So, it’s now verboten to start a sentence with ‘so’.  So, so simple to reduce John Humpries to speechless rage with a single word. So, we were taught at school, was up there in crime level terms with talking in the corridors – but there was a brief halcyon period when its use was considered acceptable, even a little edgy.  A bit Channel 4, slightly beret sporting. The dahlia is in a similar place as we speak but it faces an inevitable return to the compost heap as the moment passes and it is no longer ironic, just passe.  On the plus side  I don’t find ‘so’ remotely as irritating as the awful, thankfully ended vogue for peppering every utterance with ‘like’.

I am reminded of the man who wrote a leader in The Times hidden in  which was the name of his mistress (Was it Peter Jay?  Someone must remember) and James May who was fired for concealing something rude about his editor in a piece in a motoring magazine.  There is a temptation to do something similar with ‘so’ but don’t waste the day searching; in case you haven’t noticed it is no longer June.  We’ve stopped wondering whether it’s too early to cut back the daffodils. No time available for linguistic buggering about.  It is practically Christmas and wrapping must start NOW.

And card writing which HAS to be done with a fountain pen leaving you with indelible stains on your fingers and bleeding eyes from the hours updating your data base with all the hatches, un-matches and dispatches which have happened since last year.  (And – another no-no starter). Too late and too busy now to start a campaign to have slightly fewer, smaller trees in the house – that window of opportunity should have been opened by August.  Absolute latest.

Every shop in Britain has bedecked its windows with rusting tinsel and faltering fairy lights and even the undertakers has got a floral window display with holly and ivy.  That will be a comfort to the festively bereaved, I imagine.  Nothing worse than planning a December funeral surrounded by dusty Easter eggs.

 

You sense bitterness, reader, barely disguised hysteria.  You detect the tell-tale signs that, fingers scraping into the ice, I, like all women, have started the inevitable slide into the annual abyss of rage and despair that is the Festive season.  So even that’s started early.