Peter Rhodes on cartoons, candles and should we regard a virus as wicked?
For neat political commentary you can't beat the caption to a Matt cartoon in the Daily Telegraph: “Christmas tree lights are like flights to Rwanda. You know they're not going to work.”
In truth, the infuriating age of dodgy Xmas lights is long past, thanks to the LED. Kids don't believe us when we tell them of the good old days when, if the string of lights failed, you had to identify and remove the duff bulb (out of 30) and replace it, by which time another bulb had popped.
Frankly, it's amazing that any of us baby-boomers survived to relate such tales. We were the last generation to deck the house with massive bunches of paper-chain decorations before clipping tiny wax candles to a tinder-dry tree and lighting them. “Fire hazard” does not begin to describe it.