It was the night before Christmas. Newsthump had run an article claiming that if the surplus Remainers from Islington were resident in Rochdale on the 25th of December they would automatically be on the local electoral role and it would be enough to tip the balance when the Lib Dems forced a 2nd Referendum.
The Pope may have had a point about fake news.
By Christmas Eve 2000 Montessori Assistants, Street Food Evangalists, Diversity Co-ordinators and Momentum organisers had descended upon the Town.
By the time Jonas & the heavily pregnant Marissa arrived late on the evening there was no room at Hotel du Vin and the the Mongolian Yurt Village that they had been promised had turned out to be a hoax, the Lib Dems getting their way should have been their first clue that it was satire.
Southern Trains had let them down at Clapham and Jonas said it would be a much more “authentic democratic experience” if they travelled in a 1998 BMW 3 Series, which broke down just outside Knutsford Services.
Marissa said that she wasn’t judging Jonas but he really could have thought this through a bit more. Jonas said that their Relationship Surrogate had told her about her passive-aggressive attitude and that it wasn’t good for the baby.
Jonas was pretty sure it wasn’t his and was really trying to swallow Marissa’s explanation that her pregnancy was “a miracle”. Actually he thought that Nouha, the Barista from The 8th Day fair trade organic coffee co-operative, spent way, way too much time round at their flat.
After a series of frantic conversations in the Lamb & Lion pub on the High Street Jonas said that a chap called Gabriel who did the trolleys in the car park in Waitrose said that they could park up the Beamer in the disabled spots.
They were, he said, well lit and he would give them a key for the staff toilets. Jonas’ helpful comment that the leather seats would wipe clean if she had the kid in the back of the car were met with a withering stare and something muttered about her father.
At 10.50 – just before closing time – she went into labour. They called an ambulance and the child was born in the local hospital.
What exactly were you expecting? It’s Lancashire not a fucking medieval desert encampment under Roman occupation for Christ’s sake. Being Rochdale it was impossible to find 3 wise men or a virgin, but there were plenty of volunteers to be shepherds.
In the morning a car arrived from Marissa’s dad to take her and baby Jocasta back to the family home in Chipping Norton. Jonas had been clamped (unbelievably those bastards work Christmas Day as well) and besides “he had some thinking to do”.
A friend of her father, who apparently was a bit of a big-wig in the Government, was going to sort the Birth Certificate so it wouldn’t say Rochdale.
Everyone at the Islington Thursday Night Drum Workshop agreed that The North was a massive shithole and they were never going back, even to save the UK’s place in the EU. Rory wrote a non-denominational Christmas Rap for Jocasta and they shared a bottle of non-alcoholic Prosecco from a Palestinian orphanage.
And now if that’s not the true meaning of Christmas, well I don’t know what is!
