double shot of espresso with triple sugar after another and his already hyperactive speech of telling funny stories only became even more hyperactive, like a machine gun or the heavy artillery, his audience beginning to need a double espresso or two to keep listening to him. The old nun was asked if she would like her coffee black or white. She replied, 'Irish, please!'
As Dick was speaking more and more, his mother kicked him harder and harder under the table until Dick exclaimed, 'why are you kicking me all the time!?' His mother smiled politely and said with genuinely false innocence, 'oh, I am so sorry!'
Other delightful conversation included one sadist of a prominent arrogant left-wing big city mayor, who had settled out of court an employment tribunal case of him viciously bullying a sadest elderly lady secretary at a solicitors office they had both worked in, complaining how all the voluntary legal advisors at the local charity were white but of course he omitted to say that no non-white lawyer had volunteered to do this unpaid work, not even Asif or Arshad.
A far Eastern opportunist lady did not waste time listening too much to anyone or engaging in any deep conversation with anyone so endowed unlike herself, with the attention span of a fish, just flying around, quickly as an insect or fish in water, with a hat looking like a fish tail, insect wings or bird feather and a skirt as superficial and short as her attention span, from one person to another to network and drop names she thought beneficial to her interests even if those names were entirely unknown to the audience. When she offers theatre tickets at the last minute to someone she hopes to benefit from, she does not mention what the play is or even by whom, as such matters are of no consequence to her, it is only important for her to be seen in the theatre rather than seeing or hearing anything in the theatre. She only found time to talk to people she perceived less important once it was time to tell them to leave.
One Ambassador's wife, Mrs Schicklgruber-Jughashvili (née Marquise de Sade), elegant as a snake, also moving around as smoothly as a snake and smiling like a snake, was trying to hide how well she could speak her mother's native pre-revolutionary elegant Imperial Russian by making simple mistakes while getting the difficult Russian grammar right. However she did not feel any need to hide her mother's pre-revolutionary jewelry that she had stripped off her mother before she even passed away. Neither did she forget to frequently advertise her 'secret' relationship with a certain little opportunist closet-pro-revolutionary tinpot dictator parvenu despite the relationship having ended years ago - putain and Pootin. The Ambassadress would also complain how much caviar students had dropped and stepped on her carpets (the cost of which was billed to her country's tax payer) while nobody had ever seen anything more expensive than cabbage pie served at her diplomatic receptions - no prizes for guessing where the Persian caviar and tax payer money went! Her successors served such small canapés that even if one dropped them on the carpet little could be seen.
In fairness to the old witch she had no less intelligence and ability that her fine gentleman of a husband (apart from her lack of skill in hiding how well she spoke Russian), but in her generation a lady could not be a career diplomat, even if she did end up being the de facto ambassador for a few years as her husband was bedridden just like the tinpot dictators of both the sending and receiving country.... her frustration in life maybe led her to be a psychopath who was most skilful in making ill-witted comments to many who had the misfortune to be near enough...
After abusing and killing her mother who she had forced to disinherit everyone but herself, she had reduced her husband, a very fine and kind gentleman, to a long and painful illness before he committed suicide, femme fatale. Her grandson would own a profitable company running immigration detention centres... His meteoric career was fueled not by what he knew (if anything) but who he knew, rising quickly to business unit manager (BUM).
The same linguistic predicament was suffered by the South American diplomat's wife Mrs Chavez (her husband had succeeded in politics by fishing fishy votes from chavs). She was trying to hide just how well she spoke her mother's native German, also making simple mistakes but getting all the difficult German grammar right, maybe because her maternal grandfather was a prominent Nazi of East Prussian and Polish extraction Dr Pinderschloss-Schtrangelow (illiberally translated in English, Strangle-Love). (The young Count would not wish to say that he was even an extremely distant relative of Hermann Goerring's second wife, Countess Carin von Kantzow (pronounced cunt...ff), née Baroness Fock (a pronounced in the North), but at least he was not known to be related to the Fuggers (also spelt Fucker), the German banker family of counts and princes, and Fokker, the Dutch aviator.)
Zoltán Kárpáthy would have had an easy and even boring job working out where each not so fair lady and gentleman came from at this occasion.
A married Persian gentleman was proposing marriage to a married European lady, offering big diamond jewelry and a ring. The European lady asked, 'are you not already married?' He replied that there would be no problem at all as he was related to the Shah and he could send his wife to Tehran where the revolutionaries would kill her in no time, leaving the European lady wondering when it would be her turn to be sent to Tehran to be killed by the revolutionaries. One can obviously trust Republican revolutionaries to kill people more than anything else.
The granddaughter of the ambassadress, already a selfish psychopath from a very young age like her grandmother, the old witch and the little bitch, pest and cholera, young but clumsy Chlodowica Schicklgruber-Jughashvili (nicknamed Petra Pain, the eternal immature teenager), immensely talented in destroying everything big and small from dishes to washing machines and the mental well-being of those near enough, was spilling everything on and off the menu on the crisp white table cloth (to the horror of the maid Clothilde who would have to try to clean it afterwards) and she used a fine sliver spoon to scratch something brulé stuck on her plate, giving worse than a physical scratch to the hostess horrified by the fate of her non-inherited silver and porcelain. The hostess was lucky that all four crystal wine glasses had not been smashed, and she had been wise enough to protect the lacquered wooden dining table with thick cloth from modern or contemporary urban streetwise guests from placing hot pots etc to spoil the lacquer. Articulate mainly in abusiveness and manipulation, lying through her sharp teeth or yuleteeth, always quick to receive material benefits but slow in giving anything but grief especially to those "nearest and dearest" to her, Chlodowica treats everything in the world as existing solely for her with no consideration for anyone else, a truly modern and contemporary person! Yet she misses much of what is really worthwhile by being addicted to her phone screen while the previous generation drives her past the most breathtaking natural or architectural beauty. Her talk about high morals, protecting the environment etc is what she expects of others but not herself. Disgusted by anything natural, attending environmental demonstrations for her kind is pure self promoting devoid of any genuine conviction in anything but her own greed, self righteous in her hostility to nature, religion etc. She would never clean anything, and throw a huge tantrum of self pity if anyone even hinted to the prospect, but would leave a huge mess everywhere she went preventing anyone else from enjoying the place, all greatly contributing to her colossal ego and immense self-importance - the modern or contemporary coloniser of everyone and everything within the reach of her long nails. When she is home, other family members begin to enjoy going to work. After she has a shower, the bathroom is flooded and filthy, full of her hair and the bathtub only becomes clean after the previous generation has used it, assuming they do not slip on the soap left on the surface and break their neck and kill themselves (they are best advised not to lock the bathroom door so it will be easier to discard their dead body (unwanted already alive) without needing to break the lock)... She was already born evil, and certainly looked so terrifying already as a baby that people would ask her mother to turn her face towards the wall. The mother would years later laugh how her daughter 'looked like a little monkey as a baby' to the immense annoyance of the daughter. Psychopaths in at least three generations, not only does the family have a heritary disease, the family is a hereditary disease. At least the Hitlers decided to die out.
For her Christmas was all about the presents she would get while she would frown about how materialistic and selfish other people were desiring presents so unlike her.
"Nice and mature", remarked the old Duke, "the cheese, I mean..." He continued to lament how people nowadays keep playing loud videos on their phones as if they were on the London 18 bus going through Harlesden (long gone are the days (if any) of the reasonable common "man on the Clapham Omnibus") but then he realised it was a baby crying, one that was not facing the wall. There were other problems with the Duke's hearing, first he got excited as he throught he could hear Brazilian drums (the only good sound of the contemporary Notting Hill Carnival spoiled by too many loudspeaker rather than fine live music) but it turned out to be the Paddington train - at least it was not the fat banker's gravy train. Then he thought he heard somewhat less noisy drum practice or was it dripping rain on the tin roof in the perfect contemporary British Christmas weather... Then a horrendous thunderstorm broke out and the old butler began to shake but the hostess calmly said that he will be well placed to shake the cocktails and mix the Martinis. Old Duke Philip had also problems with his sight - first he was appalled by the extensive tattoos worn by a young man before he realised it was his shirt which was little more appropriate for the occasion, however.
A certain guest had lost one loose tooth, wondering after the dinner where the missing tooth might be. Her husband had to ask the hostess if there were any loose teeth left behind laying around anywhere, with a clue of which of the many drawing rooms it might be in, and indeed happily the teeth were found and returned. On another occasion after exclaiming something in excitement the loose tooth flew out of the mouth on to the floor with the owner hoping that not too many people present noticed the flight of the shooting tooth but at least she had noticed herself to know where to recover them this time.
One grumpy old man in a moment of irritation threw his detachable set of teeth on the floor and the dutiful dog of course promptly recovered them to have the teeth then locked in his mouth. Then the dog went to show off his new teeth to another family member who did not immediately see the provenance of the teeth. Happy Yuleteeth!
Some of the invitees who had been given the best seats at the table cancelled last minute. The most dutiful and respectful guests who were present were given the least prominent seats facing the corner of the back of the back room while the grand speeches were delivered. At least they could yawn without needing to hide it too much.
Another lady talked about her impoverished country cousins who were not poor in wit however. Once a group of a certain well-established minority famous for combining fast speed and horses, among other things, appeared at the manor house, driving fast up the drive in their carriages, expecting to be generously entertained. The hosts explained that they were extremely busy harvesting the annual crops before the rain would ruin it. The guests were not impressed by the excuse, remarking sarcastically that marrying off all the many daughters in the house would be quite a racket. One of the daughters quickly replied, 'then we will have time to entertain you too!' The guests were left with only their carriages and the cracks of the whips.
Another elderly widow said her late Tom cat went out for periods of time without her knowing where or when he might be coming back, just like her late husband. Approaching her 80s, she felt she was doing overtime, but her son-in-law already in his 40s felt he was not only an overstayer but an illegal entrant and eternal outsider, cosmopolitan alien even in what technically and ancestrally at least was his own country. By his 40s he felt he was well past his best before date, an old machine for which replacement parts are no longer manufactured and barely compliant with current legislation and practice. He remembered a joke by an even older fellow country man: 'old age is when if you get up in the morning and feel no pain you know you are dead!' His mother said she had had to slow down a little after hitting 80. He felt he had had to slow down around 40!
He also lamented his declining memory, not having inherited the good memory of his 94-year old grandfather who remembered the train timetables from 1918 (not that the timetable changed much since then). He had inherited his grandmother's bad memory. She mixed up the names of her children, calling them even by names none of them had. In fairness, she did have nine children. Her grandson had the same name challenge with only three cats...
Someone asked what the cost of living in Brazil is. The reply was, "your life" - with the high crime and corruption, it is likely to cost your life to live in Brazil! One Brazilian lady said she was hoping to meet a rich sheikh. Her friend replied, 'hold your horses, he will just whip you like his horses!'
She carried on, "never mind the Jews and the Indians, the best money-makers are the Armenians! They are so good at doing business that if you do business with them, the Armenians will become very rich but you will not! This is all of course because Noah's Ark hit the Ararat..."
Someone asked a gentleman married to a Brazilian lady if he had seen the Iguaçu Falls is Brazil. He replied that the only Brazilian waterfall he had seen so far was his Brazilian wife washing up the dishes with the amount of water coming from the tap. Despite the considerable water bill, after pleas for the environment to save water, not to mention the water bill, it was still probably cheaper than the costs of traveling to Brazil to see the Falls impressive enough.
'The children from my husband's first marriage...', said the first wife, of her children, a certain Baroness von... who was not baronial by birth and possibly not even by marriage because although it was possible that her (first) husband's family was not raised to the noblesse as late as after crossing the post-revolutionary Russian border, but may have even belonged to a Baltic-German Freiherrlich Haus... the husband's behaviour was as if he was a genuine parvenu unless he was trying to be fashionable in a dreadful 1970s way. The Baroness (if any) would raise some eyebrows by wearing the jewellery of a Baroness with a t-shirt. At least she had not acquired her jeans in exchange for an old Russian icon in true Soviet socialist style and neither killed her mother for the jewels.
While the children played hide and seek, the adults enjoyed Heidsieck. As one gentleman had drunk so much wine that he could barely speak, Donna Justina asked the man’s wife if she had life insurance for him, as he was drinking himself to death, and if not, best to get him signed up for life insurance as soon as possible while he was still alive.
Then continuing the Christmas customs of Olli, the children play Silent Night on the piano, forty hands, enough to wake one up from the most surreal dreams - les rêves de Noël - but 'truth is stranger than fiction.'
The French Ambassador's wife had as usual kept telling everybody how much better all French wine was than any wine in any other country ever. When she was leaving however a bottle of non-French wine fell out from inside her coat onto the crisp-white clean marble floor. She just looked around as if someone else had dropped it.
Amusing as the dream may have been, it was nevertheless a relief to wake up, as if it was a nightmare, because how could one have possibly bent backwards or upside down or bend it like Beckham or Boris... to carry on the chameleon adaptation to all these varied diverse characters...! But what all the diverse backgrounds have in common is selfishness. What else could better bring together diverse backgrounds and inspire the spirit of Christmas!
(Any resemblance to real persons is coincidental, of course!)
