SIDELINE CUT: Christmas is coming along with the amateur road runners and the beach belly-floppers
THERE HAS been a notable absence of Chris Rea's Driving Home for Christmason the wireless this year. Daytime disc jockeys also seem to be shunning Shane MacGowan's universally adored Fairytale of New York, a song which champions the NYPD choir so movingly it is still hard to believe such a body does not exist.
An acquaintance of mine has been complaining it doesn't "feel" like Christmas – he is a member of the Garda and therefore an accomplished complainer. But he has a point. There is a definite absence of the usual madness. The old hymn is spot on. All is calm. All is bright (until about 4.30 pm in our part of the world when this sort of mist rolls in which is less the romantic Mull of Kintyre-type haze that Paul McCartney sang about and more like the sinister fog in that John Carpenter classic).
It could be one of those years Christmas kind of creeps up on everyone. It could be one of those years when it will only truly seem like Christmas when we see an Irish male emerging from the sea wearing nothing but Speedos and a sopping Santa hat giving the thumbs up to an RTÉ film crew. Yes, it might be one of those Christmases that only truly arrives when you find yourself engaged in a vicious, private battle at kilometre six of the “fun” 10k with an octogenarian lady wearing cuddly reindeer antlers and a Michael Jackson T-shirt who is breezing along the back roads with the kind of lightness better associated with Kenenisa Bekele.
Some deep, primal fear of Christmas Day exists in many people – the psychological trauma, perhaps, of too many childhoods spent playing four-hour Monopoly games with family members on December 25th. (It is surely only a matter of time before the motivation of all the Irish property moguls of the last decade who were consumed with an insatiable need to buy up the world is traced back to a Christmas Day Monopoly game when they were cleaned out and humiliated by an older sister/brother).
It is no coincidence that in January, Irish people habitually ask one another, "How did you get over Christmas?" as if the festive season was an illness. One way to get over it is to take a deep breath and plunge into all the daytime television classics: Escape to Victory, Guns of Navarone, It's A Wonderful Life. Another way is to wrap up warmly and take a walk. And yet another way is to participate in the various swims and runs that people feel compelled to take at this time of year –often in the name of charity.
A few years ago, a friend suggested taking part in a run on St Stephen’s Day. He had been a pretty serious runner in his youth. The idea that people would turn out for a race the day after Christmas seemed pretty far-fetched. Three of us showed up expecting the streets to have that absolute emptiness of Christmas. But some mothers really do have ’em. Thousands of people had already gathered, wearing Lycra leggings and woollen hats, lining up for the little entry numbers that you pin on your shirt. It was a genuinely incredible sight and proof that athletics in Ireland is nothing if not a subculture, a mass movement that seems to exist both invisibly yet in broad daylight. The runner suggested a few light stretches. The former midfielder in our company declined and despondently lit a cigarette, grieving that his sporting life had come to this and declaring he could not be sure that his hamstrings would hold up.
The race itself was not really a race – some guy won it in 29 minutes and everyone else trundled along behind, exhibiting a flabbergasting range of running styles. A few K in a man in a vintage – and stretched – Tipperary GAA shirt went by. He was, as the bespoke people say, a larger gentleman and the shirt may have been a trophy from his distant minor days, when he was a fleet and underweight 17 year-old with prospects. He held his head up high, as if he was hoping to receive some sign from the sun. But this was Galway, man, where there hasn’t been sun since about 1975. Still, he retained something of the old speed because he sort of glided by our group.
My friend, the runner, had watched him ease past with undisguised horror in his eyes. For a few seconds, he seemed prepared to let him go but then a spark of instinctive competitiveness – hatred would be another way of putting it – came into his eyes and after muttering something indistinct, he shifted gears and moved ahead to hunt his prey. He succeeded too and returned to his home feeling murderous and redeemed. That is what the Christmas fun run does to you.
These scenes are played out all over the country. The beaches play host to another form of madness. The Christmas day “swim” is a different journey altogether. They say the Bering Strait contains the coldest water on this good earth. But Irish water has a unique kind of coldness that has nothing really to do with temperatures.
Every coastal community has at least one old legend who is reputed to have gone swimming every single day, hail or shine, since about 1913. It is forgotten, though, that he dedicates his life – commits himself with Olympian austerity – to the act of preparing his body to cope with the savage, unforgettable cold that the mid-winter Atlantic holds. He may be crazy but he is also Zen. At least he treats the sea with respect.
What happens on Christmas Day is another thing. There is always some character caught between over-excitement and the early stages of hypothermia who will charge at the water full pelt, whooping like Geronimo himself. He will hurl himself over the edge of whatever pier with the mad abandon of a man ready to hurl himself out of life itself. A huge shadow will fall upon the waters beneath and the swimmers already in there will look up and catch a glimpse of the hero from the underside of his carriage, so to speak – an image that will revisit them through many dark nights. They will realise, with abject terror, that he is seconds from landing on them.
A scene reminiscent of Chief Brody clearing the water on Amity beach will follow, people trashing to get out of danger, the strongest throwing the old and weak behind them. Our man will hang there. You have seen him. He is beyond pale, almost translucent white except for those vivid red Speedo trunks. He has let himself go a little bit and he celebrated boisterously on Christmas Eve. The ambulance crew will turn off Radio Two and prepare for action.
He drops into the Atlantic and kicks off the beginnings of a tsunami in Asia. When he emerges, several seconds later, he is a different human being entirely. He is sorry looking, stripped bare and shivering. But look at the light in his eyes! He comes out of the water looking as if someone has just whispered the Secrets of Fatima in his ear. He is chaste. Beatific. Silent. Humbled. Serene. Alive.
Happy Christmas.
