One Sunday I said
To my wife,
“Have you noticed there are no angels this Christmas?”
“What do you mean?” she said.
“This Christmas,” I said,
“Have you noticed there are no angels?”
“No angels?” she said.
“No. Have you seen any angels?” I said.
“Can’t say that I’ve noticed,” she said.
And then we had some tea.
Some days later my wife said
To me,
“I see what you mean.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“About the angels,” she said.
“Oh,” I said.
“I haven’t seen any either:
Not on a Christmas card,
Not on a tree,
None in the papers,
None on TV…
I’ve looked.
Hard.”
We fell silent,
Contemplating Christmas without angels.
Then a single light bulb appeared over two heads
And in a twinkling
We were in the loft,
Opening up our
Big Box of Christmas Stuff.
But
Our cardboard-top-of-the-tree made-by-our-five-year-old-son-twenty-years-ago
Angel, was gone.
We rang the local radio station,
Tony Snell. Breakfast Show,
And our angels were a throwaway item
Just before the sport.
By lunchtime it was proper in the news.
Nobody in Liverpool, it seems,
Had seen an angel this Christmas:
Nobody in Liverpool, it seems,
Had noticed they’d not noticed any angels until we noticed it.
By evening it was regional, on TV:
No Angels in northern England.
Next day,
Those nice, smiley people were reviewing
The papers on Breakfast TV.
The Times said:
MYSTERY OF MISSING ANGELS
The Daily Express said:
ANGEL DROUGHT HITS BRITAIN
The Daily Mail said:
IMMIGRANTS TAKE OUR ANGELS.
All over the country, strange things
Began to happen.
Newcastle lost its Angel of the North,
Monopoly boards across the land
Lost a square in Islington
And poor people, for dessert, just had Delight.
Wide-eyed, gap-toothed schoolchildren,
Earmarked for the part of angels
In a thousand Nativity plays,
Stayed cowering in their beds.
Elsewhere, too, there was panic.
Mrs Merkel, boss of Germany, couldn’t locate her first name.
In Venezuela, people went carackers
As the Angel Falls became a trickle.
Los Angeles briefly rioted
Before disappearing from the map.
Angel cakes disappeared from menus,
Even in the best hotels.
So the whole world over
Christmas was ruined.
And although no wars
Stopped and there were no Christmas football games,
Everyone agreed
That a world without angels
Was a world without joy.
On the credit side, that bloody Robbie Williams song was never heard again…