In a week that felt plucked from a surrealist calendar, journalist Lucy Mangan has chronicled a series of peculiar events alongside her own festive tribulations. From environmental oddities to the peculiar comforts of family tradition, her digested week offers a wry look at modern British life.
Monday's Ominous Portents: Sinkholes and Octopus Armies
The week began with news that felt distinctly symbolic. A canal in Shropshire effectively vanished, swallowed by a significant sinkhole. This geological freak event was swiftly followed by a report from the Cornwall Wildlife Trust revealing a staggering surge in octopus numbers. Approximately 233,000 octopuses were caught in UK waters this year, a figure 13 times higher than usual.
Mangan muses on the unsettling nature of these occurrences. Sinkholes, she notes, represent a profound betrayal of terra firma—the literal ground beneath our feet capable of giving way without warning. The octopus surge, meanwhile, strikes her as a potential muster for invasion. "No bones. Eight legs. Brains everywhere," she observes, only half-jestingly advising vigilance for the year 2026.
The Festive Time Warp and Family Traditions
As Christmas approached, Mangan found herself battling a familiar paradox. Despite working double her usual hours in the preceding weeks to clear her schedule, the promised freedom failed to materialise. "Twice as much for ages should eventually result in some kind of gap in the timetable, no?" she laments. A friend offered a bleak but plausible explanation: this relentless sequence of tasks is simply the essence of adult life.
The holiday itself, spent in Devon with her sister, mother, and family, provided the classic blend of warmth and mild irritation. A train journey involved a character dissection with her mother, cleverly mitigated by canned cocktails consumed incognito. Christmas Day was deemed a success: perfect food, thoughtful presents (including the correct edition of a Dorset Pevsner for her husband), and a masterstroke of delegation.
"We gave Mum all our odd socks in a big basket and she happily sorted those all afternoon," Mangan reports, noting the ensuing peaceful quiet. The day followed a gentle rhythm of eating, napping, listening to the King's first Christmas speech, and a failed resolution to play a board game.
The Liberating Joy of the Post-Christmas Void
Boxing Day in the Devon countryside meant forgoing the traditional sales pilgrimage, an ritual Mangan cherishes for its unique atmosphere. She describes it not as bargain hunting, but as a collective sigh of relief—a liberation from the intense, loving scrutiny of family gatherings. "People are just so glad to be out, to be free instead of surrounded by loving relatives and weirdo uncles," she writes.
Her concluding reflection captures the week's theme: "Christmas is lovely but, like sex or massages, it is even better when it stops." It's a sentiment that wraps up the chaos, the oddities, and the familial quirks into a perfectly relatable package. The week's digested photos provided their own commentary, from the terror of a Dick Van Dyke fan meetup to the universal struggle of activating 'fun mode' before a family dinner.
