Merry Christmas, United Kingdom.
The image that will adorn the front of Gordon Brown's first Christmas card from 10 Downing Street has been released into the public realm.
No, your eyes are not deceiving you - that crabbed drawing has been produced by the patron saint of every English childhood, Shirley Hughes. Her characters always seemed to be a bizarre genetic hybrid of small children, old age pensioners and garden gnomes. Their faces still haunt me in dreams.
But this delightful image - a conceptual hybrid of Brown's racial harmony/'Britishness' rhetoric, and orange boxes from the nineteen-fifties - merely begs two questions. Number one, why is the boy in the deerstalker hat at the back seemingly preoccupied with pleasuring himself behind the carefully-arranged fronds of the happy Christmas tree? Look at his plump apple face, swelled with pride and a peculiar sense of exhibitionism that probably stems from his mother allowing him to defecate wherever he pleased during childhood! And number two: why is a minature Su Pollard holding the 'Happy Christmas' sign? The mind boggles. Someone needs to do a thesis on the psychology of Shirley Hughes cartoons. They're like waking up to discover your father with his penis in your ear.
No, your eyes are not deceiving you - that crabbed drawing has been produced by the patron saint of every English childhood, Shirley Hughes. Her characters always seemed to be a bizarre genetic hybrid of small children, old age pensioners and garden gnomes. Their faces still haunt me in dreams.
But this delightful image - a conceptual hybrid of Brown's racial harmony/'Britishness' rhetoric, and orange boxes from the nineteen-fifties - merely begs two questions. Number one, why is the boy in the deerstalker hat at the back seemingly preoccupied with pleasuring himself behind the carefully-arranged fronds of the happy Christmas tree? Look at his plump apple face, swelled with pride and a peculiar sense of exhibitionism that probably stems from his mother allowing him to defecate wherever he pleased during childhood! And number two: why is a minature Su Pollard holding the 'Happy Christmas' sign? The mind boggles. Someone needs to do a thesis on the psychology of Shirley Hughes cartoons. They're like waking up to discover your father with his penis in your ear.
