Part I - Have Yourself A Bitter Little Christmas.

Plenty of people these days lament the loss of the traditional Christmas - it's too bloody commercialized now, the dissenters howl; just another excuse for big business to flog their wares on us. A big bloody con devised by the bosses at Hallmark to grope the last few pennies out of us at year's end before they hit us again six days later with the cost of a new calendar, and the whole sordid cycle begins again. In the words of the world's biggest cock-knocker Richard Littlejohn, you couldn't make it up. Yes, to some of the more cynical among us, Christmas now is little more than a Coca-Cola-sodden husk of its former self, long since expired, despised by all and sundry as it lies face down in the snow, a mangy old dog urinating on it for good measure. And while that may appear to be a solid point, here's another - piss off, you perpetual humbuggers, Christmas is the tits.

Now don't get me wrong, there's plenty to dislike about the overwhelming commercial aspect of Jesus' annual birthday bash - if, for example, you only know it's Christmas when the advert breaks on Coronation Street assume a waifer-thin veneer of festive spirit (for example, Martin Kemp is pushing sofas with a Christmas hat and a sleighbell-tinted rendition of "Gold") then the meaning of Christmas is probably lost on you as it is - but as with anything else, Christmas is what you make of it. It can be a time for misery and general ill-will to all men, but it can be so much more. It can be a snow-covered hillside on a racist farmer's land. It can be unwrapping a present from that really rubbish uncle to discover he thinks enough of you to give you one of his old jumpers for Christmas (complete with a large plaster stain on the front because he refused to pay a plasterer good money for something - he thought - he could do himself). It can be a robin caught under the wheel of a gritter and popped like a cheap, feathery balloon. It can be sitting around the table with the family, trying to eat in peace while your newly-converted Jehovah's Witness of an auntie condemns you all to a lifetime in hell and an awkward Christmas dinner like the pious old prune she is (while you silently resolve to refuse to offer her second helpings, dessert or a blood transfusion). And, if there's time, it can also be compassion and a sense of festive cheer.

So what's been happening in the pub? Well, nothing has changed - there was a little speculation that maybe I'd got another job, been paid millions for my story or had been rumbled locally as a pseudonymous net-based ne'erdowell (sadly, the former two are not true and thankfully nor is the latter) but the truth is I'm still there, festering away behind the bar as I ebb slowly and inevitably towards a position of seniority. The main reason for this? Henry's incompetence, which is becoming a bigger and bigger scourge upon my time with each passing day. It's not that I want a position of seniority, far from it - but it's the small differences between Henry and myself that often put me in a more favourable light. Take, for instance, the gentlemen who was becoming agitated that - despite there only being eight people in the lounge eating - we were not taking any further orders for food.

My response: "I know it doesn't look much, but we've a very small kitchen and they've booked the full Christmas menu which requires our undivided attention for groups larger than four. I'm sorry if this is an inconvenience." Looking more or less appeased with what I'd told him, he asked to speak to the manager - possibly to just get it from the horse's mouth. However, he probably didn't expect the horse to come galloping down the corridor, hooves covered in brandy sauce and brandishing a butter knife threateningly, open his big horsey mouth and spew shit all over his face. Needless to say, Henry had somewhat misread the situation.

"We work damn hard in that fucking kitchen," Henry snapped with all the airs and graces of a punch in the mouth. "And I'll be damned if I'm going to take that sort of shit from the likes of you..." Henry wiped his nose, and, with a final sprig of insult atop the Christmas pudding of injury, added: "...and your fat wife." Quite the assertion, considering the generously-portioned lady that Henry assumed to be his wife was, upon closer inspection, the property surveyor for the brewery who had come to discuss the repairs to the window frames. Needless to say, we didn't get our windows looked at that day and the gentleman went home to his wife - about whose size we are still none the wiser - with something of a sour taste in his mouth. Two complaints against the pub for the price of one. Quite a spectacular feat.

So most times, if people want to discuss something of any importance, they will oftentimes come and talk to me about it rather than deal with Henry. This applies even to the people directly above him, creating this absurd atmosphere where the crew know more about the ship than the captain does. It was this bizarre situation that left us without a single drop of bitter for the week before Christmas. Now, any of the regulars at our pub will tell you that bitter is far and away the most popular item on the menu, and if it's not on then you might as well leave the doors locked. Normally, we order a little more than we need. And when I say that, I mean I order a little more than we need, because Henry refuses to deal with the brewery's (faultlessly polite) stock people. However, due to a rather pesky bout of glandular fever, I was knocked out of action for a few days. And while I thoroughly enjoyed my time away from work, slobbing around on the settee watching DVDs of Peep Show and turning the stereo up to the point where the neighbours could well have assumed Tim Harrington was actually living with me, I knew there would be an unpleasant surprise awaiting my return. I wasn't sure what it would be, but there was a general feeling of unease that gripped me and made me very nervous about returning to work.

And lo and behold, there it was, a cellar fit to bursting with all the old shit we can't sell, and not a single bitter barrel to be found. The company's "continental lager", their foray into mainland European-style beer, that couldn't be any less popular if the pump was shaped like a massive dopper with Ian Huntley's face on it? We had that to burn (and we may as well have done just that, because we sure as hell can't sell the sodding stuff - if you live in Cardiff and have been inside a pub belonging to a certain company recently then you almost certainly know what I'm on about, and if you don't, imagine somebody's taken a barrel of Stella and decanted it through a filter made primarily of raw onions and cancerous sheep livers and then ask yourself whether you'd pay somebody £2.75 for the privilege of drinking it). Bottled cider, a fashion crutch that recently experienced a downward spike in popularity so sharp you could cut your Pogs on it? We had enough to drown a cider festival. But did we have a drop of bitter? No, we did not. Why? Because rather than going out the back to check our stock levels himself, Henry decided to just assume that the stock list I'd prepared the week prior (when bitter was plentiful and joy was unconfined) was good for another week's use, and phoned that in. Didn't check the date on it, didn't even check it was right. Just phoned it in and hoped for the best. Resulting in a particularly harrowing dilemma.

I discovered the problem on a quiet Tuesday evening when Eddie and I were putting the final festive touches up around the pub. Every year we're given a little less to work with and this year our budget could barely stretch for the wrapping paper we use to wrap the pictures on the walls (to make them look like presents), much less anything particularly seasonal behind the bar. Eddie, who I think is something of a frustrated fashion designer at heart, spent quite some time trying to affix battery-powered fairy lights to my shirt in the hopes that if everybody brought their own fairy lights in, a few modifications would mean the festive cheer would be physically attached to us (and more importantly would draw attention away from the sparsely-spruced back bar). As I was pouring a round of drinks looking like a human Christmas tree, the bitter spattered to a halt. No matter, I thought, until I noticed our complete and utter deficit. I wondered first what I had done to be punished in this way, before realizing who was to blame.

Of course, with the festive time of year comes the national compulsion to rise from ones seat and devour everything and everyone within a five mile radius, including your recently vacated seat, your entire family, and every last damn thing in the kitchen of the local pub. Christmas meals are something for which we prepare very carefully - we put out pre-prepared menus months in advance that some people have seen fit to utilize, which means Henry is in the kitchen by himself, trying to cook mince pies and bellowing to nobody in particular about nothing in particular, occasionally collaring one of us to give us a pep talk about commitment, as if we needed to be reminded that working over Christmas is a jolly unpleasant experience. The advice I give to him - and now to you - is this: don't fancy working long, hard, thankless hours over Christmas? Don't be a landlord in a shitty pub. That's probably good advice anyway, but especially if you're not down with busting a nut in December. This is advice Henry singularly failed to heed and as such he was confined to the kitchen of a dying pub that will more than likely get boarded up in the next three years. So naturally he wasn't really in the mood to be beaten around the head with his faults by Eddie and myself.

"We don't have any bitter," I murmured gingerly to him as if attempting to wake a sleeping child after a long car journey.
"What!?"
"You didn't order any bitter," Eddie blasted, opening the door of the car at sixty miles an hour, pushing subtlety out into oncoming traffic.
"Am I expected to do everything around here - what the fuck are you wearing?" I solemnly switched off the battery pack for my shirt-lights.
"Generally the landlord's expected to keep an eye on the stock," Eddie noted correctly.
"We'll need to get a transfer from another pub... but I've got this to do."
"I'll go and get it."
"You can't go on your own," barked Henry, wrist deep in mince pie filling. "You'll need somebody else."
"Who?"

I didn't even wait for the answer. I silently zipped up my jacket, grabbed my iPod from behind the amplifier and got in Eddie's deathmobile.

"Right, sorry about the mess - just grab that A to Z and sling it in the back... oh, and the heating's a bit patchy... you got any Christmas music on that thing?" I handed over my iPod and Eddie began carefully reviewing my taste in music. "In Dulce Jubilo - which versions are these?"
"There's one by a band called Swimming that -"
"Got Mike Oldfield?"
"Yeah, there's the Mike Oldfield version on there."

So that was the Christmas music on our way to our first pub - one of "my" tunes, followed by Mike Oldfield's "In Dulce Jubilo." Sufjan Stevens' melancholy "That Was The Worst Christmas Ever!"... followed by In Dulce Jubilo. Paul McCartney's ham-fisted attempt at proving he was still worth a damn creatively after Wings turned out to be a load of arse... In Dulce Jubilo. Swimming's "In Dulce Jubilo"... Mike Oldfield's "In Dulce Jubilo". After a while, the tune felt like a bit of Christmas dinner that just wouldn't stay down. It became like a word that has been repeated over and over again - it lost all meaning entirely as I became intimately, almost biblically, knowledgeable about every last nook and cranny of the song. The missed note in the solo at 1:48, the gentle crooning wheeze of the oboe, the sound of Oldfield's assistants begrudgingly wheeling the tubular bells out of the studio (after being informed on a moment's notice that the next installment in that little "masterpiece" was being recorded the next day). After a while I probably would have taken Moonlight bloody Shadow rather than another spin of In Dulce Jubilo.

"Are you sure you don't want anything else? I've got the lot here, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Wizzard, Slade..."
"Nah, you're alright, I only really like that one. And Moonlight Shadow. Have you -"
"No."

So that one we stuck with as we pulled up outside the closest brewery-owned pub - a ghastly little nightclub-type joint called Dionysus. In the 1980s it had been a truly horrendous Greek-themed wine bar, but then rock became king once more and now it's a painfully fashionable club. How do you know it's fashionable? Well, for a start, you have to pay two bloody quid to get in. And this was at six in the evening on a Tuesday, it's not as if we were trying to gatecrash at midnight on a Friday.

"Cover's two quid mate," the doorman informed me.
"No, we're here to see the manager," we said, flaunting our stock transfer papers as if this somehow got us A-list privileges. "We need some bitter, we're from the pub down the road."
"Oh yeah, what's it called?"
"It's called The -"
"Actually it doesn't matter," the doorman proclaimed. "I'm not just letting you ten-a-penny jokers waltz in here without paying cover."
"Aw fuck off," Eddie snorted derisively. "This isn't Stringfellows mate, it's a shitty little club way out in the sticks."
"Now it's four quid." I felt Eddie's involvement in negotiations had hindered us considerably.
"It was two quid a minute ago, this is mental!"
"It was two quid before your little mate told me to fuck off." Before Eddie could bump the price up any further by turning the air blue, a gentleman in a rather fetching drug dealer suit (white, rolled up sleeves, black shirt, top buttons undone to reveal farmer's tan and gold chain) asked what the problem was.

"These two lads are from - well, they claim to be from - hang on, where did you say you were from again?"
"We didn't," I said, turning to the nice drug dealer. "We're from The -"
"I know you!" the man squealed giddily. "You're Henry's boys, aren't you?"
"Steady on mate," Eddie snapped. "We're not his 'boys', we're his staff. Boys implies something wholly untoward." Brilliant, I thought, now we'll probably have to buy some drugs off him to make him happy, and if Eddie thought I was going to start doing crack because he didn't have any manners, he had an entirely different think coming. Luckily, Senor Drug Mule just laughed.
"Hahaha, yes, I was at - what's your pub called again?"
"The -"
"I was there a few weeks ago for a manager's meeting. You did me a bowl of chips when Henry wouldn't." This is a task I will perform for people when business is quiet and the kitchen is technically 'closed'. You would be amazed the gratitude it gets you. I've had drinks bought for me, offers of nights out in other pubs, the works, all because I know how to fry some chips.

"Come with me to my office, please, I don't make a habit of conducting business in the street."

To be continued... (part two will be posted December 24th)