Rage Against The Tree

On Sunday, the Trafalgar Square Christmas Tree was taken down, marking this year’s end to a heart-warming geopolitical tradition. Every year since 1947, the people of Norway (Earth's most beautiful country) have gifted Britain a Christmas tree as a gesture of friendship and gratitude for Britain's assistance in The Second World War. It is always displayed in London's Trafalgar Square and sparsely decorated with simple lights in a traditional Norwegian style. It's really rather touching, particularly in an increasingly tense world.

The tree is just like the one in New York's Rockefeller Centre - a large spruce - except it has much further to travel, so it arrives looking quite beaten up by the journey. It takes the best part of a fortnight for the tree to unfurl to its full width, which, along with the minimalism of its decoration, makes it look quite dated compared to the Rockefeller tree's bling. Cue the season's most embarrassing display of ignorance. British social media gets bombarded by a small group of people who seem remarkably angry about the tree's appearance, and certain journalists - who seem to be permanently angry about lots of things - weigh in and inflate the nonsense.

Other trees are available. If the angry mob took a five-minute walk to Covent Garden, they'd see a magnificent tree with modern decoration. They can ice-skate around the one at Westfield. And if they want really modern, they can head to St. Pancras or the V&A Museum to see abstract art installations of Christmas trees. But they don't. They just get really angry about the one at Trafalgar Square.

I blame the internet and Ken Livingston for making Trafalgar Square the informal "prestige cultural hub" of the nation (ironic quotations mine). When I was a boy, the square was a cultural institution for Londoners, but not at all what you see now. Back then, it was covered in bird shit, and we loved it. Seed sellers handed us cups of bird feed, and pigeons landed on our outstretched arms, shoulders and heads to peck at it. My mother has pictures of me covered with the disease-spreading vermin and wearing the most flammable clothing the eighties had to offer. Different times. When we grew big enough, we'd climb the lion statues at the base of Nelson's Column and hope not to fall on one of the drunks passed out beneath them. Trafalgar Square wasn't clean or particularly safe, but it was ours.

Then Red Ken - man of the people - became Mayor Ken and banned the seed sellers and brought in falcons to hunt the pigeons. London's transition from a city of Cockneys to a city of Instagramers (i.e. advertisers) grew from there. The pigeons are now gone, and Trafalgar Square is spotless, and, when I tried to climb a lion a few years ago, a safety warden blew a whistle at me. I was half-minded to shove it somewhere that would give him musical flatulence. The people who like this new state of affairs are generally the people who want a bushy Christmas Tree with impressive decoration - a manicured power symbol for a manicured country. I miss the dirt.

I also miss the dirt on the internet (not that kind... there's more of it than ever). Social media used to be about putting your most authentic and fun self online. We filled our Facebook* feeds with pictures of nights out - the more bleary-eyed, the better - and the comments were friendly banter, as in actual banter between friends.

Now, everything's best foot forward with your hair combed and your shirt pressed for fear of judgement in the comments. It just isn't real life - it's LinkedIn, and it's the internet now. Are we really going to let the world's angry-about-a-Christmas-tree people win?

*For anyone under thirty-five, Facebook is a social media platform that harvests data about old people. Optimists hope this is to improve elderly care. Others suggest it's so that advertisers can target prune juice at an appropriate market.

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