'tis the season to be merry

Like the first cuckoo or the switching on of the Christmas lights, the fist pile of vomit heralds the beginning of the Christmas party season. Oh joy! The only time I actively dislike living in Fitzrovia is the month before the festive bloat-out – happy holidays! Anytime after 8pm one is likely to encounter girls in vertiginous heels puking in rubbish bins, staggering, their mascara an oil slick across their faces, trailing coat and handbag behind them. They gather in crowds in doorways emptying vodka bottles, attempting to light soggy cigarettes. Sobbing wetly into a friend’s shoulder or chanting raucously they clatter and twist down the capital’s main street. Men are not exempt from this yuletide ritual, vomitoria are set up in and around the city where they can puke into plastic bags hung around their ears and sleep the drunkenness off, far from the risk of traffic accidents and opportunist muggings. Not everyone makes it; early one Saturday morning I found a well dressed bloke lying face down half in the road half on the pavement, dead drunk. A gentle prodding of my boot failed to elicit any response. I determined to rouse him if he was still there when I came back from the early morning bagel run. He wasn’t - perhaps the cold, damp pavement had finally seeped through those natty pin stripes.

Another Christmas task, more joyful than avoiding puddles of sick is the sending of cards on the PEN list. PEN is campaigning organisation for imprisoned writers and journalists. Each Christmas they send members the names of imprisoned writers and journalists so we can send each one a seasonal greeting card. This year for the first time in three years the Cubans were absent; previously they had been the biggest group. I laboriously copied out addresses to the various prisons where poets, journalists and bloggers were incarcerated. So well done Cuba, or felicidades  companeros! This feel good news may be due in part to the 2009 PEN Cuba campaign and of course to my jolly messages sent each December.

Top of the list this year are the Vietnamese: poets, bloggers and writers have all fallen foul of the law – what is happening in that country? The Viet Nam war is far enough away to be part of GCSE history syllabus – who won? Did anyone? I guess freedom of speech lost. Their illustrious twenty imprisoned scribblers will be my card list. The Chinese come a close second at seventeen – but then the list doesn’t include dead writers- China is followed by Turkey at four, international pariah Iran with three and curiously, Spain, one.

Mexico is not on the list because they have another method of silencing the Press. Thanks to the coke habits of their American neighbours anyone who speaks out about drug gangs is a target. The blogger, known as 'Rascatripas', was murdered on 9 November this year, in Nuevo Laredo. A message on his bound and decapitated body read: 'This happened to me because I didn't understand that I shouldn't report on the internet’. His murder follows the September killing of another blogger and journalist Maria Elizabeth Macias Castro, also left dead and decapitated on 24 September 2011. Mexico is one of the most dangerous places in the wMorld in which to practice journalism. PEN International recently launched itsDay of the Dead 2011 campaign, highlighting the violence suffered by journalists and writers in Mexico. In the last five years, 36 print journalists, writers and bloggers have been murdered there. Newspaper facilities, websites and chat-rooms are targeted by organized criminal gangs seeking to silence anyone shining a light on their filthy trade.

Back to Christmas, the sparkly lights are up everywhere glittering and twinkling as shopkeepers hope the tills will start ringing. The grim determination of the weekend shopper in the run up to Christmas is a marvel to behold. If you ever though retail therapy was fun, check out these faces as they trudge through the gloom dragging their spoils behind them. For its pleasure quotient, I reckon Christmas shopping is right up there with root canal work and crushed fingers. I avoid the West End this time of year –it’s just too depressing; unlike writing uplifting notes to those who no longer have the right to do anything at all - which really does give me the warm fuzzies.

So Season’s greetings to inmates of  XX labour camp: Nguyen Van Hai independent journalist and blogger, Nguyen Xuan Nghia, poet and writer, Nguyen Van Tuc, farmer, poet and human rights defender. Ngô Quỳnh, student and author of dissenting articles, all detained in September 2008 and the others spending the season of goodwill away from loved ones. May none of your fingers be crushed and your teeth remain in their sockets and may the New Year bring Peace and Freedom.