THE KING’S CHRISTMAS MESSAGE
Compliments of the season from our humble palace at Lush Places. The Queen and I do hope you will have a merry Christmas, but also that you have a perfect Christmas. These are not the same thing. A merry Christmas is a doddle; all one has to do is make sure one’s servants appear regularly with a cocktail. A perfect Christmas is a far more meticulous affair, though they were once simple enough.
When I was small, a perfect Christmas would begin with me sitting on Santa’s knee at H & J Smith, Invercargill’s department store, and end with me unwrapping my presents under the tree in the lounge of our tiny split-level house on Kelvin St.
Once I became a teenager, a perfect Christmas was any one spent on a family holiday by a lake, and in my 20s and 30s, it was one shared with friends rather than family.
Now, as I approach my seventh decade, with my tolerance for yuletide-ry approaching its lowest ebb, a perfect Christmas demands none of those things: I don’t care what I am given for Christmas, I don’t want to be anywhere but Lush Places, and I don’t care to spend it with anyone other than the Queen, of course, though this year one will be making an exception, with one’s humble palace hosting one of one’s subjects, a droll fellow from Auckland.
A perfect Christmas always begins with rising early, with the Queen making tea, before one sits down to read the papers and complete Wordle and the Times’ quick crossword.
Lunch will be something delicious prepared by the Queen, who likes to make a fuss, before we settle in front of the goggle box to be amused.
Eventually, the Queen will wander off for a siesta, while the King considers whether it’s too early to reopen the bar, decide it isn’t, and then imbibe a snifter with a book in a deckchair under the golden elm.
There will be an early dinner – again something delicious prepared by the Queen – before the King retires to his bed chamber shortly after sundown.
This is a perfect Christmas Day. It is also just a perfect day.
THE QUEEN’S CHRISTMAS MESSAGE
I don’t like to leave Lush Places on Christmas Day. I like to cook nice things, have some glasses of wine of a slightly better quality than the usual quaff, and go out to the paddock and have a lie-down with the sheep. There is nothing more lovely than a lie-down with sheep. The sheep will have cashew nuts for Christmas. We will be having prawn cocktails, because we always have prawn cocktails on Christmas Day, then sugar-and-bay-cured duck. There will be mini pavs. There will be homemade spiced biscuits and orange muscat ice cream. There will be bubbles. That is what I call a properly perfect Christmas.
In that other time, childhood, where the edges are blurry, we went camping for Christmas. Most years, we went to Tapotupotu Bay, the northern-most camping ground in the country. It was remote. You couldn’t go to the dairy for a hokey pokey ice cream. There was no dairy. There was a truck once a week should you find yourself short of baked beans or bog rolls. We’d camp in a big, shabby canvas tent that let in water when it rained. It quite frequently fell over because of my father’s inability to perform any practical task with any expectation of success. He thought throwing petrol on a barbecue was a perfectly reasonable idea. He and the other blokes would go surf casting. I don’t recall if he ever caught a fish, and I think I would. It would have been as big an event as the day he streaked though the camping ground wearing nothing but an orange towelling hat.
There were peacocks on the beach at the bay. Can that be true?
I can’t remember what we ate on Christmas Day. My mother’s culinary skills matched my father’s practical ones, so probably baked beans.
We would go digging for tuatua. A couple of shaggy, bronzed surfie dudes I had a 10-year-old’s crush on went oystering and presented me with an oyster containing a pearl. Can that be true? I choose to believe it. It is a perfect Christmas memory.
