And so to the Day In Question, the main event, the big kahuna. Christmas.
Let Chaos Reign!
Christmas is a special time for me. A close to the year, a time for food and family, the stuff of memory building - and, indeed, memory revisiting. Nostalgia feeds our annual year-end feast, whether it's an imagined Victoria experience of snowdrifts, sleigh-bells, and red-breasted robins roasting over a crackling Yule log, or something more intimate and local. For me it's the memory of past family gatherings, the larger Simian whanau coming from Dunedin and Christchurch to share Christmas with us, the rolling maul of big dinners, eked out into leftover cold servings and, yes, barbeques. The last Christmases together, before one or more of us left our home, or left the embrace of our family. I lost a cousin two weeks ago; as one ages, Christmas mingles happy memories and sad, the most bittersweet of anniversaries.
But to a kid in the Seventies Christmas was huge. Toys, holidays, long summers, trifles and jelly, cousins and play mates. My family's Christmases are an unashamed attempt to recapture some of that for our kids and ourselves. A riot of colour, activity, smells, tastes and noises. You're pooped by the end of it all - eyes glazed with TV specials, belly groaning from rich multiple servings, ears ringing from the long hours and laughter. Enough nostalgia, though. Or... not...?
Manic Street Preachers' Send Away the Tigers was an improbable hit. A chart-topper that delivered a righteous hit in Nina Persson duet, but delivered thin servings thereafter. Far from the experimental Lifeblood before it, or the divisive and cut-down double Know Your Enemy before it, Tigers is a wry re-run of past victories and crowd-pleasers, lacking only a needle to push. However, it did delivery some good B-Sides, including this particular burst of UK Christmas nostalgia - an unashamed mash of memberberries. It is, in the words of What Is Music podcast a right banger.
Best of all for 2022 is Manics re-releasing Know Your Enemy in as close to its original intended form as possible. A real surprise and a Christmas treat to be sure.
Merry Christmas, Everybody!
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