Christmas Is Coming and Roy's Ashes No Longer Live in the Porch

Me and Richard Austin at what used to be our annual Christmas party - a full English at Cutcombe Market

Here’s a seasonal newspaper column I wrote a few years ago - it contains a mention of my old friend Roy Tassell, as well as talk of what used to be my annual Xmas party - a fried “full-English” breakfast at the Cutcombe Fatstock Show.

So this was a newspaper column I wrote a few years ago about my very own lead-up to Christmas.

My old friend Bill Liversidge collects first prize for one of his turkeys

Is it me, or does Christmas creep up on us and suddenly reveal itself as a sort of glitzy, glittering, boozy, slightly holy, surprise?

I only have to think about this for a second to know the answer to my own question - it is just me. The result of the weird and rather lonesome life I live. After all, millions of people complain that the overly-commercialised modern Christmas begins earlier each year. So how come I’m missing out on that?

Entirely by choice, I can assure you. If you live up a lonely valley in a national park and spend a lot of time locked away writing in a garret, it is easy to miss out on quite a lot. And if that means overcrowded shopping centres in towns with people breathing germs and stores blaring festive music of the most irritating kind, you won’t find me complaining. 

There are the odd moments of wistfulness, like when you glimpse fleeting emails from colleagues about the staff Christmas party - being staged 100 miles away so you’ve as much chance of attending as flying on Concorde. But hey… I am old and grumpy, so the lovely young things I work with, but never see from one year to the next, wouldn’t want me casting a gloomy rustic shadow on their jollities anyway.

Actually, I had my annual staff Christmas party yesterday with the colleague I work with most - i.e. one Richard Austin, whose name you will often see attached to photographs in these pages. The famous snapper and I had an excellent greasy spoon fry-up at Cutcombe Christmas Fatstock Show.

We didn’t wear funny hats or anything, but we were as festive as two old codgers could be - and my Christmassy mood was ENORMOUSLY enhanced by my successfully bidding for the biggest turkey in the place. I’ll let you into a little secret - so pleased with myself did I appear, that Mr Austin wanted me to hold the bird above my head like a cup-winning footballer, but I was too weak in a wimpish writerly kind of way. That monster bird was just too heavy.

My blacksmith brother could have thrown it over the new market’s roof, which brings me on to New Year and its resolutions. Maybe I should start working out. And getting out more.

But more of resolutions next week - let me carry on my merry Christmas build-up…

Our first festive guest arrived this week. He’s not what you’d call a conversationalist. In fact he’s so dull, we’ve put him out in the porch where he remains, silent and strangely aloof. Best place for my old friend Roy, given that we was the last person ever to smoke in my house. There I was making him a cup of tea one afternoon a couple of years ago, and when I re-entered the dining room he was puffing away on a gasper dropping ash all over the carpet.

There’s a word in that sentence which is highly relevant, because Roy now knows all about ash. And if I’d opened the box he arrived in, which I almost did, there would have been his ash all over the carpet once again. And I mean, his ash. But at the last moment, as I prepared to rip open the heavy parcel, I noticed big red letters spelling: “WARNING! contains human remains.”

Not the nicest Christmas box we’ve ever had. His son, should you be wondering, is coming over from Paris on Boxing Day to do something with him. In the meantime we’ve put some tinsel around his box in an attempt to make old Roy look a bit more jolly. Not a mood he was particularly known for during a long and colourful life. 

RIP Roy Tassell

For many years he was famous in certain circles as doorman of Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in London - he knew all the stars of that dark nocturnal world, and they knew him. In later life, Roy was to be found in a converted chapel on an island off the Irish coast making big, beautiful, model aeroplanes while puffing on cigarettes - a kind of English, non-believing, Father Ted.

I first met him over 40 years ago when I was hitchhiking and he picked me up in a big black van which had a massive model version of the tower that holds Big Ben strapped to its roof.

For whom the bell tolls. Well, it tolled for Roy. And now it’s tolling for me because I’ve run out of room. Just enough space left to wish my readers a very, very, happy Christmas. 

Me with Roy’s son Marc and the great man himself - at Marc’s wedding - a few years before Roy died