Thursday 24 December 2015

Day 24 - All I Ever Get for Christmas is Blue - Over The Rhine

It sometimes feels as if I worked alongside Charles Babbage on his Analytical Engine and I’ve convinced myself I did some coding alongside Alan Turing; I certainly played some games on Prestel – the forerunner of the World Wide Web - and I once won the League for West Ham on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum; so it shouldn’t come as any great surprise when I get a message via the Internet - but the fact is it occasionally does.

When an email arrives from Calgary, Canada some 4300 miles away – sent by someone you don’t know and are never likely to meet - telling you how much he enjoys your half-baked attempt to post a Christmas song every day over Advent, you can feel kinda humbled. Either that or your head turns around and smoke comes out of your ears like a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

I got such an email early in November pointing me to this husband and wife duo who I might otherwise have never known about. Over the Rhine seem ideally suited for Christmas Eve; Slow, sultry, smoky with dangerously romantic overtones, you don’t so much listen to this as sink into it like a 15 tog duvet.

Strings of lights above the bed / Curtains drawn and a glass of red / All I ever get for Christmas is blue / Saxophone on the radio / Recorded forty years ago / All I ever get for Christmas is blue

With this in mind - whether you go out or stay in this most wonderful of nights – make sure you enjoy whatever it is you do with whoever you chose to be with. It’s Christmas, you're alive and the other options aren't anywhere near as good.  


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