Looking at the negative side of things!

There is a downside to everything.

Theresa May dodges the no confidence bullet but at the cost of promising she won’t continue as leader of her party after the next election.

And now Professor Lars Gunnarsen has been warning about hygge.

I didn’t know you could actually ‘do hygge’ but it seems that teenagers like to ‘do hygge’ in their bedrooms. Why they can’t just share the family hygge is probably one of those teenage conundrums. You know the kind of thing: they don’t want to go to family trips to the restaurant; they disapprove of their mothers’ (lack of) fashion sense; they won’t be seen dead walking down the road with parents. 

So what’s the problem with hygge? Which I thought was more a state of mind than anything else. It more or less translates as cosiness. To create hygge in your home you dim the lights and light lots of aromatic candles. That’s the problem. The candles give off particles leading to lung inflammation, arteriosclerosis, ageing of your chromosomes, just as if you were exposed to the particles from diesel fuel.

You see, I knew I was right to shun those smelly candles. Someone once gave me one as a present. I took a sniff, said thank you very much and left it on a shelf for ages until I sent it to a charity shop. I can’t go in the shop called Lush as the over-perfumed smell of their products drives me crazy. I have a similar reaction when I walk through displays of aromatic candles in a whole range of stores.

Then there is the fire risk. The number of house fires in Denmark jumps by 35%, according to an expert called Mads Dalgaard. All because of hygge and the candles. This is why they discourage allowing children and teenagers to ‘do hygge’ in their bedrooms, because they are notoriously careless with naked flames. Mads Dalgaard recommends using LED or battery powered lighting to provide the hygge effect.

By the way, don’t you just love those Danish names?

I fully expected to wake up to snow this morning but the weathermen seem to have changed their minds, now they are warning us that when it rains it will freeze. They are worried about this as this is the BIG SHOPPING WEEKEND!

The local supermarket was more than a little full this morning.

Oddly I got into a conversation with someone who must have a sort of managerial role. He began by telling me how sick he is of the Christmas songs playing on a loop all day since the start of December. I told him about Ryman’s, the stationers, in Manchester where they were wearing elf costumes at the start of November. He countered with the story of how he was asked earlier this week to set up a display of Easter eggs in the store entrance. He refuse to do so! Good for him! Consumerism gone mad.

Now for a Christmas dilemma. A young Facebook friend, daughter of a real, not-media friend, a new mummy I have probably mentioned, before asked this: “Question - do you wrap stocking fillers?” Apparently her family doesn’t, but her young husband’s family does, so now they need to decide which path to go down for their tiny daughter. The aforementioned tiny daughter will be about eight weeks old on Christmas Day. I doubt if she will notice whether anything is wrapped or not. They can put off the problem until next year. If I were the young mummy I would just hope for a peaceful Christmas Day!

You see, everything has a downside, even Christmas. You find yourself faced with these difficult philosophical questions!