Halo Halo! Seasonal Goodwill, Dodgy Deals and Unreliable Witnesses

Jingle bells, jingle bloody bells. Yes, it’s that time of year again. A month of enforced jollity is about to be inflicted on us. And to make matters worse, The Apprentice is back on the box, that weekly display of arrogant, immature toadies stabbing each other in the back in an attempt to impress Alan Sugar and his sidekicks with their dodgy business deals.

An hour of that every week could certainly affect your mental health. You find yourself thinking; If only Marx had been a better businessman. Instead of hiding away in the British Museum reading room every day he’d have invested in a Father Christmas outfit and a false beard and got himself down to Oxford Street with a suitcase full of plastic, happy nodding worker gnomes. At £5.99 each (batteries extra) they’d have sold like hot cakes and we’d have had socialism years ago.

Fortunately, the Apprentices will have all been fired by Christmas, but as for Christmas itself, the only known ways to ensure a festive free December are to apply for a place on the Mars colonization programme or to join the Jehovah’s Witnesses. And the Mars mission is probably more oversubscribed than the vacancies (144,000) in the Jehovah’s Witnesses heaven.

So unless you want to spend the rest of your days reading The Watchtower, (mandatory for ‘witnesses’ to prevent them ‘falling into darkness’) you’ll just have to put up with it. Whatever you do, don’t invite them round to share your turkey. They are mad. Honestly, you’d have more fun with a paper hat, a balloon and a cracker, surrounded by screaming kids and broken toys, while attempting to plough through volume three of Capital with the Queen’s speech on the telly in the background.

What’s really irritating about them though, apart from their numerous attempts to forecast the end of the world, so far unsuccessfully, are their sanctimonious, infantile publications, The Watchtower and Awake.

Take the September issue of Awake for example. ‘A Balanced View of Money’ it promised us on the front cover. Exactly what’s needed we thought, and excitedly looked forward to reading their views on the accumulation of capital and, definitely, something on the production of absolute and of relative surplus value. But guess what? All we could find was the warning that ‘the love of money is a root to all sorts of injurious things’, and a heartbreaking account of how Daniel and his friend Thomas fell out after the car Thomas bought from Daniel broke down, and he demanded his money back.

Not what we were hoping for, but at least we learned one thing. Never buy a second-hand car from a Jehovah’s Witness.

NW