Xmas is a time of contrasts.

In the market, a bloke is selling gift bags with four top of the range brand perfumes for a tenner. Ask no questions…

Outside the Eastern European Deli by Clarence Road a crowd of people gather round a man playing an accordion and sing the Rumanian version of Felice Navidad. Rumanian being a Latin language, the first word is the same. As is the tune. They seem to be having a good time. People passing by smile, even though they don’t understand the words. They can pick up on the good feeling.

Hurtling on a mobility scooter down George Street towards Morrisons at about 4 mph, a wild haired man with a rubbery twisted face mutters and gurns at passers by like Mick Jagger with Turettes.

Inside a tiny Rumanian owned finance shop on the riverward side of the level crossing by the station, a full scale service is going on. A priest in a cylindrical black hat, wearing an utterly gorgeous scarlet cloak covered with ornate gold embroidery with an icon like picture of the Virgin Mary on the reverse collar at the back of his neck, waves a heavy gold cross in one hand, while crossing himself with the other. Sometimes facing his small congregation of men with nylon suits and short haircuts, sometimes facing the wall behind him. This has an plaque celebrating the company’s Platinum award for HR successes, so it sometimes looks as though they are worshipping that. To his left, and facing the gawpers in the street through the plate glass windows, an attendant in an equally heavily gold embossed crimson robe stands guard with a serious look on his face. The overall effect is positively Byzantine in its mystical magnificence; humanised by the small table of snacks and orange squash along the wall.

At the bottom of Cromwell Road a tiny boy wearing one of those animal head hats that make him look like Max from “Where the Wild Things are”, is being pushed along by his Mum on a little purple plastic three wheel scooter which flashes lights as it trundles onwards. He is standing rigidly erect like a little Emperor, hands firmly on the handlebars, one of them grasping a sharpened pencil that he holds pointedly upwards like a staff of office.

Coming out of the Church of Christ Celestial, a young woman dressed all in white like a cross between a pastry chef and a woman from the Handmaiden’s tale, bustles off down the road on Godly business. The Church is installed above the St Luke’s Hospice shop in what used to be the Burton’s Snooker Hall. Burton’s was a popular off the peg suit emporium that ran a snooker hall above the shop in the middle of the last century. My Dad told me that this was considered something of a den of iniquity among respectable folk – as in The Music Man song:

Oh yes we’ve got trouble

Right here in River City

With a capital T

And that rhymes with P

And that stands for Pool.

The logo for the snooker club – a triangle of racked balls – can still be seen faded but legible on the most southerly window. Hopefully the Church won’t disapprove as much as my grandparents did, and will leave it in place.

Although my Dad was forbidden to go in there, he’d sometimes surreptitiously nip up the stairs, not because he wanted to be Thurrock’s answer to Fast Eddie Felton, but accompanying a mate who’s Mum ran the tea bar as an alternative to the London Road Cafe on a Saturday night; for a heavily stewed tea and slice of “yellow cake” (a late 40s austerity version of Madeira, and nothing to do with Uranium…so they said).

Down Hathaway Road marches a small, slow, stately procession of elderly black matrons, all in their best church hats and sombre business like handbags, led by one of their number carrying a museum piece of a tall vertical banner in dark red with something Biblical in black written on it that could be straight out of the Shankill Road circa 1887. The strong influence of Black Evangelicals on the local Conservative Party indicating that the Saints might not be marching in, but they are definitely marching on; resolutely in the wrong direction.

Outdoor household Xmas decs look a bit sad in daylight, even before the day itself. Lights at night are one thing, but shopworn bows and slightly deflated snowmen and Santas blowing a bit desperately in the wind, are something else. Especially as seen from the top of the 100 bus to Basildon hospital, trundling through Stanford le Hope and Corringham, on a local road for local people, running alongside the huge six lane A roads that slice through and coil around the old towns like Boa Constrictors, with most traffic passing them by, trucking mountains of containers from the docks at Tilbury and Thames Gateway on up to the M25 and across the country. The relatively small and discrete railway line from Southend to London probably carries as much, or could, and makes a far lower impact on the landscape. Blink and you might miss it. You can’t miss the roads, making Stanford and Corringham feel by passed by their by passes. Both have a slightly tired and accidental higgeldy piggeldy feel to them, with no real centre, or heart, just successive layers of improvised development, clustered beyond Stanford’s handsome old church, with matching pub across what might have been a village green once.

Along the river run a row of giant cranes and gantries and the containers pile up 6 storeys high looking like the Martian machines from War of the Worlds. The sort of job done by my grandfather and great uncle consigned by them to rapid oblivion in the early 70s. An old family friend drops in and tells me that her job as a copywriter has gone the same way. At the beginning of last year, she had a waiting list and steady work with regular clients. ChatGPT comes along this year and wipes her out. She hasn’t had work for two months.

My Mum had quite a few cousins. Two of them had rhyming nicknames. Donk and Bronc. “Donk” because he would donk people on the nose if they were getting on his nerves too much. Bronc because, as a child, he was always playing cowboys.

An aspect of US hegemony is the extent to which the films and TV series we have watched all our lives make people think of them as the good guys. This is despite everything we have lived though, from Vietnam to Chile to Central America and the 4.5 million people killed in the war on terror, with Abu Ghraib and the Fallujah Free Fire zone providing a model for the IDF now in Gaza and the West Bank, while the US supplies them with the bombs and bullets to do what they are doing. All played down and deflected in our media of course.

The cavalry charge bugle call that heralded the goodies (white soldiers) arriving at the gallop at the end of so many Westerns to deal with the “savages” (native Americans) to the cheers of the Saturday matinee crowds of children in the 50s and 60s was played in a way intended to be darkly ironic at the end of that decade in the Helicopter gunship scene in Apocalypse Now, where the music shifts to the Apache helicopters playing Ride of the Valkyries through loudspeakers as they swoop in to strafe the Vietnamese village, and their commander comments, “I love the smell of Napalm in the morning”. Only the ironic intent and impact is inappropriate, because, think it back and project it forward, in the “war of civilisation against barbarism” (B. Netanyahu) its a call for the same armed forces to do the same damn thing over and over and over again.