KEY POINTS:
There are days when you wake up and the world is wonderful. The horizon's clear, the sun is bright and warm and fills the sky. Your fingers tingle. The awesome possibility of love seems finally secure.
A smile dances behind your eyelids, a perfume fills your air. Happiness is tangible, as real as the whisper you never want to stop hearing.
Those are good days, Singing in the Rain days, when you feel that life is a Paris street put there for you to dance along, clicking your heels in the air as you swing on the lamp-posts like old Gene what's-his-name in those big-budget musicals with the overhead camera shots that turn the whole chorus into mesmerising patterns and shapes.
Well, maybe he wasn't in those ones, but you get the point.
Some days you want to go on forever, like the chorus at the end of Hey Jude.
But there's other days, too bleak to contemplate, when even the farther sun, that holy ghost, is muzzled by the grey and shrouding mist.
Sometimes it's because your private life has turned into a melancholy minefield that threatens to blow up in your face and sometimes it's because the world's come rushing in, as cold and unwelcome as those walls of water that always burst through the bulkhead in submarine movies just before the crew finish twirling the spinny thing.
Yesterday was like that.
It started well enough. Woke up, still had a pulse, but then the shock news hit. There it was, as plain as a gloomy day, on The Harold's wondrous website...
Is Santa running out of time?
What!?! Surely not!?! That's like saying the elves all come from China and plastic toys will break. Or the ARC couldn't organise a booze-up in a brewery, even if they did get David Beckham over to pour the drinks.
But it's true, apparently. Santa is running out of time. At least according to a Mr Alx Swny, a man seemingly as bereft of cheer as he is of vowels.
According to Mr Swny, who leads some Scrooge-like coven of humbuggers called Heart of the City - Ha! Heartless, more like - the big Santa atop Whitcoulls' Queen St veranda may have come to the end of the road.
No matter he's on an intersection, or that he's been there since 1998 - the year Mafeking was relieved, lest anyone forget - it seems Mr Swny's had complaints about Santa's beckoning finger and "friendly" wink.
Too seedy for some, it seems - or so says Mr Swny, who's Heartless organisation has just been granted custody of the digitally agitated icon.
Is a huge plastic finger salaciously tickling the air precisely what we want in this decorous day and age, asks Mr Swny, adding that he'd personally like Santa to stay, but, well, you know, some people have another view.
Then poke their eyes out with a sharp stick, Mr Swny, if indd that is your nme! Make them walk away around backwards so they aren't affronted by the beacon beckon.
Tell them to put paper bags over their heads or spend Christmas in Zimbabwe. Alternatively, fix F.C.'s fickle finger in the vertical position to more better reflect what the rest of us think of their "seedy" preoccupations.
Put boxing gloves on the old bloke, Mr Wsny. Show these whey-faced wowsers they've got a fight on their hands!!!
Defend the digit, boy. Tell 'em to get one up em!!!! This is Christmas, after all. The season of pce and gdwll, Mr Ywns. Do not go gentle into that ungood night wherein no finger quivers and even innocence can't wink.
We don't want the feigned concern of the overly knowing tainting our view. So take them - and the lemon-lipped angst of the sadly repressed - and shove the lot down the chmny of yr contempt, Mr Swyn.
But don't take Santa down!!
Don't even think about replacing him with some thin, abstemious geezer like Dr Bollard, who's beckoning finger could serve as an invitation to oil companies, power companies, councils and banks.
Fine for Dr B to decree that all such egregious extortionists must "play their part" and join his Christmas crusade to leave more jingle in our pockets and less bells on the wretched registers, but reserve him for the Bank, Mr Wyns. Don't put him on the veranda!!!!
'Cos if you do, Mr Nwsy, there's a whole bunch of guys in Falun Gong who're not at all happy about being left out of the Santa parade and they're just itching to settle a few scores - get my drift!!
And lest you don't, then let that grand old Christmas ballad, God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen (apprprtly adptd) speak for every innocent amng us...
Gd rst ye mrry, Snta Claus.
Lng may yr fngr stay.
And hear ths clr, sour Swny dear
Dn't tke St Nck away
For if you do, that dgit vast
Will mrk the course you chose
And we wll stck the ruddy thng
Strght up yr Heartless nose!
Sd tdngs, discmfrt and no jy!!
