Enough of this blogger's impotent rage! It's time to celebrate surviving another year in south London with cheap cake and our favourite local podcaster!

The year is nearly out. I know this because  Panettone is on sale in Lidl, and one of the most loyal readers of this blog is once again offering the best audible - as opposed to edible - Advent Calendar your ears will ever be lucky enough to be plugged into.

So before I embark on the standard moan about what an even lousier year it has been - let's just hear it for cheap Panettone and Daniel Ruiz Tizon's fantastic podcasts. These two seemingly unrelated phenomena must surely force me to think again before consigning the whole of the Modern World to fire and damnation.

I enjoyed the Advent Calendar so much that I wrote a post on this blog in praise of it, and, listening just now to the fabulous 16th December episode (The Kindness of Strangers), I would say, without hesitation, that you'd be crazy not to listen to all of it! It's also good to see that Daniel's also working on new material for his Café Chronicles on Resonance FM - a Christmas Eve special goes out at 8pm on the 24th.

This excellent south London podcaster is also one - possibly the only - regular reader of this blog. He often gives us a favourable mention on his twitter feed, and often enjoys pointing out how few and far between are the posts. He has even, on a couple of occasions,  referred to me as the Greta Garbo-like recluse of this hellish world of online writers.

He's right, of course - there's no way a blog can flourish on one post every four or five months.

The thing is, I write dozens of pieces for every one I publish. The abandoned majority are nearly always ill-considered rants. The impotent rage of an elderly remnant of a pampered generation: one who never moved on from the trauma of the 1979 General Election.

It happens like this. I go somewhere, I see something outrageous, something that really gets my blood boiling, and on the way home I compose a searing diatribe that will surely draw full attention to the menace in question (it is usually some form of motorised road-user).

Trouble is, when I'm finally staring at the laptop screen, those wonderful armour-piercing chains of words have all blown away, and become just a harmless puff of hot gas....and there's nothing worse than a half-baked rant. But I try, and the evidence is there in blogger archive: hundreds of unpublished outbursts.

The headlines of a few recent spiked stories give a flavour of my bile-fuelled year of rage:

– Nine Elms' Sainsbury tower block fails to win 2018 Carbuncle Cup:  we wuz robbed!
– F.a.o truck owners: if you really can't see what's between you and the pavement, how come your vehicle's allowed on the road?
– Nine reasons to regret US decision to build Embassy in Nine Elms
– The dismal decline of London's listings magazines
– Blinded by the light: why are modern car headlamps so dangerously dazzling?
– Anyone able to squeeze out a tear for the stalled developers of Chelsea Barracks?
– Out on the streets I'm calling it murder: souped-up cars are the new lethal weapons of choice
– SUV drivers! Since when did it stop being a crime to honk your horn merely to express your arrogance?
– Confusion every which way: the bonkers new cycle-superhighway systems at Stockwell, Vauxhall Cross and Elephant and Castle...
– and so on, blah, blah, bloody blah.......

It was while writing the last one - provisional headline, "To the bloke in a tight white shirt and red-and-grey tie, driving a metallic grey Audi A8, at Clapham Common at 5.05 yesterday afternoon, who honked at the Nissan Micra in front because it was waiting for an elderly disabled person cross the High Street: learn some bleedin' patience, fatso! " - that I realised that the headline itself said it all, and I should stop writing these things until I could control my rage a bit better.

So, I have spared you from even having the chance to glimpse these bitter words. Anger, I now realise, is not enough: it is not a useful basis for a blog or for any other form of expression. I never really much liked hard-core punk music for the same reason. The Angry Young Men of 1950s Britain? Just a bit too pleased with their own righteous manly bristling for my liking. As for The Who smashing their instruments - that was just plain stupid.

So even though it has truly been a terrible year for so many people,  and although I really have witnessed many, many more incidents of extreme and unprovoked anger and selfishness and even violence on the streets of south London this year than in any previous one, I think it is a good idea to swallow my bile for once.

Instead, please join me in enjoying a slice or two of Lidl's £3.29 De Luxe Panettone, a few glasses of cheap white wine (Prosecco, if you insist) and get listening to that Advent Calendar! No better way to get through these strange bleak days.

And one 2019 resolution: I will start writing more regular, less negative items for Microgroove. Oh yes I will.....

Opening windows on a love-hate relationship with Christmas

Terrible, to think we're only 12 days away from the 12 days - that we are now halfway through Advent.

It's several decades since I last opened the cardboard window of an Advent Calendar to reveal….well, in those days, it was a badly-drawn scene from the nativity story. I loved that ritual, each morning revealing the next episode. Each year I longed to reach the climactic moment where you looked through the stable door to see Joseph and Mary and a donkey and a crib and lots of golden hay. Coloured cellophane. The cut-out shape of the star of the East. The shepherds with their crooks and glowing lanterns. Hold it up to the light boy!

These days,  kids get sweets, chocolates, trinkets, and for all I know gold, frankincense and myrrh each time they pull back those little flaps.

This year I'm hooked again. No cardboard flaps, though. I've  become an addict of the Advent Calendar of podcaster, Daniel Ruiz Tizon. As he points out so well in the first episode,  for kids the excitement of Christmas is all about the countdown, the expectation - and not about the day itself, which was often a terrible let-down.

OK, we have already got to Day 12 but there's still time to catch up. You can binge on Advent Calendar podcasts on iTunes, instead of one of those boxed-set TV shows. It costs less (well, nothing actually) and it goes straight to the point of our existences on the surface of this planet. In all honesty,  what could be better?

These daily nuggets of storytelling share some of the bitter-sweet observational humour of  the weekly show on ResonanceFM, Daniel Ruiz Tizon is Available, which has already had a few mentions on this blog.

The theme is familiar – can jaded, life-battered adults ever recapture the magic of Christmas? – but the treatment is entirely and absolutely Daniel's own. It's sad, it's funny, it's obsessive, it's moving, its addictive. And if you were brought up in England at any point between the 60s and the 90s it's going to get your memory-strings reverberating in interesting ways.

The presents you longed for but never got; the ones you dreaded being given. The visits to no-longer existing department stores. Christmas TV of the 70s and 80s. Christmas pop. Above all the pain, the fights,  the embarrassments and occasionally even the joys of being part of a family.

Each day's episode is only 10 or 12 minutes, so although we're already past the half-way mark of this advent season, you can quite easily catch up. And I recommend you do: you will very soon be as captivated as I am.