It's a long time to Christmas but according to the supermarkets, it's any day now. They are full of Christmas crap that bears no relation to anything connected with the season at all. Check out the mince pies. Some have expiry dates before Christmas. You can't have them on Christmas day anyway. It's illegal. Cromwell's silly law is still on the books, I believe. I buy nothing Christmas-related before December 1st on principle and usually I hang on until much closer, when prices are dropped faster than a cast-iron Tory guarantee.

Last year, just after Christmas, I bought a heavily discounted black Christmas tree because I thought it was funny. It still is, even though it's still in the box. I am collecting ornaments for it - rubber fingers from Halloween, some little skulls and teeth, a set of blue lights - and intend to get hold of an action figure, dress it up as and MP and ram it as far onto the point of the tree as I can manage (after drilling a suitable receiving hole). Then I'll stand in a pentacle and chant 'Hail Santa!' and it'll be fifty-fifty which red guy shows up first*.

Well, the whole tree and tinsel stuff has nothing to do with Christianity anyway so I might as well have a laugh. It'll ensure another year, at least, with no interruptions from neighbours. Especially if I take it into the garden in the new year and burn it while intoning something meaningless in a deep voice. I could even tie in a few packets of chemicals to colour the flames.

I will, naturally, be running a sweep on how long I can have this thing before some neighbour or other calls the police. It's racist because it's black, it offends religion, burning it must surely be incitement to racism and/or religious persecution, even though...

It's a plastic-and-wire tree. Not a person. There were no fir trees in the vicinity of Christ's birth and if there had been, they'd have been green and made of wood. Not black and made of tinsel. There will be no symbols of any religion at all fixed to it. The tree and tinsel dates back to the winter solstice, long before Christianity, when the 'return of the sun' happened - ie it started getting higher in the sky instead of lower. They'd sacrifice something or someone and drape the entrails and other bits over the bare trees. Hence, the tree and the long floppy decorations. Let's not think too hard about the gleaming, round baubles.

So it can't possibly offend anyone but the pagans, and since modern paganism was invented by Gerald Gardner, the pagans don't do this stuff any more anyway. Modern paganism is based on Gardner's interpretation of the confessions that were forced out at the witch trials, not from witches necessarily, but from confused and frightened villagers. Sorry, Pagans, you need to dig a bit deeper than Gardner.

If questioned while burning the tree, I'll state that the light cable started smouldering and I took it outside just in time - because it caught fire as soon as I put it down. If questioned while having the tree in my window, I will ask for a very specific offence to be defined. There isn't one. Unless, within the next month, 'being different' is made illegal. It could be worse, that power the Police report to might become involved. You know, the ones we used to call 'Council' but who we must now refer to as 'Sir'.

The council's job is to empty the bins, keep the streets in good order and generally deal with the day-to-day running of a whole town that we can't do as individuals. That's what we pay them for. Instead, they are the Great Power who even the police defer to.

Tell your child off for misbehaving in a supermarket and a secret policeman will follow you home, note your address and report you to the Child Protection Stasi. Call the police because you've been in a near-miss with a speeding car and they will report you for not having State-approved wallpaper. What's that one? Breaking and decorating? Stripping paint without due care and attention? Being in possession of a loaded paintbrush? Whatever it is, the Council will use it in an attempt to steal your child. The police will pass your thoughtcrime up to that higher authority.

The worst crime in the country now, the one that gets a dawn raid on your house, summary arrest, fingerprinting, DNA sampling and lock-up in a box for six hours while the police work out how to spell 'fixed penalty notice' is...

...swearing at a Stasi official. One word is all it takes. The Stasi Council now have the police at their beck and call in many areas. The law means nothing any more. 'Illegal' is defined by the council and enforced by the police. Note that the council waster defined the one swear word as 'assault' and no action is being taken in respect of that false accusation. Note also that the police never, ever apologise, even for a dawn raid on a pensioner who had used no weapon other than his tongue.

Beat someone within an inch of their lives and you'll get a caution. Swear at some pointless, useless little cretin who couldn't get a real job if he was the only one in the country with hands and you'll be raided at dawn. Never call the police if you're decorating. It's illegal. Let your children rip everything off the shelves in the supermarket. It's illegal to stop them. If you have children, I recommend you let them do just that. When the store manager asks you to control them, point out that that would be child abuse and if he's going to insist on it, you'll report him.

I fully expect my neighbours to call the police about my unusual Christmas tree. I have a pretty good idea which lunatic drone will do it first. The police can call at 5:30 am if they wish, I'm often still up but generally a tad over 'the limit' and I will happily let them breathalyse me and take me all the way to court before I point out that I don't have a car.

If the police and the courts are at all concerned with getting the public on their side again, they need to stop treating the council Stasi as if they were some kind of infallible source of truth and perfection. The council is largely composed of people the police would never consider employing, and neither would anyone else. Keep that in mind when interacting with them, officers. You are dealing with spiteful, paranoid, self-serving morons. They are not telling you the truth. They are telling you their version of reality, a version that could keep a psychiatric business in profit for decades. Every time you fall for it, you lose a little more public confidence.

I need some tinsel for this tree. I can get real pig entrails with no trouble, the slaughterhouse is only a couple of streets away, but I'd rather have a realistic but non-rotting and stench-free alternative. I'm going to have to make some.



*Incidentally, on the whole Santa/Satan thing - They both wear red, come out at night and have an affinity for fireplaces BUT one of them is obese, has been pictured smoking a pipe and sneaks into children's rooms late at night. The other is slim and tells adults to do things they don't really want to do. If the Righteous had to choose, which would they favour?