The Deadline Before Christmas

It can’t have escaped your notice that it’s nearly Christmas. I didn’t realise until the start of October when I heard my first burst of Roy Wood in Debenhams. That was the time that I knew I should start writing a short story on the theme of Christmas for a woman’s magazine. I had a plot worked out that I thought would get me into the magazine’s Christmas Special with no problem. It’s about a boy who wakes up at precisely the wrong (or, for the sake of my story, precisely the right) moment and chats with Santa, telling him that the one thing he really wants this year is to help his ailing mother pay off the bailiffs. She’s dying of severe X Factor withdrawal and the only thing that can save her is to see her son make an incredible journey on Skating on Ice. Probably from the changing room to the recovery room. Something cloyingly sweet like that always goes down well at this time of year.

I rang around my list of potential buyers to find when they wanted subscriptions in by, and that’s when my spirits began to drop lower than a dachshund’s dangler.

‘August!!! You can’t have wanted them in that early! I was enjoying the sunshine then, not thinking about Santa, carols and sickly mothers on ice!’ As one magazine editor politely put it, she knew of several thousand other writers who hadn’t been sunning themselves over the summer.

I’ve now learned a valuable life lesson. If I want to support myself and my Beloved through my wordsmithery I’ll have to live my life several months in advance. So watch for the post: your Easter eggs may arrive any day now.

And while I’m on the subject of timings, I thought I’d share a story that my Beloved told me this week. She received yet another unwanted spam text message the other day, but this one was a little different. It wasn’t asking if she’d had an injury in the last twelve months or if she wanted to change her energy supplier. No, this text was reminding her of the great deliver service that a certain pizza company provide. The only problem was, they were in Basildon. I suspect that, as we live in Yorkshire, they wouldn’t make good on their promise of, ‘if we don’t deliver in half an hour you get your pizza for free’!


© Shaun Finnie 2011