Bauble

With my favourite random word generator looking like it's been eaten by the Worm of the World's End, I'm left waiting for my Dictionary app to spit a random word at me. Today it spat a bauble at me, which could have been dangerous if it had been one of those delicate glass Christmas decorations. In a world become very conscious of health & safety (rightly, for the most part) it does seem out of keeping that we celebrate a great festival to be enjoyed by children by surrounding them with fragile glass and putting electric lights on damp pine trees.

I have a box full of the most delightful, timorously fragile Christmas baubles. Alas they've remained wrapped in cotton wool (or possible bubble wrap) since they were bought, because they're far too fragile to actually do anything with. Instead my Christmas decorations of choice are £4 fairy lights from Chapel Market and a load of tinsel. Interestingly (to me) although I never take the baubles out of the box, I never put the tinsel and fairy lights away, and they've been decorating my north London garret for months now.

I had tinsel wrapped round Easter eggs, tinsel glinting in the midsummer sun, soon I'll have fairy lights shining through the eyes of pumpkins. There is something eternal about tinsel, not least because it's made of plastic and probably takes about 50 billion years to biodegrade. I look forward to being reincarnated as a sentient crustacean in the year 34,005,455,343 and digging up the preserved remains of the Selfridges Santa's Grotto from 2073, the year human civilization was finally destroyed by an invasion of strange pink blobs descended from David Cameron's face.

And all the while, tucked away somewhere in a cave at the centre of the Earth, will be a small, never opened, shoebox full of shell-like baubles, marked 'fragile' in long dead marker pen.