A Christmas Cancel

A Festive Ghost Story in Five Parts

Merry Christmas, and welcome to a bumper ‘utopian drivel’ Christmas Special edition! I’d like to thank all my subscribers, both free and paid-up, for their support over this difficult year. Even before the pandemic, it was a difficult media landscape for freelance writers to survive in, and the crisis has only made things worse. Paid subscribers have allowed me to keep the lights on more than once this year, and for that I’m extremely grateful. If you’re a free subscriber and would like to receive emails more regularly (I try for once a week, and although that’s been hard this year, my New Year’s Resolution is to achieve that) please do consider a paid subscription, or a gift subscription for a friend or enemy. It’s the equivalent of buying me a pint once a month, and then me not getting my round in. I realise that times are hard for us all, however, and sharing and liking writer’s work is also a real material help. Thank you.

Enough of the hustle, and on with the show! Despite this terrible year, I wish all who celebrate it a Merry Christmas, and (christ, how I mean this) good tidings for a better year next year for us all. With the festive spirits ready to pour down our throats and fill us with cheer, I present to you a winter’s tale of misers and the mysterious…

A Christmas Cancel

I.

Dominic’s career was dead, to begin with. As he put the phone down, he scrunched up his forehead, rubbing his fingers against the bridge of his nose. There was no getting away from it: Dominic Bacon had had a stinking fucking year. It had all started so brightly; in January there were discussions about his three-parter history of protest music for Radio 4, an encyclopedic survey covering the gamut, from Dylan to UB40. In February he’d pitched a double-paged spread to the Observer, on the Forgotten Foods of the Red Wall. But March had put paid to all those plans, and he felt like he was being outmatched and outpaced as a journalist for the first time in his career. Just as Britain went into lockdown Sarah left. “I just think we’re looking for different things” she’d said the night before she packed her stuff, and he knew what she meant. She wanted a younger man, someone with more similar cultural references, someone who wasn’t facing down a year of making ends meet with paperback review roundups. But then, when he’d gone down for another bottle of real ale, he’d heard her, whispering down the phone as she slumped on the floor behind the fridge. “I don’t know mum, I’ll find somewhere. But even if it’s just a month, locked up with him, I don’t think I’d survive.” In his low points he’d log off his Twitter just to look at hers, even though she’d blocked him, and read her articles about Soviet ballet and Virginia Woolf. And now, as he reached the depths of winter huddled up in his Archway attic flat, the final sharp jab: would he consider coming into the studio on Friday to do a talking heads show on memories of Christmas hits in the 80s, as David Quantick had double booked? He looked mournfully at his new electric oven, which the man in IKEA said would “save him in the long run”.

He needn’t end his life, he thought, but perhaps it was time to end his career. His articles got fewer and fewer and fewer shares. He was recognised less and less in the supermarket. Commissions were down and pitches were up. He’d only been sent to write about the disillusionment of the white working class living up north three times this year, and one of those had been spiked in favour of an article titled “10 times The Crown made us say YAS QUEEN!”. He sighed. Does this even constitute a career any more, he wondered? Hard to see how. He’d had a call from an old drinking buddy he’d known from the advertising desk at the Independent. He’d started his own marketing company and wondered if he needed work. Just writing copy for product, he’d said, nothing exciting I’m afraid, but regular, and semi-decent money, for what it is. He’d turned him down but with the offer open, perhaps it was time to call journalism quits.

He’d turned down the central heating to save a bit of money, so had to put on his duffle coat over his Harrington jacket to leave the house. He snuck out into the stairwell, using his foot to nudge the cat back into the flat, and stuffed his Bag for Life deep into the pocket. Outside, the snow was turning to sleet even as it fell, and the double deckers that idled outside his house kicked an oily soot over the sludgy cold snowdrifts. He trudged, head down, towards Waitrose. What he wouldn’t give for a pint at the Crown right now, or to catch a bus to Camden to meet the guys from the record shop, long closed, who still met up, although with decreasing frequency, to discuss the good times. But then, he didn’t fancy letting them know about Sarah, not after his indiscrete bragging this summer about her kinky side, and anyway, with Tier 3 lockdown in place all the pubs were closed. It was the best thing about this time of year, and it had been taken off him by bloody BoJo. He secretly regretted his nose-holding vote for him last December, more with each passing day. Better than Corbyn, though. The young lad who slept outside Waitrose looked bloody freezing, he thought as he went in. Maybe I’ll buy him a sandwich. He felt so out of sorts, aching for a little company, that for the first time ever he’d offered to go back and see his mum in Harpenden for Christmas. He’d even looked at a foot spa on Amazon that he thought she might like. “Best not,” she said to him when he’d called last weekend, “your Dad’s got a bit of a cough, best not to risk it”. He seemed fine when he’d answered the phone, Dominic thought.

By the time he got home his toes were cold and wet. The problem is, they don’t make Doc Martens in Britain any more. They’re a bloody rip off now, always something wrong within a few months, not like the old ones. He fumbled his keys in the door, but they wouldn’t turn in the lock. He shivered and the hallway light switched itself off. “Bloody hell” he muttered to himself. The night seemed to wrap around him like a cold blanket, nipping at his fingers, and he felt his keys slip into the darkness below. Dominic kneeled to grab them, but as he stood up he banged the top of his head against the door handle. The pain seemed sharper in the cold, and for a moment he felt it stab into the crown of his head, before the darkness finished encroaching, and he fell forwards, passed out, against the door. As he lay there, concussed and unconscious, he slipped into a fitful dream. In it he woke in place, but felt a warmth radiating through the front door, its panels still painted thick with gloss. It was as though his whole flat glowed with a comforting heat, not just physical, but in that way that things in dreams just are, a warmth of pleasant recognition, of his friends and family and those he admired. But as he reached for the door, the handle seemed to become too hot. He grabbed for it, but like a pan left too long on a hob, it sizzled to his touch, scalding him. He screeched in pain, and the handle itself seemed to laugh… an unmistakable cackle. “Again!” it taunted him. His hand still throbbed as he stumbled to his knee; he knew it would be piping now, but something inside him urged him to try again, to push open the door, now slightly ajar, and be welcomed into the bosom of warmth and respect that seemed to lay behind. It burnt again, a searing pain shooting down his arm that caused him to collapse. Again he rose to his knees; behind the door, there were sounds of great joy. It was the festive party he’d always wanted to join, the smell of cigarette smoke and sloshed red wine staining the white tablecloths. He heard the cheery chirruping of broadsheet editors, the booming, rasping laughs of the ghosts of George Orwell, Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis, the sound of cash registers tingling, the joyful scratching of contracts signed, the sound of his legacy being tapped out, a word at a time, on the typewriter. The handle was too hot to touch now, absolutely red hot like steel pulled straight from the fire, but it was the only way to open the door and walk through, so he grabbed the heat and let it fill his body, a burning, sizzling, flaming heat that seemed to pour into him, and from his toes to his face his blood seemed to boil, his hair twist and singe, and he pushed his whole weight against the open door.

II.

He came too, roused by the sound of the cat on the far side of the door, nursing a bump emerging on his crown. Bloody fucking Christmas, he thought to himself. How long have I been out on this floor… the Waitrose butter was still rock hard, but that might be because the hallway itself was already frigid. Still, half an hour, maybe more? Christ what a headache he’d have in the morning. He pushed the key into the lock, and it turned first time. Inside, the cat nudged him. “All right, all right” he told him, digging into the bag for some cat food. He put away the swollen bags of beer and food. Still, he thought, at least no bloody carol singers this year. Outside the sleet was now rain. Without the curtains shut, and with his lights off, the light from the Rymans across the road cast his shadow up against his back wall, and he stood there like that, the flashing lights and the sound of Wham seemingly cast across his face. He hated Wham then, he thought to himself, and he hated Wham now. He pulled the curtains shut, turned on the lamps and the TV, and fired up Twitter. “I hated Wham then,” he typed, “and I BLOODY hate Wham now.” He pressed send, and took a seat in front of Morecambe and Wise. He’d seen it before, maybe even when it was first one, but they don’t make TV like that anymore. Still stands up, he thought. He pulled down on his Notifications page. 3 retweets, 18 likes. Not bad, he thought. He pulled again. 3 retweets, 19 likes. Sometimes he wondered what those 23k followers were doing, at this moment. He bet they weren’t all alone. It would be enough to make a lesser man bitter. Here he was, putting out this content, but he was never rewarded for it, with love nor bloody money, just the occasional piece for NME. Although they haven’t emailed since last year, he realised now. Bloody hell. He deliverood for a curry. 5 retweets, 24 likes, and one quote tweet, although he couldn’t see who from. He hated that.

The night drew in and he neglected to clean up his dinner. He started to drift off in the chilly living room, a blanket that Sarah must have left tucked over his lap, only to be woken when the bloody cat, leaping to clean up the half empty takeaway containers, sent the empty bottles of ale scattering like bar skittles. It was a fright, but only for a moment. He settled back into 8 out of 10 Cats, then an Inbetweeners marathon, before he slipped into what felt at first like a peaceful sleep. Perhaps he would have laid there all night, waking up to a lonely Christmas Day with a hoppy headache and a crick in his neck that only the bottle of malt whisky he’d picked up at Waitrose would soothe. 

Instead he awoke to darkness. All the lights of the flat were out, and only the streetlights threw their monstrous silhouettes up onto the wall. An ambulance screamed through the night, and he heard the shutters of the off-licence falling. But wait… the off-licence closed at midnight. It was past two when he fell asleep, four episode into his marathon. The shutters were wrong. Could he have slept through to six, when the shutters went up? He pulled the curtains shut, and retreated to his bedroom. But as he climbed beneath the covers, the curtains were pulled open, by a hand, I tell you. 

All in a sudden, the room was whipped into a great typhoon, Dominic’s sheets and dirty laundry span around him as he leapt in terror onto the bed. His legs tangled up in old Levi’s, a pillowcase twisting across his face, he stumbled and fell backwards. Slumped against the wall he pulled away the pillow to see all the papers that he’d left strewn across his desk whipped too into the maelstrom, a great twister made of unpaid electric bills and unfiled invoices, pages of notes and ideas, and his entire unfinished novel spiralling up towards the swinging paper lampshade at the top of the room. He let out a howling scream, as before his very eyes the spinning whirlwind became to take the form, like newspapers wrapped by the wind around a lamppost, of a large man, maybe nine feet in height and stacked like a bouncer, the sheets of paper defining his bulging arms and chest, sticking to his face like the bandages of the invisible man. The pages and pages of typescript and handwriting melded and ran like fresh ink down his sculpted paper body, picking out in shadow his dark eyes, his belt, wrapped thickly around his body, his mouth and ears and hair until this inky behemoth raised his great hands and stilled the winds. 

Dominic shook in fear. “Who…. who, and what, are you?!” he asked of the ghoul. A drug deal gone wrong? A maligned partner of a long-forgotten shag? A piece of lime pickle from the night before? From the depths of his memory all forms of anxious spectres began to rise. The spirit placated him.

“I am the Ghost of Columns Past!” he boomed to him.

Dominic, a founder member of Archway Skeptics, found himself terrified by the spectre, and tried bargaining with it, or perhaps with his own irrational superstitions. 

“What… what do you want with me, quote unquote spirit?” he begged.

“Dominic… you have lost the spirit of being a columnist! You live a life devoid of hope! I have come to show you that it is not too late to save your career, Dominic Bacon! There is still time to change!”

Dominic had met such trolls before, on twitter. “It’s not easy being a writer, you know! It’s very easy to snipe from the sidelines. Come back to me with something you’ve had in print and then we’ll talk.”

The spirit let out a howling woOOOoooOOOoo sound, and span the room with a fresh gust of cold winter air. “DoOoOoOon’t bE a pRiCk, DoMiNiC!” he wailed, before floating his papery head to Dominic’s ear. “You’re a washed up hack. Everything you’ve written in the last two years has been boring at best. Young people don’t even understand your jokes, let alone find them funny, and soon no-one will commission you and you’ll have to go back to the copyediting desk.” It was the most terrifying thing Dom had heard all night. He whimpered with fright. 

“Please, no!” he choked back the tears. “Anything but that!”  

The Ghost of Columns Past grabbed the hollering hack, and with that, pulled him from his dingy room. They passed through the wall, and Dominic found himself back in the Coach and Horses, some 25 years past. He had been a young reporter, fresh from a couple of years tearing up the reviews pages of the NME with his iconoclastic, angry style, sticking two fingers up at the pop music establishment. It couldn’t last forever, so here he was in a new literary review started by a couple of mates, other lads from the music press, and some of their friends, who’d cut their teeth on classier joints after graduating from Oxford. Sure there was a bit of culture-clash between their public school jokes and Dom and his pals’ less salubrious council-estate (well, not literally) style, but that was part of the charm, wasn’t it?

“Dominic! Do you remember these, the good old days, when you still had so much vim in your work?” the Spirit asked him.

“Not half!” said Dom, “it only seems like yesterday. We were so cool back then, Spirit, so alive!” The group were huddled in the corner of the bar, some perched on stools. Fag smoke filled the air, and the group seemed impervious to the blasts of winter night pushing through the door whenever another young journalistic renegade joined the plucky young gang. Dominic listened in to Jasper and Jolyon arguing with Barry and Sally. Despite leaning into them, they seemed completely unaware of his presence, or that of the Spirit, who loomed over the gathering. Over the bar hi-fi, the sounds of Wham! provided plenty of meat for the columnists to carve up.

“It’s bloody old bloody shite is what it is!” spluttered Barry, “Thatcherite shite shoved down the throats of the working-class!” Jasper, a wry smile on his face, thought he’d try out his new move, a foil to Barry’s proley posturing. 

“Nonsense,” came his riposte, “Thatcherism has been dead for years, and you have to re-approach Wham! through an ironic lens. They’re very much aware of their position, and far more punk than those middle-class punk poseurs you still can’t drop. Face it, Blair is more Wham! than Strummer!”

“Bollocks!” intervened Sally, “Wham! is bollocks, Punk is bollocks, Blair is bollocks. And Thatcher would be bollocks, except she’s a tough broad, more punk than the lot of ya!” she roared. And everybody laughed. Hahahahaha.

Over in the corner, Dom caught sight of an uncanny face, a young, handsome man who was snogging a girl in a leather jacket. It took him a second, but then he recognised him: it was Dominic, himself, back in 1995, and that was Viv, his first real love, back when she was fit, before she left him for that prick architect in 2001. The young Dom broke off from sticking his tongue down her throat to throw in his piece. “Well Blair is more Thatcher than Thatcher, so he must be the biggest, punkest bird of the lot!” The hooting and howling went up a notch as the gathered editorial team took in Dom’s bon mot.

“Were we ever so young, so intelligent?” Old Dominic asked the Ghost “let me tell you, Spirit, we were dynamite back then. So full of analysis, our pieces would fly off our word processors, and people couldn’t wait to read them! There was such a buzz, being a columnist ‒ people were waiting for your column every Sunday, so excited to see what you thought about that week’s TV, or Britpop, or your new John Major joke. Where did that go? We were all Marina Hyde back then… by the way, did you read her recent piece about BoJo the buffoon last week, Spirit? Really hilarious! I don’t know how she does it”

“Be quiet,” the Spirit responded. “Can’t you see? You were always crap writers. It’s just there was nobody on twitter to tell you. This was just your world, Dom, the same group of hacks.”

“Rubbish,” replied Dom, “These lot of idiots on twitter are just trolls, basement dwellers. We had a sharp, no-nonsense tone, coming for all the sacred cows. We were proper anti-establishment writers; nothing and no-one was out of bounds for us! Comedians, columnists, pop legends ‒ we worked hard sticking up our fingers at that old world of deference and corporate conservative cultural crap! We’ve spent decades recreating the cultural world in our own image and what thanks do we get? Nothing!” 

The eyes of the Spirit were darkening now as the ink began to run, the pages of his body stained and tacky as the words melded into each other. The sheets of foolscap that made up his torso were yellowing with time. The scene before them, the gathered young journalists whose voices reverberated around the festive bar, began to fade into the mist. Dom barely noticed.

“These young trolls have no respect for us! Instead they’re all rallying behind that fuddy-duddy old magic grandpa, sitting in their safe spaces, rabbiting on about pronouns! In my day we didn’t even have pronouns! We had… we had… rebellion!”  The more he talked, the more aged and wrinkled the paper Ghost became. 

“Dom,” he tried to get him to listen, “there are two more spirits” 

“And they’re all snowflakes, sensitive over the tiniest little thing. Always looking to shoot down stuff that we did. It was funny! I mean back in those days, we had a sense of humour!”

“Dom, listen. The next spirit will arrive by two AM. You must be ready!”

If Dom heard the Spirit, he didn’t let on. “Poor David. He did look like he had a pineapple on his head, it’s just now everyone is too PC to admit it!”

“It’s racist, Dom” the Ghost wailed, “always was mate.” And with that, the staples that held the Spirit together finally rusted and snapped, and Dom found himself again, tucked up against the cold Christmas Eve night, in his own bed.

III.

He awoke to the sound of a revving engine, and then a long, protracted scraping, followed by a loud, calamitous crash; a car had slid on the ice, the driver losing control, and shunted front first into the van at the lights. The sound of slamming doors and muttered apologies rose to his window. He thought he saw daylight through the curtains, the cat scratching at his bedroom door. It must be morning, he thought. My god, what a weird, anxious dream — but still, no second spirit, at least. It was at that moment that it appeared. In a flash, a bright rectangle popped up before him, casting the room with a harsh, blue-white light. Dom held his hands to the light, to shield himself from its strange rays. Slowly opening his fingers, he peeked through, his eyes becoming accustomed to the brightness. Unlike the first Spirit, this apparition was almost without form; no head or torso, no voluminous body, simply a rectangular shard of thick light that hung in front of him, like smoke blown up through the beam of a projector. It was white, but as he focused upon it, it seemed to be covered in images and words, coalescing in the air. There was no noise; in fact, an absence of noise, his ears whoosing like a vacuum.  He tried to read the bold black letters at the top. YOU he could just about make out, and as he tried to trace the letters with his fingers, more became clear. YOU WILL NEVER GUESS, and then the tops of some further block capitals seemed to hang below. By moving his hand up the body of the light, the words moved too; he soon found himself scrolling the Spirit. YOU WILL NEVER GUESS WHAT VISITED DOM BACON ON THE NIGHT OF CHRISTMAS! it read, then, as he continued, more text: 

“Tired and suicidal hack, lonely and contemplating his demise, found himself this Christmas Eve experiencing a terrifying supernatural delusion, as he was visited by a strange and otherworldly being. To find out what spooktacular event terrified the pathetic journo, watch our exclusive video....” Dom knew that he couldn’t resist, and hated himself for it. Still, enraptured by the addictive wraith, he scrolled. An advert for a cottage in the Cotswolds seemed to taunt him, dragged up by the apparition’s algorithm from an old Google search he had done months ago, while Sarah was still there, for a birthday getaway. And then a rectangle upon the spirit’s ethereal body appeared, bright and dazzling still, with a cock-eyed triangle, which Dom could not help but press. What was visiting Dom on the Night of Christmas? Suddenly the room filled with a booming, screeching, horrifying noise, and the lights flashed and span, causing him to collapse before the light.

“IT IS I!!!” the Spirit screamed, “THE GHOST OF COLUMNS PRESENT!!! BUT THEN YOU KNEW THAT DOM, SO WHY DID YOU HAVE TO CLICK???” Dom cowered before its terrifying heavenly visage.

“I… I don’t know….” he stammered, “I thought it might be something other than the thing it is obviously going to be.”

“THEY ALL THINK THAT” the spirit boomed “BUT IT IS OBVIOUSLY GOING TO BE THE THING YOU THINK IT’S GOING TO BE. Come, Dom, we have little time, and much to see.” 

The light burst, the entire room filled with an intense and burning luminescence. Dom was blinded; as the light receded, he found himself in a huge room, virtually empty. Surrounded by glass windows, he could see out across the city. It seemed to be late evening; on the streets far below, families browsed the windows of the shops. Strings of pretty lights festooned the shopping arcade. Couples, clutching arms, rested a moment with their shopping bags as carol singers happily chirruped “Silent Night”. The smell of chestnuts and mulled wine seemed to percolate through the air-conditioning system, falling over the rows and rows of empty desks, lightly blowing the drab tinsel strung from the ranks of long halogen lights. Inside, all was silent, the air with a slight chill, except for the tapping of keys at a desk at the far end of the room. The Spirit, by now little more than a flickering cursor, said softly “come”, his arrow pointing to the noise. As Dom walked over, the saw a young man wrapped in his winter coat, hunched over his keyboard. “Do you recognise him?” The young man blew into his hands to warm them. He was in his early 30s with a receding hairline, hidden beneath the woollen hat his girlfriend had knitted him. Of course Dom recognised him. 

“Why yes,” he told the spirit, “that’s Rob Factcheck! He’s the subeditor who edits my column, tidies it up, and sends it back to me every week. Also a bit of a snowflake, I’m afraid. Always tries to butcher my style.” As with the previous spirit, they seemed invisible to the man. He continued to tap away at the keys, flicking between documents. In the corner of the screen, email notifications pinged repetitively. “But why is he still here?” he asked the Spirit. “Seems like he should be done by now. Only a few stray commas to clean up. Doesn’t he have a girlfriend?” The Spirit pointed at Factcheck’s inbox. 

“Look at some of this shit, Dom!” the Spirit chastised him, “he works on the Opinion Desk! Look at some of this shit you lot file!!”

Dom moved his head towards the screen. He saw the Spirit’s point. Page after page of raw columns, drunken, barely coherent nonsense, most of it from people he regarded as close friends, people he’d regularly meet at dinner parties. Was it all like this, he wondered? The flimsy arguments based on hearsay, the regurgitated cliches from those self-same dinner parties, the cosy agreement on politics, the hobby-horses, the I’m-pretty-lefty-buts, the just-in-time, will-this-do? screeds? Perhaps the Ghost of Columns Past was right. Perhaps these were the same voices from the old days, exposed to new audiences. Perhaps they would barely make it off a Medium page if they were starting in the industry today. Perhaps they were tenured parodies of a dead old journalistic culture still drawing cheques and feeling entitled to column space while the industry collapsed around them. Could it be?

He suddenly felt terribly sorry for young Rob Factcheck. He’d read some of his stuff before, columns on the migrant crisis and police corruption and the like, on some smaller independent websites. He was a good young journalist, he knew that, with tight prose and thoughtful opinions. What was he doing on Christmas Eve still in the office, trying to make articles from these ramblings?

“You!” the Spirit called, “You did this! You’re the ones with nothing to say! You’re the ones coddled in your bubble! The same conversations, the same experiences, barely a rizla between you and the politicians you marry!” Dom tried reasoning with the pulsating wraith. 

“Untrue, Spirit! We have worked hard to get we are! We’ve always helped shape the public conversation! Analyse the issues of the day! Hold power to account - even the power of the powerless! I didn’t cause poor Factcheck’s predicament! My columns are always concise and well argued, in fully formed sentences!” 

“Nonsense!” snapped the Spirit, “your regurgitated pap is not just driving the industry into the ground, the same recycled opinions, the same truisms, but cheapening the very idea of hope! You think yourself a lefty, but nothing must change! The poor stay poor, the young hopeless, and it is you who live in your ivory tower! You are giving thought itself a bad name! And with it, your career is dying on its arse! Nobody values what you do, Dom! Nobody looks to you anymore! Nobody cares Dom! Your industry is dying Dom! The Age of the Columnist is over! You must change your ways!”

The Spirit had grown weary with age. The cursor, once so bright, seemed to mutate; all that remained was a small and brightly coloured circle, a little wheel in all the colours of God’s rainbow. Dom tried to move it, but it stayed still. Poor Rob Factcheck was frozen, as if the cold office had finally reached his bones. Dom wanted to see more, but nothing moved. He pleaded with it, “move, Spirit, please, do something! Tell me more! When will the third spirit come??” Nothing. Eventually, frustrated, he growled “fucking piece of shit!” and with that, pop, the lights went out.

IV.

Dom was expecting the third ghost, but when it arrived, he barely noticed. It seemed to pass through the darkness of his room as more darkness, a void where he had expected all terror. But at some point, as he listened for sirens in the distance, he became faintly aware that, in the corner, pressed up against his wardrobe, something was lurking.

“Spirit?” he called into the darkness, “is that you? Please, spirit, don’t taunt me any longer. Show yourself!”

As he spoke, the darkness within the darkness moved towards him. In the dappled light from the streetlamp around the curtain, he barely made out its form. Clad in a robe of black, it showed nothing put a single, extended, alabaster bone finger, pointing towards him. “I see you! I see you are the third spirit!” he called, “are you the Spirit of Columns Yet to Come?” He stood up on his bed. Still, silence. Then he looked towards the floor. Beneath the black gown, dark as death, he saw something protrude. Two long, red shoes, at least 40 centimetres even outside the gown, and buffed shiny and bright on their bulbous ends. As the spirit moved towards him, they seemed to flop, one after the other, giving the ghost a sort of waddle, his shoulders shifting, one higher then the other. “Ghost! I fear you more than any spectre I have seen. But as I know your purpose is to do me good, and as I hope to live to be another man from what I was, I am prepared to bear you company, and do it with a thankful heart. Will you not speak to me?” The single finger moved toward the hood that sheltered his face from the night. As it pulled back the fearful cowl, Dom could make out first a terrible whiteness about the face, as though devoid of blood, and then blood-red lips, broken into a horrible smile. Above, a nose, also huge and red, then two terrible eyes, cast wide open and pupils full, as though this spectre had seen all the terrible violences of the world before. “WoOoOoOoOo” the ghost howled, “yes it’s me, the Ghost of Columns Yet to Come! Now, Dominic, follow me, for dawn is near!”

From their sudden height they descended on the city. They neared upon four columnists, gathered around a dining table in Islington. They were talking amongst themselves.

“Well, I shan’t say I’m surprised,” said one man, sweeping his hair back as he addressed them, “he turned down my invite to discuss no-platforming on Times Radio.”

“I barely saw him write four or five articles about the Gender Recognition Act,” said another, draining her pint glass of the last of its red wine, “and without a single slur, either in print or on Twitter. I mean, what did he expect?”

“Well, I was fond of him, I shall say that much,” said another man, “he stood up to the Orwellian brigade’s attack on the culture of the working classes, and he always told those stupid cunts that if they couldn’t entertain civil debate, they should fuck off. He was something of a workhorse, perhaps.” He leant forward to grab the wine, his forehead scraping against the ceiling above, “but he could always be relied up to make up any old bollocks, and you can’t say fairer than that.”

“And what has he done with his Guardian column?” inquired another. “Or his Spectator slot? I don’t know, but he hasn’t left it to me.”

Dominic knew the group well, and had heard them discussing poor fellows in such a manner before, but knew not what purpose the Spirit had in showing him such an everyday scene. Strange, he thought; if this was the Thursday night Hack Chat, where was he? He normally never missed it, especially not if one of the Guido lot was there. Even when he was a student, he never bought his own coke. “Spirit, tell me, if this tells of columns yet to come, where am I?” The Spirit spoke not, but gestured again with his bony finger. Dom grabbed his arm, and soon they were in the cold, wintery light of a cemetery in North London. Leaves and crisp packets blew around their legs, and in the distance, a car alarm beeped. Through the mist, the Spirit gestured towards a long forgotten grave. Terror struck through Dominic, he who, just hours before, had been contemplating meeting his end by his own hand. Having seen the visions of the Ghosts of Columns Past and Present, he felt an urge, an urge to write again, to live again! “Before I draw nearer to that stone to which you point,” said Dom, “answer me one question. Are these the shadows of the things that will be, or are they shadows of things that may be, only?”

The Spirit said nothing, but pointed still at the . Dominic crept towards it, trembling as he went; and following the finger, he moved back the gathered moss and read upon the stone of the neglected grave “DOMINIC BACON”.

Dom paused a second, exhaling a plume of hot breathe into the cold winter air. “Oh thank god!”

“Keep reading, dickhead” the Ghost exclaimed, exasperated.

Dominic scraped away more moss, and revealed “‘S CAREER”

He yelped in terror, clutching the squeezy clown shoes, the engraved words “DOMINIC BACON’S CAREER” catapulting around his mind. “Say it ain’t so, Spirit! Surely not! This must just be the shadow of that which may be, surely? There must be something I can do?”

The Spirit exhaled, then removed his hood. “Of course, you stupid prick. Why don’t you do what every other columnist does when they’re washed up, intellectually moribund, losing all public respect, struggling to understand any social phenomena of the past three decades, when their work is steadily degrading, barely comprehensible, and they’re totally out of ideas? Get yourself cancelled!”

Dom scrubbed the tears from his eyes. From all the hopeless horror of the night, a ray of light seemed to be breaking through. “Why, Spirit, you might be right! You mean, instead of trying to get better, I could… get worse?”

“Can’t you see what we three spirits have been trying to tell you?” the ghoulish presence insisted, “it’s been there all along. The nuclear option, but once you’ve done it, there’s a whole new circuit for you. Endless columns, and you’ll never have to have a new idea again. Everyone’s doing it: don’t you know how busy me and the lads have been this year? It took us best part of a month to explain this to Laurence Fox.”

Dom mused for a while, rising from his knees and brushing off the dirt. “I don’t know, Spirit. Is that not a bit obvious? I’m not Laurence Fox. After all, I have some natural talent for what I do. I feel like I have some good years left in me, I’m sure of it. I must have something to say?”

The Spirit observed him a while, then wrapped his body arm around Dominic’s shoulder. “Listen, Dom, I’ve heard it before. I don’t want to patronise you, but let me tell you how I see it, speaking frankly, as a harbinger of death. The world has changed for you, and it’s scary, I get it. Back in the day, newspapers were different. They were respected, but with that came a certain stuffy formality. People actually wanted to say things that they believed, that meant stuff. And you guys ‒ you saw through that charade. Let’s be honest here, you guys developed the style of the troll. It was always style with you guys, always aesthetic. It was always about saying the shocking, and being coolly unshockable in return. In taking the piss and not giving a fuck. I get it, really I do. You were brash and confrontational back when being willing to be an arsehole in writing was a rarer commodity. It’s what people were looking for back then, like a line of coke in the Groucho toilets. Invigorating!” They reached the cemetery gates, which swung open before them. “But things have changed pal. Now you’re an arsehole and the establishment, and you’re working in an environment where everybody can and will be an arsehole. And not just an arsehole, but a clever, more interesting, better informed arsehole than you. That’s Twitter. Anybody can answer back. You never had substance, Dom, only arsehole style. But now everyone on Twitter is an arsehole merchant. The market is flooded. That’s why you’ve been experiencing this strange, nagging sense of ennui, of inadequacy, this rising tide of fury and resentment against your readers.”

“I can see what you’re saying, Spirit. But then, if everyone is an arsehole online, what makes me any different? What’s the point in getting myself cancelled?”

“Don’t you see, Dom? You can give them what they want: reassurance! And glamour! The spectacle of torpedoing your own career and pretending you’ve been censored will only confirm to people what they’ve felt all along: that you can’t say anything these days! It’s a conspiracy against common sense! They’ll lap it up! And what’s more, if anyone contradicts you, they’re automatically a totalitarian! A censor! A woke fascist! The country is full of people desperate to say faggot, or call Muhammad a nonce, or say trans women are predators. You can give them that, and what’s more, let them know that in being a prick, they’re actually defending freedom and science! They will worship you for it!”

“That makes sense” Dom said, nodding enthusiastically to the dream the ghost conjured, “but what do I get out of it?” 

“You mean, other than a tour of the media studies, the column inches, the invites to the Oxford Union, a whole stream of substack contributors, and a new column at a national paper, Dom? You’ll get your dignity back, Dom. Cancellation is an affirmation that you’re still willing to say the unsayable, still punk, still real in a world of snowflakes and squares. The Telegraph will love your punkness! The Spectator will applaud you sticking it to the man! Think about it, Dom,” the Spirit, one bony arm around his shoulders, gestured with the other towards the twinkling Christmas firmament, “You could be the biggest arsehole of them all!”

V.

Yes! and the bedpost was his own. The bed was his own, the room was his own. Best and happiest of all, the time before him was his own, to make amends in! He drew his curtains in a dash, and threw open the window, and lent out over the shop hoardings below. In the street, a young lad was cycling his BMX down the pavement.

“Tell me boy, what day is it?” he called down to him.

“Today? Why, sir, it’s Christmas Day!” the boy replied.

Then it’s not too late to be cancelled, Dominic thought. 

“Tell me boy, is UnHerd still taking submissions?”

“Yes sir, at a pound a word, I heard!”

Dominic wondered who the fuck was funding it at that rate for online only.

“Perfect!” he called to the boy. “Then wait just there! Can you go there, and take them my column, the biggest I can find, absolutely stuffed full of shite?”

“Fuck off, you melt!” the boy called back, and sped off into the snow, probably to sell Spice or something.

“WOKE STASI!!!!” Dom screamed after him, then slammed shut his window. There was much to do, and no time to waste. He emailed Rob Factcheck, and demanded he ready himself, quickly, for a piece was incoming. Then he opened a fresh new document and began typing. It must be topical, he thought... And shocking, enough to be shared by friend and foe alike… and with a recognisable cast of characters, so people know when to boo and when to cheer, like a panto. That’s it, he thought! Men in dresses! Tradition! The working class! Sick filth! It needs to be panto! He began typing...

“When I was a young, working-class lad, from a council estate, because I was working-class, which is something these liberal metropolitan elitists will never understand, there was one Christmas treat I looked forward to more than ever. Not mince pies, nor our Christmas stocking, and certainly not sprouts!” He paused typing to congratulate himself on a knockout intro. “No, what I loved more than anything was a good old pantomime. So I was appalled, but not surprised, to discover that our pantos are now the next victim of the pathetic woke left’s obsession with grievance politics and policing. Apparently the traditional panto dame ‒ in my childhood, always a local firefighter in a dress with a push-up bra ‒ is now “out”, banned by the online LGBT group “Dames are Hate Speech” as offensive. According to these jumped-up Orwellian offence merchants, panto dames are “an appropriation of queer culture” and OUR British dames replaced with THEIR sick “drag queen” performers. Perhaps I’m old-fashioned, but I like our tradition of panto as a naughty, cheeky, family-friendly event full of jokes about Dick’s little pussy and bumming. I for one would be appalled to take my children to this left-wing pantoMAOme re-education, with its sick drag queens talking about vaginas and anal sex.” He went on, and hitting 900 words, called it a day, firing it off to Rob Factcheck, and sending him a WhatsApp message to check his email.

He received an email back from Rob within the hour. “Thanks, Dom,” it began, “Actually, I was hoping to have a nice Christmas away from the computer, just for the day, and spend some time with my girlfriend. Can this wait for tomorrow? Cheers, Rob.”

Brilliant, Dom thought. All going to plan. He fired back another immediately. “Afraid not, Rob. This is pretty urgent. Please publish today.” He sat back and poured himself a real ale, pleased with his work. It took another hour, but as expected, Rob got back to him. “Dom, I’ve done a line edit for spelling and grammar. But one thing. I’ve been doing some fact checking and it seems there’s no such group as “Dames are Hate Speech”. In fact I can’t find any evidence of any LGBT group opposing pantomime dames at all. It seems a lot of gays actually quite like panto. Can you confirm your sources on this, otherwise I can’t publish today and will have to take it to Michelle when I’m back at the office. Cheers, Rob.”

The trap was sprung, the bait loaded. He fired up Twitter and, his blood rushing from his ale, typed out a tweet. “I have been CENSORED for an article I produced about the LGBT lobby’s attempts to BAN panto dames, yet another attack on normal English culture. I have NO CHOICE but to resign from the paper. Will publish soon elsewhere: I will not be SILENCED or CANCELLED by the woke stasi!” Replying to himself, he wrote another “Editor at paper said my expose on #panto first said “not today” then said “can’t publish”. Won’t stand for it. I fought for your rights in the 90s, stupid poofs! But if they won’t publish I won’t be bullied out. I have been resigned. Cancelled! Fuck off” Sent, he sat back, and watched as the retweets rolled in. 

It all seemed too easy. Columnist after columnist responding in solidarity. His phone began to buzz. TV programmes called. Is he available for Good Morning Britain? Newsnight wants to discuss #pantogate. He watched his twitter followers rise. The vague smell of Toby Young began to waft through his front door. The Spirits were right, he thought. The coverage, the money, the outrage poured in, filling his coffers. He was back, suddenly the toast of every editor, a sure-fire click-winner. He could pull any opinion you wanted out of his arse, just name your price. Ad revenues through the roof. He flung his window open to the spirits of cancellation. “It’s me! It’s me!” he screamed into the London air, “I’m still King Arsehole!”

In his zero hours contract office job, flicking through newspapers for a multimillion pound media company whose main office, for tax purposes only, was registered in Amsterdam, Tiny Tim browsed the comment pages, looking for something of substance to read. In every paper, some bullshit, some hateful bullshit. Still the dead piled up. Still the electricity was cut off. But here in the papers, everything floated by, a stream of confected fluff and sugary, nourishment-free nonsense worse than any Christmas cake. Endless columns of print by people with a megaphone screaming that they’d been silenced, that their culture is under attack, that they are the victims of a victim culture. Transphobia, casual racism, humiliation of the poor, a joyless, hopeless mockery that anything might ever be better than this. He sighed. “Fucking dogshit, every one.”