After opening our presents, my mum and dad enter the fray. And then I do the meat: cook the turkey upside down, like Delia or Jamie or someone or other does it, and let all the juices flow into the breast. Keep spooning the fat all over it, before turning it over for the last half an hour. Remove the foil and hopefully you’ve nailed it. If you have nailed it, everyone will talk about it for the rest of the day, as if you’re some kind of cookery genius who’s performed some dark magic. Which is daft, because it’s not like there’s any magic to it. I’m not a turkey whisperer, I just put it in the oven and cook it upside down. And if you haven’t nailed it, everyone will talk as if you’ve nailed it anyway. Those are some basic turkey rules.
But I have got it wrong, I must admit. I’ve underdone the turkey, in which case it ended up in a frying pan, and I’ve overdone the turkey, in which case there was nothing I could do to salvage the situation. I don’t know a great deal about cookery, but I do know that you can’t uncook a turkey.
Because I’m a fan of the Queen, we always sit round and watch her Christmas Message. I’ve got a lot of respect for her, but it’s also a nostalgia thing. When I was a kid, my nan and grandpa would come round on Christmas Day and make sure we had it on the telly. My nan loved the Queen, even used to write letters to her. And she always got a reply. She’d write about her grandkids: ‘Our Andrew’s started playing for Lancashire and our Christopher’s playing cricket as well.’ Some of the letters she got back from the Queen were lovely. She also used to write to prime ministers. I remember her getting a reply from John Major, wishing me well in my career as a cricketer, because he’s a massive cricket fan. A couple of years ago, I sat next to him at the Oval.
After the Queen’s finished her message, I sit back and eat my own bodyweight in chocolate. I’m not into a lot of traditional Christmas foods, like Christmas pudding. I’d love to know the ratio of Christmas puddings sold to Christmas puddings eaten every year, it must be something like 100 to 1. I’m not a raisin or sultana man. I like the taste of them but the texture frightens me. And they’re basically shrivelled, wizened, ill grapes. I can’t get my head around that. You wouldn’t eat anything else that was on its last legs. One time, my missus wanted to get me out of bed and threw a box of raisins at me. I played it cool, but it got to me, it really did. Raisins are like snakes to me. Even when my auntie Joan used to serve me up a buttered hot cross bun, I’d pick out the raisins and put them in my pockets. I didn’t have the heart to tell her.
I have an aversion to mince pies for much the same reason. Who likes mince pies anyway? Anyone under 40? Not a chance would I eat one of those. The same with nuts. I like a pistachio but I can’t be arsed taking them out of their shells. And I don’t live in a Dickens novel, where a bowl of nuts was the stuff of a madman’s dreams. I love a bowl of custard – I’ll even eat it cold – but without the mince pie. But the idea of trifle fills me with dread. Trifle is the devil’s work. Jelly, fruit, sponge, custard and sherry all mixed together? Whoever invented it must have been on acid. The sherry means I’m not allowed to eat it anyway. I can imagine being interviewed in a few years’ time and the journalist saying, ‘What got you back on the booze?’ and me replying, ‘My mum’s trifle.’
My Christmas dessert of choice is a big slice of Victoria sponge. Not very Christmassy, you might think, but once you’ve got your cracker hat on, everything’s Christmassy. That’s the only thing about Christmas, there’s a lot of feigned happiness. You’ll pull a cracker, stick the hat on, show everyone the pair of nail clippers that’s fallen out and everyone will act as if it’s the best thing that’s ever happened. And if a set of clockwork false teeth that can chatter and walk around the table falls out, it’s as if Jesus has appeared.
The sizing for cracker hats is all over the place. Marks and Spencer need to hire a good milliner. One person’s cracker hat will be sat on the top of their head at a jaunty angle, another person’s will have slipped down their forehead so that it’s covering their eyes, someone else’s will be round their neck. I’ll look around the table and think, ‘What is happening here? Grandpa’s 92 and he’s got a cracker hat on. Have some dignity, man.’ Meanwhile, he’s telling me the turkey’s nice and moist when he can barely chew it. Instead, he’s letting it dissolve on his tongue, like a cough lozenge. Personally, I don’t like wearing a cracker hat. I feel like standing up, slamming my hands on the table and screaming, ‘I am not a paper king!’ It’s not even proper paper. It’s old-school toilet paper. But I always bow to Christmas peer pressure. You just look like an old misery guts if you’re not wearing one. And no one likes to be an old misery guts on Christmas Day – the family Scrooge – even if you are one.
When it comes to Christmas chocolates, I’m a Heroes rather than a Celebrations man. As far as I’m concerned, Cadbury win that one hands down. That said, each pick and mix has its pros and cons. I am a rare breed in that I love a miniature Bounty. In most houses, the Celebrations box is swimming with Bounties as Christmas Day draws to a close, but not in our house. I think it’s because I like to suck my chocolate. That’s why I’m a big fan of Yorkies, it’s like sucking on miniature breeze blocks. But you pop a piece of Cadbury Caramel into your mouth and it’s gone in seconds, and no one wants that.
Someone told me once that they play a Christmas Day game which involves Heroes versus Celebrations, in a Ryder Cup format. Heroes were the European team, Celebrations the US team, you’d have a blind draw and everyone would have to vote on the winner of each match. It was surprisingly tactical. Do Celebrations frontload their team with the big guns, like Mars and Snickers? Or do they chuck Bounty and Milky Way up front, as sacrificial lambs, having anticipated that Heroes would be leading out with Dairy Milk and Caramel, both titans of the chocolate world? Personally, I prefer charades. And I’m not sure it works, because everyone knows that Dairy Milk is king.
Once dinner is out of the way and the cracker hat has been shed and scraped into the bin with the leftover turkey, we’ll all crash out and watch a Christmas film. And when it comes to family Christmas films, you can’t beat Elf with Will Ferrell. And then I fall asleep. Actually, I’m usually asleep after about half an hour. And that’s pretty much that for another year. I’ve never been a big fan of Boxing Day. When I was still on the booze, I’d wake up with a terrible hangover, because I’d been drinking since breakfast on Christmas Day, and still feeling stuffed. And then I’d have to run through a brick wall again. There’d be half a turkey that needed finishing, all the food that no one wanted to eat on Christmas Day and two crates of lager. I associate Boxing Day with groaning. People sprawled all over the house groaning. It’s not the best day , but now I enjoy it as we go to my mums.
Of course, after Boxing Day is even worse. That awful void of pointlessness. The lost zone. No one knows what the date is, everyone keeps asking what day of the week it is. Mind you, the 27th was always a big day when we were kids, because it was my auntie’s birthday and she’d have another party. But when she died, we lost the 27th as well. That just became another part of the lost zone. But we did gain the 28th recently, because that’s when our last baby was born. Thinking about it, I might have another one and time it so that its arrival fills another gap between Boxing Day and new year. Just so we’ve got something to do. Rather than eating turkey and miniature Bounties.
As for New Year’s Eve, it’s the worst night of the year. By a country mile. You go out and wait for something great to happen that never happens. Even when I drank it was terrible. I don’t need to be counting down to midnight, holding strangers’ hands and dancing all over the place like an idiot. And when it got to midnight, nothing actually changed. It was just another day. It was all so forced, and there are few things worse in life than forced fun.
The only time it was half-decent was when I was a kid, when my auntie Pauline would have a party for all the family and I’d get to see my cousins. But as soon as that stopped, New Year’s Eve turned to shit. Now, me and the missus never know what t
o do – because everyone thinks they have to do something – and end up doing nothing. And then you wake up the following morning and it’s January. And as if January isn’t bleak enough, some bright spark decided to make dry January a thing, although every month is dry for me. Why would anyone want to stop drinking in January? Surely it would be a better idea to say, ‘What can we do to make January more fun?’ Fun January. That makes a lot more sense to me.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE FUTURE, OR MAKING IT UP AS WE GO ALONG
What will the future look like? It is a question that has exercised the minds of some of our greatest thinkers, from H.G. Wells to the person who made the Smash instant mashed potato adverts. But they usually get it wrong. For some reason, futurists are all obsessed with the same things, chief among them robot animals, flying cars and sustenance in the shape of pills. But how is anyone going to fit a Toby Carvery into a pill? Clearly, these people are not thinking deeply enough.
There’s not a pill big enough for a Toby Carvery. How are you going to get all those meats and vegetables into a pill? It would have to be twice the size of a frisbee. And what would you do with the gravy? Try to incorporate it into the pill or pour it over the top before swallowing? It’s the minor details these sci-fi writers often overlook.
I actually think our technology is far more advanced than we know. For example, I reckon they already have robots and computers that know what people are thinking without saying anything. But I think the tech companies and the authorities aren’t letting us have it, because they know it would blow our minds and wouldn’t necessarily be good for us. Because, let’s face it, a lot of amazing technology isn’t necessarily good for us. In case you hadn’t noticed, the technological advance has slowed in recent years, in that there haven’t been too many new developments. It’s as if they’ve hit a brick wall. But they can’t possibly have hit a brick wall, so there must be a backlog. There are all these mad patents piling up and at some point they’re all going to be unleashed on us. And when that happens, who knows how society is going to react.
Sometimes the sci-fi folk get it right. George Orwell’s 1984 seems to have got a lot of things right about politics and society. And Back to the Future came pretty close. In the second one, they nailed biometrics, virtual reality glasses, Bluetooth-style headsets and flatscreen TVs. But even they got flying cars wrong. Marty McFly was one of the great gilet wearers, 30 years ahead of his time, and you can also buy the self-lacing Nike trainers he wore in Back to the Future II. They cost about 30 grand. That’s a lot of money, but if we have another lockdown and I get a bit bored, I can’t rule out buying a pair.
Other futurists just make it up as they go along. Like Nostradamus. At the start of every year, some Nostradamus devotee will pop up and say, ‘Nostradamus predicted there will be a great shock in the next 12 months.’ No shit. Of course there’s going to be a shock. Chances are, there will be quite a few of them. And every few years, people say Nostradamus predicted the world is about to end. And obviously it never happens. Not that Nostradamus gives a shit, he died about 500 years ago. You can’t even hold him accountable for his nonsense.
I’m not sure about flying cars, they’d be too dangerous. It’s all very well having a prang in a supermarket car park, but if you did that at 50 feet up, you could fall out of the sky and die. If flying cars ever do take off, I bet you there will be flying cyclists holding everyone up, just like before. I can picture them now, hovering about, cutting in front of the flying cars, getting angry about everything. And then they’ll have to think of somewhere else for cars to go.
That’s one of the reasons why it might become quite normal for people to go to space, because of traffic jams. I certainly wouldn’t mind going up and having a look. Some people say it would be a bit dull, because there’s nothing there. But that’s ridiculous. Imagine staring down on your own planet. I can’t even begin to imagine how incredible that would feel. You’d also be able to check that the world was actually round, and that governments hadn’t been lying to us. And maybe you’d even bump into an alien life form. It’s a long shot, but I’d say it’s more likely to happen in space than Cheshire.
What would you say if an alien introduced himself? That’s a big question. Chances are you’d have all these big ideas in your head, about how the universe had changed forever, but be so overwhelmed that you’d start blathering on about the most trivial things: ‘All right? Nice to meet you. Erm, have you eaten? Do you even eat? I’ve got a Toby Carvery gold card if you fancy a trip to Macclesfield. Just say you’re a friend of mine. The four meats will blow your mind. You don’t get that on Pluto. But maybe give the gammon a swerve.’
Of course, aliens have already visited planet Earth. They made the pyramids. They must have, there’s no other explanation. I know someone who studies Egyptology and even he thinks the only explanation is magic. And because we know that humans can’t actually do magic, it must have been aliens. And they must have been all over the world, because there are pyramids all over the world: Africa, South America, the Antarctic. You can’t move for pyramids. There’s even one in Stockport. I don’t think there are any tombs in that one, although there might be a few bodies under it.
Do you want to know something else about the pyramids? There is a bigger time gap between when the oldest Egyptian pyramids were built and the most recent pyramids were built than there is between the most recent pyramids being built and now. If that doesn’t blow your mind, I don’t know what will.
We live in a seriously weird and wonderful world, don’t we?
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to David Luxton, Sara Drinkwater, Alita Butcher-Wallis, Katie Lydon, Matt Phillips, Beth Eynon, Ben Dirs, Tom Fordyce, Nikki Mander and all at Bonnier Books UK.
Are there aliens out there somewhere?
What happens when I die?
What’s the worst that can happen?
Do You Know What? is an unexpectedly helpful, occasionally silly and absorbing brain dump on life and everything it holds, from one of Britain’s most-loved national treasures.
Out now
If you haven’t yet read
read on for a hilarious extract from Chapter One . . .
CHAPTER 1
IN (ALMOST) TOO DEEP
life beyond the comfort zone
I’m standing in a wrestling ring in a warehouse in Florida, surrounded by dozens of cameras, filming me from every conceivable angle. What looks like the entire cast of Game of Thrones are ringside, all wearing fluorescent Lycra. And all I can think is: ‘I just want to get out of here.’
Before I know it, someone has shoved a microphone in my hand and shouted in my ear, ‘Right, now your turn.’ No going back now. Two minutes doesn’t sound like much, but when you’re so far out of your comfort zone you need satnav to find your way back, it feels like an eternity.
I launch into my routine, which I thought up during the walk to the ring: ‘I’m from Preston, England, and I’m gonna hammer all of you and shake things up!’
It still makes me cringe just thinking about it. But as I’m climbing out of the ring, I think to myself, ‘That was rubbish. I want another crack at it.’
I snatch the microphone back, climb back in and take in my surroundings for a few seconds. Everywhere I look there are weird and wonderful people, and I pick out a few obvious targets – a fella with a massive head, a fella with a big nose, a fella with a particularly bad haircut, a fella with a stupid voice – and let rip. The fella with a head like a melon gets it good and proper, big nose doesn’t know what’s hit him, the bloke with the man-bun looks like he might start crying. Two minutes go by and I can see the director trying to wind me up out of the corner of my eye, but I start shouting at him like a maniac, ‘Oh no, I have not finished yet, just you try and stop me . . . ’ I’m like a man possessed. At this rate, wind-up man is going to have to wrench the microphone from my cold, dead hands.
My routine lasts ten minutes, and as I’m climbing out of th
e ring for the second time, all I can hear is absolute silence. Everyone else got a clap. I sit back down, feeling a bit self-conscious, and watch the room empty.
The acting coach comes over and says, ‘That was good, well done.’
‘Thanks, mate, but I don’t think the others liked it much.’
‘Don’t worry about them. You can teach anyone to wrestle, but you’ve got to be able to get a reaction from the audience, whether good or bad. Wrestling fans hate vanilla. And one thing you weren’t was vanilla.’
How did I end up in a wrestling ring in Tampa? It’s a fair question – wrestling isn’t a typical career progression for a former England cricketer. The simple answer is, I needed a job. I was living in Dubai at the time, drinking too much, eating anything I wanted, cruising through life. My day consisted of taking the kids to school at 7:30 – I’m not an early riser, so that was a nightmare, especially after a heavy night – before heading to the gym at the Burj Al Arab. The Burj is a six-star hotel, and ridiculous for it, because you don’t have to do anything. You park your car and someone appears out of nowhere to take your keys. Someone carries your bag to the gym. You meet your bag at the gym and as you’re getting undressed, a man is picking your clothes up to wash them. You get in the gym and as you’re trying to put weights on the bar, someone steps in to do it for you. I’m surprised they don’t offer to run for you as well.
Right, Said Fred Page 15