Our columnist seats Father Christmas among the opinions of N1 and watches him try, and fail, to stay out of it
A Mistake, In Hindsight
Inviting Santa to a North London dinner party was, in hindsight, a mistake, though not for the reasons you might think. Santa is a delightful guest. He is warm, he is generous, he brought a very good bottle of something the elves had apparently been ageing. The problem was not Santa. The problem was the table, which contained six North Londoners with strong opinions and a quantity of wine, and which began discussing politics, as North London tables do, somewhere around the arrival of the burrata.
The North Pole dispatches suggest Santa generally maintains a careful neutrality, declining to take political sides, which is wise for a man who must deliver gifts to children of every conceivable household. But neutrality is not an option at a North London dinner party. Neutrality, at a North London dinner party, is treated as a position, and a suspicious one. By the time the starter arrived, three separate guests had tried to recruit Santa to their cause, and the burrata had not even been touched.
The Council Recycling Argument
It began, as these things do, with something small and local that rapidly escalated into a referendum on the soul of the nation. Someone mentioned the council’s new recycling policy. Within ninety seconds this had become an argument about the future of local democracy, the failures of the entire political class, and whether the person across the table had ever, in fact, understood anything. Santa, seated between the two combatants, attempted to admire the burrata. The burrata could not save him.
I have lived in North London long enough to know the choreography of these arguments. They are not really about recycling, or housing, or whatever the ostensible subject is. They are about identity, about signalling, about establishing who at the table is the most thoughtful and the most correct. Guidance via the London government information service on the actual recycling policy would have settled the factual question in minutes, but nobody at a North London dinner party wants the factual question settled. They want the argument. Local context at the regional events register only ever adds fuel.
Santa Tries to Stay Out of It
To his enormous credit, Santa tried to stay out of it. He deployed the classic techniques of the cornered dinner guest: the noncommittal nod, the sudden deep interest in the bread, the well-timed question about whether anyone needed more wine. But the North London table is relentless. Eventually someone asked him, directly, what he thought, and the table fell silent, and Santa, the most beloved figure on Earth, found himself in the one situation his magic could not extract him from: being asked to take a side on the Tufnell Park parking scheme.
He handled it beautifully, I should say. He observed that he visited the homes of people who disagreed about everything, and loved them all equally, and that perhaps the most important thing was that the children of every household, whatever their parents believed, received their gifts the same. It was a genuinely lovely sentiment, and it lasted approximately four seconds before someone said yes but, and the argument resumed. Commentary via the London Evening Standard on the state of local political discourse would not have surprised anyone at that table.
The Cheese Course Was a Battlefield
By the cheese course, two guests were no longer speaking, one had delivered a monologue about the housing crisis that brooked no interruption, and Santa had quietly moved to the end of the table to talk to the only other person maintaining neutrality, who turned out to be the cat. I watched him there, the man who brings peace and joy to the entire world, finding refuge with a cat because the North London dinner party had defeated even him. Event listings I later saw at the events society advertised several more dinners. I did not attend them.
What the Table Says About Us
There is something I find both maddening and oddly endearing about the North London dinner party, and watching Santa navigate one crystallized it. We are, in this corner of the city, a people who care enormously about being right, who treat dinner as a forum, who cannot let a recycling policy pass without interrogating its implications for the future of democracy. It is exhausting. It is also, in its way, a sign of people who give a damn, even if they express it by ruining the burrata.
Santa, I think, saw both sides of this, as he tends to. He found the relentless politicking a bit much, retreating to the cat as any sane being would. But he also, I suspect, recognized something admirable in a table full of people who cared so much about how things ought to be that they were prepared to fall out over parking schemes. Caring too much is a flaw, but it is a better flaw than caring too little, and North London, whatever else you say about it, does not care too little.
For those facing their own festive dinner-party minefields, I offer no solution, because there is none, but the resources at the public registry on local policy may at least let you win the factual arguments, even if winning the factual argument has never once ended a North London dinner-party row. And if it all becomes too much, excuse yourself, find the cat, and have a quiet go on the games at the diversions index until the housing-crisis monologue has run its course, which, in my experience, takes about forty minutes.
Santa left around midnight, having made peace with the cat and quietly with everyone else, the way he does. The arguments at the table continued well after he had gone, because they always do, because the point was never to resolve them. I cleared the plates and reflected that the most generous man on Earth had spent his evening being lobbied about parking, and had borne it with more grace than I manage on a good day. He brings the world its gifts. The least we could do is let him eat his burrata in peace.
SOURCE: https://santaclaus.top
