My Xmas presence may be all I have (From This Is Local London)

My Xmas presence may be all I have

11:43am Wednesday 23rd December 2009 in

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CHRISTMAS greetings from distant panto-land – Malvern in Worcestershire this year, which, I am delighted to report, is currently snow free although we had a minor and worrying flurry last night.

I am however viewing the reports from Bucks with rising anxiety. The delights of a white Christmas are only evident to the young or the sledge and ski lovers among us.

Those of us who have to manipulate the roads and work over Christmas are rather more curmudgeonly about snow and ice.

Malvern is a pleasant enough town in most picturesque surroundings, but I would prefer not to be forced spend Christmas Day here alone in my rented flat. In four decades of appearing in panto, I have only failed to get home for Christmas once, in 1979, when I was Dick Whittington in Cork in Eire.

Since then I have been on the road within milliseconds of the curtain fall on Christmas Eve to spend that precious one day with my family before returning at the crack of dawn on Boxing Day for the matinee, while everyone else is relaxing into the second day of their family Christmas.

Every company manager in every theatre in the land spends an anxious morning on Boxing Day awaiting the return of the all those performers who share my “Driving Home for Christmas” determination. Adverse weather conditions don’t help their stress levels.

The stories abound of Boxing Day matinees of Snow White and the Three Dwarves, when four of their companions got stuck on a snowbound motorway, or of an invisible King Rat, when a stage manager read the lines of the absent royal rodent over the loud speaker system with a few lines about his mysterious ‘invisibility’ added to the script until he arrived in the middle of Act Two.

My other anxiety stems from my decision to do a large proportion of my Christmas shopping online this year. Our poor postman is apparently struggling to get to the rural retreat that is Baker Towers through the ice and snow, which may mean when I get back to wrap on Christmas Eve, there may be a lack of wrappables.

Dare I hope that my presence rather than my presents might be enough?

A very Happy Christmas to all of you, especially Wycombe Wanderers as they trek to distant Yeovil on Boxing Day to give us a blue rather than white Christmas!