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If 2025 is anything like 2024, I’ll be back on the Baileys

6 27
05.01.2025

Christ was born in a barn. This proves that he came for all humankind, as well as reducing his parents’ options for witty off-the-peg verbal critiques of him should he leave their front door open. Bearing Christ’s universality in mind, on Christmas Day at lunchtime I made my guests stand to listen to a few hours of festive recordings I had sourced via a bent Prison Service contact. A choir of people convicted of offences relating to the summer riots performed a selection of seasonal songs as my guests listened, hands on their hearts. The man who took a brick in the testicles in Southport added a particularly effective descant on the closing verse of Feed the World. Auntie Gladys was in tears and the old man from next door soiled himself in woe.

In the run-up to Christmas, I pondered all those less fortunate than me who would perhaps have to spend the season in prison; or worse still, those who will have to make polite conversation over the turkey with elderly Reform-voting relatives who still think Brexit was a great idea but it just wasn’t done right, and that Nigel Farage is “a character”.

Meanwhile, 19 environmental protesters, soon to be lauded as martyrs in the planet’s last line of defence, celebrated Christmas in British jails this year, doubtless eating artificially fertilised food and opening wasteful cards, like the trust fund-funded middle-class student hypocrites they are.

One 77-year-old Quaker layabout do-gooder, Gaie Delap, initially instructed to serve her sentence at home, was also told she would spend Christmas in........

© The Guardian