Boxing Day

The alarm went off and it was still dark outside. A hand reached from the covers and felt for the digital radio's on button - if I did have to regain consciousless, at least I could do so while suckling on the reassuring teat of cricket.

Flintoff was on a hat trick! He steamed in to bowl and... oh dear, down leg side. No hat trick for Flintoff. But at least he's on a hat trick - that means we're doing well... wait, no, hang on, that means they've already bowled us out for some paltry total. It means we're doing really badly. Oh well.

Phone on, text arrives: 'Why is it called Boxing Day?'. No idea, sweetheart. My theory is that during the great plague of 1666 (which was ended, in the end, by the great forward-thinking medical technique of setting everything on fire then running around and screaming a lot) they ran out of boxes to put corpses into, and so the King decreed that the day after Christmas was to be a day for making many coffins. The great surviving peoples of England were told to make coffins out of any material available; such was the stench on that wintry night. So a great clamour went up across the land, and the wonderful English peasantfolk used their famous ingenuity and pluck; soon coffins were readily available, though some were made from other corpses, making a kind of corpse sandwich, or threesome.

And that's why it's called Boxing Day.

I stumbled downstairs, and found meat. My phone bleeped to say that my taxi had arrived. When I had pointed out to work that there were no trains to New Malden on Boxing Day, and that New Malden is beyond the sweaty advances of the tube network, they responded by ordering me a cab, the swines. Clearly I was expecting them to give me a day off and order me to spend it bathing in asses’ milk.

Thinking about it, isn't 'asses' milk' just a posh way of saying 'shit'?

I get in the cab. The driver's Australian. Brilliant. Don't mention the war, James. Don't mention the war.

We're driving down the high street.

"There's a lot of Chinese around here, aren't there?"
"They're Korean, actually. It's the biggest Korean community in Europe!"

A pause.

"You'll be speaking it soon, then."

Uh-oh. Looks like this guy is a stereotypical cab driver - the kind of cab driver that gives the Radio 4 listening, Camus reading, olive oil glugging majority of cab drivers a bad name.

Being a kind soul, I move the conversation away from multiculturalism to one I assume he'll enjoy: the cricket, and England's incompetence therein.

"Yeah, you were rolled over for 150 odd, and we're 38 for nought."
"Yeah.."
"That Shane Warne though, fucking legend. I know him, actually. Total arsehole. Fucking legend, though"

Fine, good. You know Shane Warne. Of course you do. I sit back and half-listen as he rambles on about being in the Caribbean in 1995 with a girl in a dress made out of the Australian flag. Fine, all good. The conversation washed over me the way sleep used to.

"'Course, imagine if an English girl dressed in her flag - in the St George"
"Yeah?"
"The Muslims would complain."

Uh-oh. How did we get back onto this? I thought I'd managed to steer the conversation safely down leg side. But we're back in the corridor of uncertainty.

"Local councils aren't allowed to fly the flag of St George on St George's day; they're banned cos the Muslims complain. But y'know what they were flying the week after? The gay pride flag."

"Um..."

"Yeah. And that Ken Livingstone, I've met him, he's a total wanker. Remember that party that got in the paper? That party he was at?"

"Yes.."

"... that was an Aussie party. I was there, and I was talking to him, and he said he didn't like the Irish, and he lives in Cricklewood, which used to be an Irish area... and that guy up the flag pole, he was English."

He was unstoppable now. Incessant. He was like a monkey with a miniature cymbal - a cymbal full of RACISM.

As we crossed Westminster Bridge, he was on about being in the jungle back when he was in the army - "I was a commando doing some training, and I was in full camouflage, with loads of zinc sun cream on, and we hit this beach... and we came across some English tourists! They were as red as anything." The English can't handle the sun, in my head I'm a big man, a commando, I'm not a taxi driver, I'm mates with Shane Warne...

Nearly there, nearly there...

"Anyway mate, good luck with the rest of the series".

Thanks.