Christmas, the season of bad will towards men

Yesterday, whilst waiting for the Brussels sprouts to boil, inhaling the aroma of a Quorn roast in the oven, and listening to Bing Crosby sing about peace on earth and good will towards men, I was visited by the ghost of Christmas past and he gave me cause to wince a little. It's not that Christmases have ever been entirely ruined by our nuisance neighbours in the past, but that was never for the want of trying on their part. Sufficiently malevolent all year round, they always favoured this time of year to crank things up a notch, and whilst in other households merrymakers passed the time by exchanging elaborately wrapped gifts and mourning the absence of snow, my husband and I spent our first festive season here trying to locate a solicitor who worked during the holiday following our neighbours' first attempts (with us at least) at blackmail and housebreaking.

The following Christmas saw an attempt to run my husband down, although admittedly that particular activity had begun some eight months earlier when I'd just narrowly escaped being squashed, so perhaps that shouldn't be catalogued along with more specifically seasonal occupations, such as hurling bags of rubbish at us or throwing salt and sausages at our front door. The symbolic meaning of strings of ground pork has always escaped me, but the salt was apparently flung about the place as a protective measure, as it was a well-known fact amongst the locals, within six weeks of our first meeting with our neighbours - perhaps we should call them Mr & Mrs N - that my husband and I were carrying out Satanic rituals (which may or may not have involved the sacrificing of live rabbits) every Monday night (except during bank holidays). The salt made an appearance a number of times in the run up to Christmas each year, until I apparently gave up dancing with the Devil in favour of practising prostitution, with weekends spent running drugs for a large cartel based in the Congo.

Those days are gone now and Christmases are all about peace and love and not burning the stuffing. All is right with the world, carrots find their way into my saucepan as opposed to through my letterbox, and it's been three years since anyone tried to make an omelette on the bonnet of our car. But the memories linger, as I'm sure they will for many years to come, and it might be a year or ten before good old Bing will convince me that Christmas really is a time of peace on earth and goodwill towards men.