Christmas reality, or Wonderland

Alice walked moodily down the road. She kicked a pebble out of her path; it bounced off into the overgrown grass of the muddy verge. Normally, she loved Christmas, but this year so many things seemed to be going wrong in Wonderland, and she couldn’t see how they would ever get put right. She’s an optimistic little girl, as a rule, and well able to float happily above the vicissitudes and idiocies of the politicians. But what was nagging her now was how stupid they were being, and how much serious, long-term damage they were doing; how would it ever be put right?

She thought about the foghorn voiced one, who in theory looked after Wonderland’s money, and decided how to pay for the things that the people wanted. She’d spent months telling the world what she was going to do, then changing it to something else, always claiming that she knew what she was doing. Huh! thought Alice. All she was really doing was taking as much as she possibly could from the Wonderlanders who worked hard every day so she could give it to the ones who didn’t want to.

Then there was the really weird one, who seemed to believe that electricity grew on trees. Now Alice, like lots of the readers of this column, knows more than a little bit about mining, and copper, and power generation and transmission. And she knows that the man’s plan of just picking a date and announcing that everything will be electric by then is naïve and pie-in-the-sky; but it’s the Wonderlanders who will end up paying for his naïvety.

Dusk was falling as Alice wandered through the village; her thoughts were also getting even darker. She thought of the moon-faced one, who thought the old queen of France - not the well-known Polish scientist - had discovered radium. He’d announced that he didn’t think the thousand year old Wonderland justice system was good enough for him. Why let people be judged by their peers when you could just have a state employee to do the job? Give it time, and he’d probably bring back the red queen, just to shout “off with their heads” in place of all the faff of a trial and courtroom. Then he could point out how good he was at saving money.

Miserably, Alice walked on. She didn’t want to leave Wonderland and go to live in the desert kingdom, where everything was new and shiny - but also soulless and vulgar. Plenty of people were making that choice, but Alice loved Wonderland, with its idiosyncrasies and peculiarities; it was where all her friends and her family lived, and had done for generations. She didn’t want to see it crumbling under the pressure from the ideologues.

It was dark now. As she walked on, Alice could hear faintly in the distance the sound of singing. Picking up her pace, she followed the sound, and came to the village church. Pushing open the door, she got the full blast of the singing, and saw all the lights and the decorative flowers. And standing there, singing lustily, were all her friends: the Cheshire Cat, the Hatter, the March Hare, the White Rabbit, the Mock Turtle and all the rest of them, singing, smiling and waving as they saw Alice stepping in through the door.

Suddenly, she felt alright again. Wonderland had had its problems before; internal and external attacks, incompetent governments, selfish politicians and so on. But as she joined in with the singing, Alice knew that deep down there were more good things than bad things in Wonderland, and that the bad things and the bad people who caused them were no more than a blip in a long, long history.

May I take this opportunity to wish all readers a Happy Christmas, and to thank you all for continuing to read this stuff. I must also beg forgiveness from Lewis Carroll, for shamelessly using the names of his wonderful characters.