In the UK, where I have just spent a few weeks, Christmas officially starts when you can’t enter a supermarket without hearing Christmas songs recorded when Ted Heath was prime minister by bands who have long since swapped their platform shoes and wah-wah pedals for incontinence pants and mobility scooters. Slade, the 1970s glam rock ensemble responsible for the least avoidable of these ancient Xmas earworms, are said to have grossed more from its retail licensing than from the combined sales of all their other No. 1’s, and the Yuletide ubiquity of that song (which reminds us that Christmas is a time when ‘everybody’s having fun’, and defines the future as something that has ‘only just begun’), must have played a part in the transubstantiation of bug-eyed frontman Noddy Holder from raucous Brummie gargoyle into MBE’d national treasure. Over the years, many artistes have tried to emulate Slade’s Christmas killing, obliging patrons of Tesco and Sainsbury to hum along to everyone from The Pogues to Maria Carey as they trundle their self-basting turkeys to the checkout. It seems most unlikely, however, that the most downloaded UK Christmas song of 2024 will ever be promoted to this proud Pommy pantheon. And supermarkets aren’t the only national institutions which have chosen not to play it; the BBC didn’t, either. Not because Fascinating Aida, the trio responsible, have unacceptable views on things like race or gender – indeed, one of them is a trans woman. And not because their Christmas song could be deemed in any way divisive – which is the reason the Beeb cited for refusing to play a cover of another seasonal 1970s chart-topper after the artist, as an homage to Keir Starmer’s net-zero energy policy, changed Mud’s ‘It’ll be lonely this Christmas’ to ‘It’ll be freezing this Christmas’. There is nothing so divisive about Fascinating Aida’s Christmas cracker. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that it’s the most inclusive Christmas song anyone has ever recorded, expressing, as it does, a sentiment which nobody of any political stripe, religious affiliation or ethnic extraction could possibly disagree with. But I do concede that it does so in a way which even a tolerant magazine like the Speccie can only relay to its readers in a typographically modified form. Because the title and main chorus line of this song is ‘Try not to be a c-nt at Christmas’.  Google it; it’s very funny. Which explains why British police, whose job it is not to see the funny side of anything, have arrested a woman for expressing her solidarity with Fascinating Aida by putting a sticker of the song title, sans asterisk, on the back of her car. Humbug is much too small a word for such party-pooping officiousness.

Australian police, I’m very glad to say, are not so judgmental. I know this because a few days after I returned from the UK, breakfasting in my favourite Lower North Shore café, the sound of laughter caused me to look up from the book I was reading and I saw that somebody had entered the café wearing a t-shirt promoting tourism in the Northern Territory. More specifically, a t-shirt emblazoned with the slogan ‘CU in the NT’. But with the words ‘in’ and ‘the’ printed very small, one on top of the other, so that from 10 metres away the casual observer would only see the CU and the NT, but much closer together. Not the wit of Oscar Wilde, perhaps, but I think his Australian counterpart, Sir Les Patterson, would have approved on the grounds that the NT is not a part of Australia which is in the market for tourists looking for literary sophistication.

And whose was the laughter? Yes, a group of three or four North Sydney cops who had called in, as they often do, for their mid-morning caffeine. But perhaps I’m being too generous when assuming all Australian police would have reacted as they did. Having seen the same slogan on tyre covers and baseball caps, I can safely assume that such merchandise can be bought all over the NT and worn with impunity throughout QLD, WA and SA. But I can’t help wondering what would have happened if we’d been in a café in the post Covid police state of Victoria….