Two's company, three's an orgy

Expert opinion seems to be agreed that this is the shortest day of the year. Well, they can’t have formed that view sitting at a desk in Northumberland writing letters to accompany Christmas cards. So far as I’m concerned, it is the longest day of the year. It is also the coldest. Freezing fog lingers outside throughout the hours of daylight and, despite fuelling my two domestic fires with four baskets of logs and two scuttles of coal, my fingers are so numb with cold that from time to time I have to tear them away from the computer keyboard and run them under a hot tap to restore some sort of sensation.

Still, by the time of the last post I’ve written to every single person on my extensive contact list, apart from all the women with whom I ended up sharing a bed during 2007. Their cards are signed, but the accompanying missives seem to require further thought, to ensure especial care in my choice of words. I’d like to pretend that these remaining cards are stacked in a huge, teetering pile, such as one might find in Russell Brand’s study in like circumstances. It would obviously be ungallant (as well as depressing) to reveal the precise numbers concerned, but a pedant would point out that the word “all” in the first sentence of this paragraph is technically incorrect, and that “both” would cover it nicely.

Despite the shortness of today’s ration of daylight, the awfulness of the weather and the fact that there are only three panicking days left before Christmas, my journey to the post office at lunchtime is impeded by a vandal busily playing with the hedge-trimmer mounted on his tractor. He is gaily strewing fragments of hedge across the road, and I know from bitter experience how surprisingly sharp these can be; I have had both cycle and car tyres punctured by them. On my way back, I get a good view of the driver’s face, and he appears to be at least 80; he doesn’t spot my car until it is a few yards away from him, and I suspect that this might be related to the fact that he is wearing the sort of glasses constructed by sawing the bottoms off a couple of Coke bottles, and looping them together with an old wire coat hanger.

Small wonder, then, that most of the attractive, old, cast iron signposts in these parts have fallen victim to hedge trimmers and other agricultural machinery. I used to gather up the arms of these signs as they were lopped off, and lobby the parish and county councils to do something about them. The Government issued a timely leaflet in 2005 stating that old signposts should be maintained and restored, which seemed helpful to my cause. Shortly afterwards, a county council worker called on me and gathered up the fallen arms that I had collected in my garage, promising to see what could be done with them. The lack of action since then suggests that the answer is “not a lot”; cast iron cannot be welded and no-one in the area seems to posses the ancient and no doubt comparatively expensive technology required to produce complete replacement arms.

Still, perhaps as a result of my stirring, the county council did at least start repainting the remaining signs, which they had previously been allowing to rust into illegibility. One of the first they tackled was a very fine example I passed every day on my way to the village shop. It really was magnificent. Then this old fellow came along with his hedge trimmer …