christmas in, ummm, october?

image � ladybanana

Dear Shop Retailers, Evening Standard, and People Who Decide When To Put the Lights Up On Oxford Street,

Today is October 23rd. It is not even Halloween. November is a distant dream. December is a foreign country. Shop window displays should NOT be full of tinsel and ornaments. The Oxford Street Christmas lights should be gathering dust in a Croydon warehouse, not creeping us out (IN THE MIDDLE OF OCTOBER!) with their ghostly hints of impending holiday doom.

While I realise that you would like us to spend the next two months in a Bacchanalian, Christmas-inspired retail frenzy as some sick means of propping up our tired economy, I would quite like you to fuck off and leave us in peace. Toys will not sell out by mid-December because buyers didn't order enough stock. Remember what they said about the millennium? Exactly.

Christmas is one day. ONE DAY. Please do not force us to spend 1/6th of the year thinking about a single day.

That is all.

Yours eternally,

Crystal

An open letter to Londoners

Already started

Depressing

Creepy!

Dear Londoners,

Why are you wasting your brains reading the tripe free papers on the tube? In the morning on the way to work, in the evening coming home from work - don't you have anything more interesting to occupy yourself with during your commute? Read a book, listen to some music, knit your granny a scarf, take photos of other passengers for your blog, create a plan for world domination, but quit being so mindlessly lazy! The papers are free for a reason - because they are full of crap - no one would buy them if they charged money, so why take them for free?

Sure, shared cultural knowledge is important - but being able to stand around the water cooler in the morning and go "ooooohhhh, I heard that Pete Doherty is havin' a cocaine breakdown, so he is" is pathetic. It's not enriching, enticing, illuminating, or mind-expanding. It's just nonsense.

On the tube you all look like zombies, carrying out your master's bidding. I'm not going to go all Chomsky-lite and suggest that the "powers that be" are brainwashing you with their not-news news in order to keep you from being aware of the crap your business men and politicians are getting up to while you're entranced by Prince William's "will he, won't he" love life, but seriously how hard is it to just chuck a book in your bag the night before and keep it there until you're finished reading it. Always wanted to read Anna Karenina or War and Peace but "never had the time"? You'll get through a Tolstoy or a Dostoevsky in no time if you read it on the tube. Read something that will move you or make you happy in the morning, don't settle for the bullshit doom, gloom, and celebrity stalking propagated by the shite papers.

Free your minds, people. Free your minds.

Yours with concern,

Crystal

Now's that's better.