A child can experience life’s lessons during the Christmas period, more specifically in the casting of the school nativity.
I didn’t care for lines. I wasn’t bothered about being the lead (although it would have made sense). All I wanted was to be an angel; to wear a white dress and have tinsel looped around my head.
My older brother, Jack, was an angel. A role which I felt at the time he took too seriously, frowning behind his round glasses as he twirled in the spot where he was instructed to. I looked forward to my time in year 2 so I could do the role justice.
Year 2 came, though, and I wasn’t cute like my brother Jack. I had ratty mousey hair, a sinus problem, and was a little tubby because I had discovered Maryland Cookies earlier that year. When the casting came, the teachers decided to not put me as an angel but as a “traveller.”
The role of the traveller consisted of walking around the audience to the badly sung tune of “Little Donkey’. We had to wear not tinsel on our heads… but our mum’s tea towels. We were paired up with another kid; my pairing was with a boy named Stewart – he had rosy rubber cheeks and had farted so loud in reading class once that he got sent out.
And so, Stewart and I shuffled together in time to ‘Little Donkey’ and sat down next to the stage as directed. When the song had ended, a new, lighter tune came over the piano, marking the angel’s cue.
Amongst the angels was my best friend Ellie, who swanned in with her arms open wide and tinsel on her head that glistened under the hall lights. She and the angels floated between the proud parents, twirled in the spot Jack had once, and sat down on the other side to the travellers.
Ellie in her white dress and me in my gravy-stained tea towel; it was in that Didcot school hall on that cold December morning where I had my first taster of being envious.
Time moves, but situations stay the same: Your colleague gets a pay rise, your friend goes home with the guy you like, your sister gets a ring on Christmas, and you get socks. But you learn to swallow your pride and try to make life work for you.
That Christmas, at home, I forced my siblings to perform the nativity alongside me. Granny Pat, the atheist, and my parents weren’t exactly the audience I had dreamed of.
– But I wore my tinsel, a white bed sheet and was an angel, nevertheless.
THE QUACK 